Do We Need the Dialectic?
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LBird, IIRC, you hoped that Rosa Liechenstein not Luxemburg would discuss her Leninism.I would like to know why you decline to join the SPGB and just where your disagreements are. Surely, the reasons are not in the differing interpretations of Pannekoek or Engels philosophying. Members on this thread and related ones have alredy disputed with one another and moreorless a party line in much of the discussion does not exist. Some one said it resembles the theological question of how many dialecticians are dancing on a pin head.So why aren't you not filling up a Form A since i think you are in more agreement with the SPGB than with others. Lets get the debate down to something tangible !!!
Also think of all the fun you will have attending conference and ADM and challenging all our sacred cows
LBird wrote:'if anyone wants to employ 'scientific socialism', be my guest'.The fact that no-one can say what it is, seems not to cause any concern.Fair enough but the same thing could be said about "proletarian science". In fact what's the difference between talking about "proletarian science" and talking about "scientific socialism"? Given the choice I prefer "scientific socialism".
I just pulled this from a review of that J Marks book. I'm not sure if it adds anything to the debate but I think it makes some good points.
Quote:What I think Marks is deliberately missing is that science is not a philosophy, not a religion, not a way of life; it is not something only people with grants from the National Science Foundation can do. Science is a tool. Anybody can use it. It is neither good nor bad. The technological applications from science may be medicines that save lives or they may be nuclear weapons, but that is not the fault of science. That is the fault of human beings. And besides there is no putting the genie of science back into the bottle. Science is a genie of great power and utility. The society that shuns science will risk disaster.http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2GJDSNOEUPNFJ/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0520259602&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=266239&store=booksHere's another quote from the review above. Hopefully useful..
Quote:Marks's complaint (and this is a familiar one) that science has always been wrong in the past again reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of science and scientific knowledge. If scientific knowledge were absolute in the same sense that religious knowledge claims to be, then it would be quite an embarrassment to find that past discoveries were imprecise, wrong or somehow needed refining. But since scientific knowledge is always tentative, subject to a correcting fact, understanding or experiment, it is not and cannot be certain knowledge. However, to quote Bertrand Russell, "When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others."http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2GJDSNOEUPNFJ/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0520259602&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=266239&store=books I think I would agree with ALB that the scientific *method*, rather than a particular science, is a product of class society. However, that method includes the segregation of fields of study. There is the broader matter as well however that science, while claiming political neutrality, in reifying the world and making the content of our lives not the thoughts that we share but the things that we possess, supports private property society. Properties are just concepts, our thoughts about the world that we live in. Reifying these properties allows them to be privately appropriated. A world of gears and machines, of computers and smartphones, is alienating in a political as well as an anthropological sense. To be direct, ALB, I would disagree with Locke who thought that there were subjective properties such as colour and objective properties such as height and weight. I think that all properties are contingent. To paraphrase, the cosmological is political. Simon W.
LBird wrote:mcolome1 wrote:Nature+society is the real conception of Marx and the proponents of socialism as the only alternative ( no alternatives ) to capitalism. It is much better than Engels' scientific socialism, but also indicating that the intention of Engels was to distinct themselves from the utopian socialists[my bold]Yes, mcolome1, the 'real conception of Marx' was the unity of nature and society.But, it is not only 'much better than Engels' scientific socialism', but the very opposite of 'Engels' scientific socialism' (sic)!Engels' 'intention' might have been praiseworthy, but in practice he ditched Marx's critical social practice and returned to crude materialism, due both to the ideological pressure of 19th century positivism and his philosophical amateurism. So, we have had to put up with over 100 years of so-called 'Marxists' insisting that 'matter' talks to us! This applies not only to the DiaMat-ists of Lenin/Stalin, but also to those who insist (when asked about the process of cognition) that 'matter/reality/physics' etc. is prior to humans. This is incorrect. Of course, reality is prior historically (it exists prior to human questions about it), but in any attempt by humans to understand that reality, humanity is prior.The social subject asks questions of the really-existing object, this 'asking' is a practical, active process (not a passive contemplation), and the product is scientific knowledge.We have to expel the so-called 'materialist' strain of Engels/Lenin/Stalin from proletarian consciousness, and replace it with the 'historical materialism' of Marx/Pannekoek.
