Is the case for socialism, one of morality, cold logic or long term survival of our species?
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Then show us where the party’s standard theory is wrong. It deserves to know.Explain it clearly, and take your time.By the way, do you expect me to defend something I disagree with? Yet you apparently adhere to something you disagree with. If anyone has a moral duty to explain his action it is you.Please show us clearly where we are wrong. Start another thread, and I promise I’ll give you all the time you need, free of any carping interference from me, to make your case.
stuartw2112 wrote:I have read Graeber, who knows his Marx inside outLOL. I have don't think that's the case at all. But that's probably one for another day!
When I say knows it inside out, I mean, he knows it inside out. I don't mean he repeats it verbatim for the satisfaction of dogmatists and sectarians. Twc: I find the 'standard theory' – if you want to give such a sketchy and metaphorical piece of storytelling such a ludicrously grand title – to be roughly OK, as a roughly right picture of the world. But you're asking me to believe in it. Sorry, but I don't do that kind of religion.
stuartw2112 wrote:When I say knows it inside out, I mean, he knows it inside out. I don't mean he repeats it verbatim for the satisfaction of dogmatists and sectarians.i don't think that's a really fair comment about Kliman or Aufheben.Yes it's true they both criticise Graeber, I think there criticisms are sound.Any theory is good if it offers some explanatory and predictive power, if another theory comes along that does both better the older one should be rejected. I don't see Graeber as offering any improvements..
Stuart, most of the above was directed at your lack of conviction in the DOP and Obj.If you think the party’s standard case is not worth defending, then you have a moral obligation to oppose it by bringing your objections out into the open, or a moral duty to the party to remove yourself from it, and set up or join an organisation whose objectives and principles you do find to be worthy of defence.Convince me why I should have any conviction in your case when you demonstrate such little conviction in it yourself. When asked why you condemn the party’s standard analysis of bolshevism, you refused to offer your own improved alternative. So far, you’ve supplied no more assurance than to accept on face value your own morality.
LBird, do you seriously suppose that if Pannekoek had even a whiff of evidence, that Engels was the precursor of Lenin’s empiriocriticism rant, he would have let him off scott free?I have just reread Pannekoek’s “Lenin as Philosopher” and he provides not a whiff of such evidence. On the contrary, he refutes this bogus charge of yours.Pannekoek’s single charge against Engels refers to Engels’s assertion of the organic chemistry industry as a practical social demonstration of the refutation of Kant’s unreachable “thing in itself”.Pannekoek claims that historical materialism alone is the refutation of Kant’s “thing in itself”, but Engels had more than conceded that, as a given, and already reached back further in history by saying that there was little one need add to Hegel’s magnificent demolition job on Kant’s “thing in itself”.Pannekoek is clearly affronted, or unsettled, by Engels’s infra-dig lowly industrial application, but human social production is the true marxian arena of social practice, and it was deliberately chosen by Engels as a very, non-academic, in-your-face assault for those dualists who don’t comprehend Marx, that “the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice”.I am inclined to agree here with practical Engels over theoretical Pannekoek. Affrontery be damned! The dualism of the great Kant now deserves it, because it has become an intellectual academic obstacle to socialism.Now, Pannekoek shows Lenin referring to Engels’s “Anti-Dühring” and “Ludwig Feuerbach” everywhere. Nothing surprising, since these were the obvious texts on marxian science.However, and this is crucial, Pannekoek goes to great lengths to show how Lenin abuses Engels’s texts to refute Mach and Avenarius, whose texts he equally abuses. He deliberately distances Engels from Lenin’s abusive practice.Finally, as clincher, Pannekoek, holds up the contrasting exemplary practice of Engels’s “Anti-Dühring” to condemn outright the ignorant and unscrupulous practice of Lenin.At a superficial level, Lenin simply taints everything he touches. But Engels’s work is too great, and survives and annihilates Lenin’s taint, just as Marx’s does, and so too does socialism.
Sorry Stuart, but that is utter nonsense.You earlier presented the case for the morality of Marx and Engels. Either you meant it, or you are deluding yourself.They had their value systems, but that didn’t preclude them from explaining human values materialistically. Explanation can only destroy values that are not worth keeping. Genuine values are enhanced by explanation.Because Marx is a materialist, he must first abstract from the social superstructure, including its value systems, in order to explain them. Thus, man, for Marx, is “economic man” in the sense in which Marx defines “economic” in his famous Preface to the “Contribution”. Look it up.For genuine respect for human values, reread Engels’s wonderful “Origin of the Family”, which is genuine anthropology. Don’t fall for the consciously anti-marxian vulgarities that parade under the name of anthropology—see the Chris Knight reference I gave earlier. [Anthroplogy became deliberately anti-marxian in exactly the same way that economics did.]As for even considering human values, apart from extraordinary fine and brave courage in the face of fear, within the Soviet Union!E. P. Thompson, great and all as he was, and superb as his biography of William Morris remains, was tainted by Leninism.Take heart from the fact that the socialist party is the only bearer of socialism, and its standard theory surpasses the vaunted writings of those who are ignorant of our standard theory. Defending our standard theory is surely one of the worthiest of human values, if not the very worthiest.As to artistic values, if you find love and beauty in oriental poetry and philosophy, grasp it with all your heart. But also acknowledge its social context and its historical limitations.Most of the best art is historical—museum stuff, I recall Hegel, who loved the stuff, saying. To appreciate it, we do need to perform a mental context switch to comprehend and enjoy it, in approximation to its originator’s intent and its intended audience’s conceptions. But you’ve already explained you are a practiced adept at that.I’m not trying to destroy human value, and neither were those big hearts Marx and Engels. They held the highest of human values, though not those appropriate to a capitalist world. I thought that was a given. Who would fight for mankind without a big heart for one’s suffering fellows.
