Conversation between Mod1 and LBird

[Anonymous]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

I feel my reading of Marx and Engels has benefitted, with some interesting passages thrown in here and there.

 I have been reading Marx and Engels and others since I was very young, and I have read most of their works .  and they have been  more beneficial than wasting my time looking for their errors, in the same way that we are wasting our time in this forum.The only thing  that I know is that a book of Engels fell in my hand many  years ago and it changed my way of thinking, and many peoples around me had the same type of experience. It is much  better than the ideas than the ones that I had in my headsPeoples with childish mentality are always looking for small details. If we look for errors we can find that Marx made more errors than Engels, and they were major mistakes including the DOP, Is that going to bring more members to the Socialist Party ?Do we want to build the church of Marx and reject  the devil of  Engels ? They did what they had to do, we have to do our part, we can not spend our whole life living in the past.Like somebody that I knew wrote: When they move, they move ( working class ) the thing is, when  they be ready to move, are you going to be ready ? That would be time to prove if we are socialists or reformists. I have been ready for many yearsThose peoples like LBIrd will spend their whole life looking for the 5th leg of the cat, or looking for the leg of the fish, or the teeth of the gens. What is needed in our brains is a coherent socialist theory to be ready to overthrow this criminal economical system.You are going to spend 100 of years arguing about the same topics and you will never reach an agreement. I am too old and with too much life  experiences in my brain in order to waste my time with little children

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

A serious question. This exchange has been going on for years among LBird, YMS and Robbo, with the occasional contribution from others. Has anyone learned anything positive from the outcome of this debate?LBird concedes the exchanges has led to the expansion of his reading but has Robbo or YMS themselves ever increased LBird's knowledge or understanding, directly?Conversely, has YMS or Robbo gained deeper insight from anything LBird has said in reply to them? 

  The answer to your last question, Alan, is – unfortunately – not much, to be brutally frank.  The main stumbling block I feel is LBird’s stubborn and incredibly irritating refusal – for reasons I do not know of – to simply answer a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. What has he got to lose by doing so? Nothing! In fact we all stand to benefit from a genuine debate.   For instance, I have asked him repeatedly to explain whether or not he thinks local democracy will play a role in his vision of a communist society since this very clearly represents a “limitation” which contradicts his thesis that there will be no limits to democracy in communism such as the one that restricts the resolution of essentially local issues to local populations. But has LBird even attempted to answer this question.  Not on your nelly! The same goes for individual decisions. The very nature of a communist society OF NECESSITY requires that there should be considerable scope for individual decision-making alongside collective decision-making.  This is clearly implicit in the whole idea of a communist based being based on free access to goods and service and voluntary labour.  Without this dimension of personal autonomy and the capacity to choose it would simply not be communism.  It would be just another form of slave society.  That is why Marx was so insistent on the free development of individuals being the condition for the free development of society as a whole. Marx himself in that respect is a prime example of what LBird (wrongly) calls an “individualist” My feeling is that LBird would benefit greatly from reading more widely.  He seems to be narrowly obsessed with epistemology as a subject to the detriment of other subjects.  His knowledge of sociology for instance and of the complexity, and two-way nature, of the relationship between individuals and society seems painfully crude and simplistic 

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

LBird wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Communism means from EACH (individual) according to the ability, to EACH (individual) acording to their needs.

So, who determines 'ability' and 'needs', YMS?Isolated individuals or social producers?How are these social products made?By ahistoric, asocial personal intuition, or by democratic discussion?

To me it seems self evident that if the boundary condition for all exchanges is that they must meet the following conditions:1) EACH individually acording to their personal mix of abilities and prefferences2) EACH according to their individual neads and wants and interests.3) EACH individual has free association and can make or refuse any exchange or offer regarding abilities and prefereences to any other indivdiual.Then EACH individual determines ability and needs.  

Again, we disagree on this, Steve.I'm a Democratic Communist, whose concern, like Marx's, is with social production.So, my answers to 'who' is 'social producers', and 'how' is 'democratic discussion'.Your answers are 'individuals' and 'individual choice'.Hope this clarifies our ideological differences. I'm not an 'individualist', and I've already commented upon your ideological notion of 'exchange', about which my position is like the SPGB's.