MColome commentary:Better or opposite will not make any difference after the damage has been created. What you are saying about Engels and Pannekok is nothing new for me, but I do not think that Engels can be rejected completely, in others aspects he also made his own contribution. There are others works of Engels which are acceptable, probably, he was an amateur in philosophy, but before Marx became an economist, Engels had been an economist already, later one Marx entered in the field of Political Economy.I will never mix up Engels with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao or Hoxha, because all of them used some economical ideas of Marx and they twisted them also in the same manner that the concept of socialism-communism was separated by them, and they distorted the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat ( personally I believe is an error of Marx ) I do not like to make hybrid of personalities because they remind me all the hybrid made by the left winger such as Marx-Lenin, Marx-Lenin-Mao, Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao, Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Hoxha, Marx-Deleon, therefore, the concept Marx-Pannekoek is not correct either because both have made their won mistakes, and we can not take their whole body of ideas, neither Marx or Pannekoek were totally correct, they made contributions
A fascinating book on this general topic (well, science) is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-History-Science-Midwives-Mechanicks/dp/1560257482
Blurb wrote:We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.A copy is available in the Party Library…
mcolome1 wrote:…I do not think that Engels can be rejected completely, in others aspects he also made his own contribution.No, I've already made this point to ALB, when he seemed to suggest I was 'rejecting Engels completely'. We're talking here about Engels' philosophy of science, not his other works, like economics, history, etc.
mcolome1 wrote:I will never mix up Engels with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao or Hoxha, because all of them used some economical ideas of Marx and they twisted them also in the same manner…Well, I think we should 'mix up Engels' with these ne'er-do-wells, 'because all of them used some philosophical ideas of Engels'. In this regard, 'they twisted the ideas of Marx', as did Engels.Simply put, Engels became a 19th century positivist, whereas Marx (probably) did not.An illustrative case of 'Social being determines social consciousness'? 19th century ideas of science were very powerful and influential; even are to this day.
LBird wrote:mcolome1 wrote:…I do not think that Engels can be rejected completely, in others aspects he also made his own contribution.No, I've already made this point to ALB, when he seemed to suggest I was 'rejecting Engels completely'. We're talking here about Engels' philosophy of science, not his other works, like economics, history, etc.
mcolome1 wrote:I will never mix up Engels with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao or Hoxha, because all of them used some economical ideas of Marx and they twisted them also in the same manner…Well, I think we should 'mix up Engels' with these ne'er-do-wells, 'because all of them used some philosophical ideas of Engels'. In this regard, 'they twisted the ideas of Marx', as did Engels.Simply put, Engels became a 19th century positivist, whereas Marx (probably) did not.An illustrative case of 'Social being determines social consciousness'? 19th century ideas of science were very powerful and influential; even are to this day.
=================================================================================================Mcolome1 commentary:Well, Marx wrongly created the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it is also an incongruent idea, because the slave can not suppress itself, Marx in an exaggerated manner supported many bourgeois nationalists revolution, and Marx took from the Utopian socialist the Labor Voucher which has been wrongly used by the Castroists as an excuse to justify shortage in Cuba and Venezuela, others have used Marx in order to justify their bourgeois nationalism, patriotism and ethnicism, and the Bolsheviks used the DOT to justify their dictatorship, the transitional society, and the division between socialism and communism. Are we going to mix-up Marx with those peoples too? If we mix up Engels with those guys we can also accept the critiques of the right wingers and the capitalists who have indicated that whatever happened in Russia is part of Marxism, and I think that we can not mix up Marx and Engels with state capitalism and Bolshevism.Now we are accepting new discoveries because others peoples did the research already, but previously we were accepting many wrong ideas as correct. When we penetrate into the field of sociological conceptions, it is like getting into a jungle with a machetes in our hands, we have to start cutting trees and leaves in order to penetrate inside, and then we can reach our destination. The Marxist-Humanists raised their critiques against Engels by saying that he twisted Marx Hegelianism, and they have tried to reject Engels to bring Hegel through the back door, they have raised critiques against his book The Origin of the family in order to justify their so called revolution in permanence and that capitalism can be skipped, and that Marx at the end of his life was changing his mind on the development of capitalism as a pre-condition for the establishing of socialism.The best option is what the Socialist Party did in 1949 in regard to dialectic, they recognized that we did not need dialectic, but they left the doors open for others ideas, if we closed our doors and windows completely we will do like the left wingers, who have the be rectifying their so called party line when the mistake is recognized, or the leaders change the routes.Marx let many errors of Engels to be passed to posterity because he was receiving financial support from him, he should have called his attention, he should have asked him to correct or rectify his mistakes, but he did not, there is not evidence indicating that he did that and Engels was also paying for the education in private schools of his own daughters.Rosa Luxemburg intended to say that Engels made changes on Volume 2 of Capital when she was writing her Accumulation of capital, but trying to correct Marx or Engels so called mistakes, she ended up making more mistakes, and in certain moment Engels also supported the collapsist theory like she did.
