Can the workers ever be wrong?
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ALB wrote:You're placing the bar for "socialist consciousness" far, far too high. All that it required to establish socialism is the understanding of a majority …
I can accept this as a reasonable criticism of my position, that I'm 'placing the bar too high', but then that leaves me wondering about Marx's view that 'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'.
ALB wrote:As to epistemology, to be perfectly honest I think that naive realism for all its philosophical inadequacy will do. At least it works for daily living. And making that better is what's socialism is all about.Perhaps this is more my problem. I think socialism is 'far, far' more than 'better daily living'. That could be achieved by a world-wide conservative paternalist ruling class initiative, that moved beyond the 'competition of capitals', and instituted a less dynamic, but still class-based society. Perhaps the 'Soviet Union' showed these socio-political possibilities in one nation-state, but with a little bit more distribution to workers, and no 'outside' Western consumer pressure, which would be the case if the bourgeois was wise enough to protect their world position, at the expense of their (then outdated) nation-states.Perhaps this picture of a world paternalism is a bit far-fetched, but no less, I'd suggest, than our own dreams for world socialism.No, I think that the bar has to be set high, and workers have to voluntarily want to hit the high bar, and want more from their lives than 'better daily living'.Of course, given their present state, many workers now would settle for just that, and ignore our dreams of human emancipation.No, my slogan is still 'Smash Naive Realism!'Errr… not very catchy or attractive, is it?
ALB wrote:(c) that this is something they are going to have to do for themselves by their own actions (nobody is going to do this or could do it for them);(d) that democracy is the way to decide what to do.As to epistemology, to be perfectly honest I think that naive realism for all its philosophical inadequacy will do. At least it works for daily living. And making that better is what's socialism is all about.So we are not missionaries then out to convert 'stupid workers' to their better interests?
LBird wrote:I can accept this as a reasonable criticism of my position, that I'm 'placing the bar too high', but then that leaves me wondering about Marx's view that 'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'.I don't see that not knowing about epistemology prevents the workers from emancipating themselves. It doesn't follow. There's no connection between the two.
LBird wrote:No, I think that the bar has to be set high, and workers have to voluntarily want to hit the high bar, and want more from their lives than 'better daily living'.Ok, socialism is about achieving the best possible daily living.
LBird wrote:No, my slogan is still 'Smash Naive Realism!'. Errr… not very catchy or attractive, is it?No, but it's not possible anyway. Most people will still be naive realists even in socialism, just as you and me are in our daily, practical life. We wouldn't survive if we weren't. Imagine trying to live if you thought food was a mental construct and not a separate thing to eat.
ALB wrote:Most people will still be naive realists even in socialism, just as you and me are in our daily, practical life. We wouldn't survive if we weren't. Imagine trying to live if you thought food was a mental construct and not a separate thing to eat.I find this quite a depressing statement. 'Naive realism' doesn't produce 'the truth'; in fact, it just confirms 'they way things are now'. Not much more than 'it looks like a bread roll, it tastes like a bread roll, it's a bread roll'. OK, full belly results.But naive realism also tells workers that 'wages are too low' and that 'the cause is immigrants'. And 'competition for bread rolls is entirely natural'.Naive realism is fundamentally uncritical of 'what exists'.In my opinion, if, as you say, 'most people will still be naive realists even in socialism', then this political order would be nothing I'd recognise as any form of democratic, liberatory, socialism, but merely 'good old fashioned, honest, I-care-for-my-worker' paternalist toryism.
ALB wrote:I don't see that not knowing about epistemology prevents the workers from emancipating themselves. It doesn't follow. There's no connection between the two.It's not too much of an overstatement on my part to say 'workers knowing about epistemology is the mark of their emancipation'. I'd say that there is an intimate connection between the two.Furthermore, even the Leninists at least pretend that, after the revolution, they'll be able to develop workers to understand epistemology, that workers have abilities denied to them by the present society. Even Stalin brought the Russian workers and peasants on educationally, ensuring most had access to the means of developing themselves…Bloody hell, this conversation's been revelatory. And not for the good.
LBird wrote:Furthermore, even the Leninists at least pretend that, after the revolution, they'll be able to develop workers to understand epistemology, that workers have abilities denied to them by the present society. Even Stalin brought the Russian workers and peasants on educationally, ensuring most had access to the means of developing themselves…And that was Leninism's greatest sin, the belief that you could have the revolution before the working class were intellectually capable of understanding and wanting socialism and could then 'raise their culture'. The point is that teh workers today have the capacity to run their own lives, and run capitalism from top to bottom, in the interests of the capitalist class. As Charlie said in these infamous theses, philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. A working capacity to change the world is what is required.