I guess I am not clear still.  Sorry, but here's an example that maybe you can tell me if it's individual production or social production.  Have you heard of kickstarter?  It's a online site where someone (person A) can propose a project like "I want to create a music album that requires a famous orchesta. if you contribute $10 and we get 499 other people to contribute, then I can and will produce this and each of you will get a collectors edition of the album for contributing to the kickstarter. if I can not get 500 people to contribure $10 each then you all get your money back and we cancel the whole idea and I won't do anything". after uploading his proposal for the kickstarter project and making it public, anyone in the world can comment, make suggestions before after or during the project, but contributors get their comments and suggestions moved to the top of the list.  anyone in the world can contribute $10, after he launches the page, but after 500 people contribute, the kickstarter project is closed and no more contriburtions can be accepted and he'll make the album described in the project proposal.  Kickstarter is real and works today and my neighbor did in fact become quite famous and successfull with his kickstarter.   Some people told him he needed to make a smaller album that didn't require an orchestra and they didn't contribute $10 and didn't get the collectors edition album he gave each of the kickstarters once he reached the 500 total and made the album.  There were a few comments on his kickstarter page that his music sucked and he should not be allowed to make music but those were ignored. Some people made a suggestion he make a different album with a different topic and he took some of their suggestons and turned it into a kickstarter for a second album which also won awards and is highly aclaimed.Questions I want you to answer like I"m a 5 year old:  Was that social production or individual production?  I would have said both.  EACH individual can choose not to contribute $10 to the kickstarter project or they can choose that they want to contribute $10 to the project. the music producer, individual (person A)  could chooose not to make a kickstarter proposal offer for others to contribure their $10 towards.  So everyone individually decides what they do as individuals IMO.  No one forced anyone into any associatioin and people could ignore the kickstarter webpage and not associate with the music producer (person A).  EACH individual could individually choose not to participate.  But it also seems like social production (given my 5 year old understanding) so I would say it's also social production because he didn't individually decide to make the album and did not have own the means of production (an orchestra, which he rented with the kickstarter money).  p.s. the numbers are made up cause I didn't want to find his old kickstarter project and get the numbers correct, but the principle works the same regardless, so please ignore math errors and don't bother pointing out a famous orchestra would cost more than $5000 for an hour performance. 

[LBird]

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

I guess I am not clear still.  Sorry, but here's an example that maybe you can tell me if it's individual production or social production.  ….Questions I want you to answer like I"m a 5 year old:  Was that social production or individual production?  I would have said both. ….EACH individual could individually choose not to participate. 

No problem, Steve, here's the answer for our '5 year old'.It's social production.The reason for this, Steve, is that all production by humans is social.To find an example of 'individual production', you'd have to find a biological individual who hasn't and doesn't take anything whatsoever from their society.This is impossible.This supposed 'individual' would, from birth, have to have no contact whatsoever with their society: no watering, no feeding, no loving, no caring, no education, no culture, etc.If someone as an adult freely wanted to choose to be in this asocial state, so that they can engage in a supposed 'individual production', we could easily grant their request.We'd remove their clothes, their access to water, food, warmth, shelter, all the 'physical/biological' stuff that society provides… and, of course, we'd have to remove all that nasty 'social conditioning' that the 'individualist' condemns so much… so, a frontal lobotomy, perhaps, anything that completely removes any trace of social knowledge that the 'individual' has taken from society.Then, we'll 'objectively observe' the naked, thirsty, hungry, cold, asocial, ahistoric, 'free individual' as they cry aloud and slowly die, not having actually produced anything 'individual', not even their own survival, and wonder just why they believed their ideologogical myth of 'individual production'.I'm sure even our '5 year old' can see that it's not really a 'free choice', and when they grow up, they won't make the mistake of seeing 'individual production' as 'freedom'.They'll be keen for us all to develop, together, as social individuals engaged in democratic production.

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