ALB wrote:I think the distinction you are trying to make is not between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" science, but between a "bourgeois scientific method" and a more adequate method or maybe between how science is conducted today and how it will be in socialism/communism (which of course can't be described as "proletarian" as someone has already pulled you up for suggesting since there will no longer be a proletariat in socialism).Pannekoek was not studying or teaching "bourgeois astronomy" if only because it's not clear what this might be. He was studying astronomy with a different scientific method from that which you call bourgeois" (but which you've admitted on another thread most mainstream scientists don't accept now anyway).You seem to be riding the same sort of hobby horse against "science" as RL does about "philosophy".There are bourgeois social sciences, and 'humanities", but there are not bourgeois natural sciences. The capitalist used sciences and some scientists to carry their own economical purposes, but there is not homogeneity among scientists. The capitalists have tried to applied Darwinism to society, but it does not mean that biology is a bourgeois science. Like Engels wrote: Scientists are materialist in their laboratory but some scientists can be metaphysical or idealists in their private life
I don't think that we are going to have a proletarian science ( it sounds like Leninism ) in a socialist society.
mcolome1 wrote:ALB wrote:I think the distinction you are trying to make is not between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" science, but between a "bourgeois scientific method" and a more adequate method or maybe between how science is conducted today and how it will be in socialism/communism (which of course can't be described as "proletarian" as someone has already pulled you up for suggesting since there will no longer be a proletariat in socialism).Pannekoek was not studying or teaching "bourgeois astronomy" if only because it's not clear what this might be. He was studying astronomy with a different scientific method from that which you call bourgeois" (but which you've admitted on another thread most mainstream scientists don't accept now anyway).You seem to be riding the same sort of hobby horse against "science" as RL does about "philosophy".There are bourgeois social sciences, and 'humanities", but there are not bourgeois natural sciences. The capitalist used sciences and some scientists to carry their own economical purposes, but there is not homogeneity among scientists. The capitalists have tried to applied Darwinism to society, but it does not mean that biology is a bourgeois science. Like Engels wrote: Scientists are materialist in their laboratory but some scientists can be metaphysical or idealists in their private life
The production of knowledge of both natural and social science is done by humans.Natural and social science both employ the same method.If social science can be bourgeois, so can natural science.If natural science can be socially-neutral, so can social science.If anyone disagrees with these theses, please detail the different theories of cognition used by natural and social sciences.I'm with Pannekoek, who argues that scientific knowledge is created by humans (not by nature or a neutral method) and Marx, who argues that humans must unite natural and social science into a singular method.The belief in the separation of natural and social science is a bourgeois ideological belief.
LBird wrote:Natural and social science both employ the same method.No, you can't perform experiments in the same way in the social sciences as you can in the natural sciences.The phenomena that the social sciences study are "multi-realisable" in a way that the phenomena of the natural sciences are not.Chapter 5 of Minds, Brains and Science by John Searle raises some interesting points.http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&lpg=PA71&ots=rA9_cwx1Xn&dq=John%20Searle%20prospects%20for%20the%20social%20sciences&pg=PA71#v=onepage&q=John%20Searle%20prospects%20for%20the%20social%20sciences&f=false
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:Natural and social science both employ the same method.No, you can't perform experiments in the same way in the social sciences as you can in the natural sciences.
And so, after months of discussion, we return to the assertion that 'rocks' and 'ideas' are different.No matter how many times those arguing this, themselves post quotes about the "theory ladenness of 'facts'", and quote Pannekoek and Marx approvingly, when push comes to shove we return to 'real science' (sic), to physics, and ignore all other sciences as somehow 'not real science'.Then we encounter Einstein's quote about 'theory determining what we can observe', spend hours and hours discussing cognition, Marx's arguments about the social bases of 'senses', the nonsense of DiaMat and Engels' diversion from Marx's critical practice and Historical Materialism, etc. etc….Then, the old empiricist canard about 'science and experiments' appears once more…I give up. Forget philosophy of science, and talk to rocks – they'll tell you the unvarnished truth…
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