SocialistPunk wrote:I say a major factor is the workers are underexposed to the socialist case, the case we push can't compete against the mainstream for attention. You seem to say, millions have been exposed and choose capitalism. What's your solution?[edit] YMS, I was hoping you would be able to provide some possible analysis to the reasons why milions of workers have conciously chosen to reject the socialist case?
SP,Imagine if the broadcast media, all the university experts and a substantial number of people kept on insisting that the sun was green, and that it was impossible to see in the daylight.Therein lies my answer.
SocialistPunk wrote:SocialistPunk wrote:I say a major factor is the workers are underexposed to the socialist case, the case we push can't compete against the mainstream for attention. You seem to say, millions have been exposed and choose capitalism. What's your solution?[edit] YMS, I was hoping you would be able to provide some possible analysis to the reasons why milions of workers have conciously chosen to reject the socialist case?
Yep I don't buy the answer "we don't have socialism because workers haven't heard the socialist party message" either.
Hi JDWIt's a complicated issue, but the main problem I see is what has been called "socialisation". Imagine if we were living in a socialist world right now, we would be socialised by our environment to accept things as they are, each new generation being indoctrinated into that social setting. Unfortunately we don't live in a socialist society, but the socialisation applies the same today in capitalism. It isn't a simple case of, "If only people heard the case", nor is it a case of millions have heard and rejected it. It isn't enough to just hear it, people need to understand it at a level that is hard to achieve in a capitalist socialised world.The socialists/communists on this site and in the SPGB and WSM are a tiny minority among a minority, and we are drowned out by the mainstream. Every now and then a person looking for an alternative comes in contact with us or some literature, internet site and so on, and may decide to dig deeper. Only then are they in a position to be able to agree or reject.
YMSYou stated that millions of people have heard and rejected the socialist case. I ask you what you think is a possible solution to that situation, and you answer with the following.
Young Master Smeet wrote:SP,Imagine if the broadcast media, all the university experts and a substantial number of people kept on insisting that the sun was green, and that it was impossible to see in the daylight.Therein lies my answer.I would appreciate it if you put a lid on the cryptic stuff YMS and just answer a question in an understandable way. You came out with a lot of this sort of stuff on the "Science for communists" thread and it helped make a complicated topic even more so. [edit] I used the word "cryptic" when I should have said sarcastic.
SocialistPunk wrote:The socialists/communists on this site and in the SPGB and WSM are a tiny minority among a minority, and we are drowned out by the mainstream. Every now and then a person looking for an alternative comes in contact with us or some literature, internet site and so on, and may decide to dig deeper. Only then are they in a position to be able to agree or reject.We are of course not the only people proposing world socialism (as a classless, stateless, moneyless world community, whatever the term used) as the alternative to capitalism. I'm thinking of groups like Zeitgeist and its offshoots, some Left Communists and Anarchist-Communists, even though they disagree with us over how to get there. So the position is not that bleak.
ALB wrote:SocialistPunk wrote:The socialists/communists on this site and in the SPGB and WSM are a tiny minority among a minority, and we are drowned out by the mainstream. Every now and then a person looking for an alternative comes in contact with us or some literature, internet site and so on, and may decide to dig deeper. Only then are they in a position to be able to agree or reject.We are of course not the only people proposing world socialism (as a classless, stateless, moneyless world community, whatever the term used) as the alternative to capitalism. I'm thinking of groups like Zeitgeist and its offshoots, some Left Communists and Anarchist-Communists, even though they disagree with us over how to get there. So the position is not that bleak.
Zeitgeist also disagree with democratic control preferring control by 'technical experts'.
SP,Sorry, I was ansswering:
Quote:I was hoping you would be able to provide some possible analysis to the reasons why milions of workers have conciously chosen to reject the socialist case?and in a hurry, but I think my answer is plain enough.