Theoretical beauty is not an end in itself.Compare the transformation laws of Galileo and Einstein’s special relativity.Galilean transformation [Galileo 1] x′ = x – v t , [Galileo 2] t′ = t .Einstein [Lorentz] transformation. [Einstein 1] x′ = γ (x – v t) , [Einstein 2] t′ = γ (t – v x / c²) , [Einstein 3] γ = 1 / √(1 – v²/c²) .Galileo’s are far more elegant than Einstein’s, but are less general. Formal beauty most abounds when the general, by theoretical abstraction, is made more elegant, but only as far as nature will allow. [The Lorentz transformation is as elegant as it gets for special relativity.]Interestingly, Einstein overplayed his hand when he later set up his, truly beautiful, equations of general relativity. Unfortunately, guided [or misguided] by formal beauty, he spirited away the, apparently to him, “inessential” cosmological constant, which over-zealous beautification he later regretted as his “greatest mistake” because it prevented him from predicting an expanding [or contracting] universe.Finally, perhaps the most astonishing something-for-nothing act of formal beautification was Dirac’s courage to predict anti-particles. That strikes most physicists as truly astonishing.Formal beauty is ultimately subservient to the world outside us ≡ objective truth.
DJP: Well, each to their own. Graeber is not the writer Marx was, but he has written the most important and interesting book from the left since Capital, in my view.TWC: If you read the posts I have written to you, you would know I have already left the party, have already made clear some of my reasons for doing so, and I am under no moral obligation to pen detailed criticisms of anything at your bidding. I've leave it there, thanks all for the chat.
stuart wrote:The essay on Marx was by me – thanks for sharing, I'm glad you liked it. I wrote it just before joining the SPGB for the second time, and I can't find much to disagree with in it now.Sorry, Stuart, I misread that to imply you had rejoined the SPGB, and were still a member. Please accept my apologies for any implied slur upon your integrity. I respect your integrity, and honour it, even if I consider it misguided, as no doubt I have no need to tell you.Having followed your references, I imagine that I comprehend your political and intellectual stance.I wrongly assumed that I was defending the party from a determined internal attack upon it. Once more, please accept my apology.
By the way, DJP, do you accept my position on objective truth and formal beauty?I pointed out that scientific theory arises by abstracting away inessentials through analysis of the objective world. That is pure Marx.Scientific beauty arises by abstracting away inessentials through secondary analysis of the form of the abstract theory itself. Beauty is truly the wonder that arises when this secondary abstraction process reveals a deeper insight into the objective world from which the theory, in its original form, was abstracted.Einstein, in his formal description of general relativity, allowed his pursuit of abstracting away the inessentials to mislead him into tossing away an apparently innocuous constant, formally demanded by the theory, but upsetting its apparent “beauty”. He set a formal constant to zero. That, by the way, mirrors straightforward thoughtless practice, engaged in all the time in the vain hope of simplifying a problem.Unfortunately, the objective world was not quite so beautiful as Einstein’s original formalism. He missed the expansion of the universe and so the Big Bang.My point is not to denigrate Einstein’s general relativity formalism, which is one of the true wonders of human achievement. My point is otherwise.I want to encourage conviction in scientific formalism, the only sure-fire conviction we have.Dirac, when he introduced electrodynamics into quantum theory had the courage of conviction in his abstract formalism, and so comprehended his formal analysis to directly express objective nature. And, to the amazement of all, he formally discovered anti-matter.So far, “half” the world was missing, even though the anti-“half” was always present, though formally concealed, in the original formalism abstracted from the concrete world.Such stunning formal discoveries of the objective world are the life blood of abstract formalism. Mathematics thrives on them.Now, the socialist party too survives by conviction in its abstract formalism in its Obj and DOP. And there’s a helluva lot of implications lurking in that formalism.I fully understand those who feel uncertain over what appears to be “mere formal” conviction. If it helps, every scientist must first go through this native distrust of “mere formal” conviction before coming out the other side convinced of its efficacy. [We saw the miserable Sorel repudiating it earlier on.]Regarding conviction in theoretical formalism, the great mathematical physicist Lagrange offered the following advice to a doubting colleague, which I freely paraphrase:“Scientific formalism is practical. Use it, and conviction will come if it’s a correct understanding of the objective world. If you don’t use it, you aren’t in a position to judge.”Our Obj and DOP predict so much. They are formally potent. There is nothing more powerful than to “use” our abstract formal principles practically, as they were intended to be used by the party, in order to comprehend the capitalist world and to lead us into socialism.This has always been the party position, and no capitalist assault upon it has so far toppled it, but has merely sidelined it for immediately appealing sophisticated insipidity.
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