ALB, post #48, wrote:Most people will still be naive realists even in socialism…Because I’ve argued both that ‘workers need to understand epistemology’ (which ALB and alanjjohnstone seem to disagree with me), and that ‘Communists are responsible for not explaining to workers, rather than ‘workers are ignoring the socialist case’ (which YMS and jondwhite seem to be saying), I’ve decided to try to explain the three cases for epistemology that we’ve discussed endlessly on this site (that is, 1. idealism; 2. materialism; and 3. idealism-materialism), in a way that most workers would be able to grasp.This isn’t a substitute for reading further and deeper into the relevant thinkers, of course, but is simply an initial attempt to show that we Communists can give workers simpler explanations which can help them orientate themselves to more complex problems. Since I believe that workers must reach a high cultural level prior to a revolution, and that it is the role of Communist workers to help in this process of workers’ self-development, and that I’ve counted the need to know at least some epistemology as amongst these heights, then I should try, as a Communist, to try to give some explanation about epistemology, and see if any other comrades here benefit from my efforts, and afterwards say whether they think that they’ve learned something from my explanations. Here goes.Imagine reality as either a blank sketch pad, or as a numbered dot-to-dot picture book. The former represents the ‘idealist’ approach to knowledge, whereas the latter represents the ‘materialist’ (or, ‘naïve realist’) approach to knowledge.To the idealist, there is no limit to their creative originality in their drawing of a picture of knowledge. They can draw freehand on a blank canvas, and any individual artist can freely improvise, with no external framework to impose a pre-existing structure upon their individual musings and scribbles.On the contrary, though, for the materialist the world imposes a numbered dot-to-dot reality upon the drawing inventiveness of the individual. The drawer is restricted to the reality of what’s ‘on the page’ of external reality, and they simply and carefully follow the numbers, join the dots, and the picture of reality emerges. Once done, it’s done. Any other drawer of knowledge, being under the same compulsion of the ‘numbered dots’ of reality, would draw the same picture.However, for Marx, neither of these epistemological viewpoints was correct. In the Theses on Feuerbach, he took from the idealists the ‘active side’, the creative impulse of the drawing human, but he recognised that external reality provided limits to human freedom to ‘create’ knowledge. Having ‘ideas’ and sketching whatever one wanted was incomplete, as an account of reality. The idealist sketches did not capture the reality of most humans’ real lives. Marx knew that ‘reality’ must play some part, a reality that the materialists correctly insisted always existed for humans. But, Marx could also see that the materialists’ picture of a reality as ‘numbered dot-to-dot book’ took away any creativity whatsoever from humans. For the materialists, the ‘book’ dictated to humans what it was picturing, and made the book the ‘active side’, rather than human criticism and creativity.Marx thus took something from both idealism and materialism, and rejected something from both idealism and materialism. He realised that ‘reality existed’, and provided limits to human creativity in producing knowledge, but he also wanted to overcome the ‘fixed world’ of unchanging reality implied by the mechanical materialists. Marx wanted an epistemology that allowed for the power of humans to change things.Marx in effect came up with the idea of reality being a dot-to-dot book, but that the dots were unnumbered. So, the ‘dots’ provided limits to what could be legitimately drawn (reality is not a blank slate for free-sketching), but the ‘numbering’ of the dots was a human creative choice (and so, the ‘book’ did not itself tell us how we must connect the dots of reality). If different numbers were actively allocated by different social groups, then Marx though that those groups would have differing pictures of ‘reality’. There wasn’t a singular ‘reality’ which was the same for all societies, because humans actively built their pictures from the dots of reality given to them, and they were creators of their own, human, social, historical, knowledge.So, we have three accounts of epistemology: ‘idealism’ (blank sketch book, any picture goes), ‘materialism’ (numbered dot-to-dot book, determines the picture) and Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’ (unnumbered dot-to-dot book, interaction of artist and dots produces the picture).If this helps to orientate any comrades within the difficult discussion of epistemology, then I’ve helped, even if only a little. If it proves to be totally useless, then perhaps ALB and alanjjohnstone are correct, and workers will never be able to grasp why they shouldn’t employ naïve realism (materialism and its copy theory of knowledge, that the picture produced is simply a copy of the numbered dots), or that YMS and jondwhite are proved correct, and that even though they themselves might understand this analogy, that most workers aren’t even listening.To me, though, either of these conclusions are tantamount to saying Socialism/Communism, in the sense Marx meant, the self-emancipation of the workers, is impossible.Of course, there is always the possibility that it’s merely my account that is not very good, and some other comrade can come up with a better explanation, but I still insist that an explanation of epistemology for workers must be possible, and that workers would be interested in hearing that explanation.
Lbird wrote:To the idealist, there is no limit to their creative originality in their drawing of a picture of knowledge. They can draw freehand on a blank canvas, and any individual artist can freely improvise, with no external framework to impose a pre-existing structure upon their individual musings and scribbles.That's not idealism. Many idealists, such as Hegel would suggest that the pad is numbered as well, except that the dots are ideas. A dualist would say there are two pads that somehow match each other, and a materialist says the dots exist outside the human mind.
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