Marx, and the myth of his ‘Materialism’
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Vin wrote:rodshaw wrote:Therefore (and you can call me picky if you like), humans are a different kind of matter from rocks, a kind which embodies creativity.
but matter neverthelessThe point being that matter creates. Basic preimise of MCH
Technically correct, but let's not forget that only some matter consciously reproduces the means to change and alter the immediate environment through creative production.
Toward the end of his life, Marx found his theory of value attacked along the lines of then-emerging marginalist theory.A new breed of economists saw Marx’s materialism as the Achilles heel of his political economy, and confidently chided Marx for deluding himself that value could be anything other than our subjective estimation of utility, one thing for you and another thing for me,In 1881, the ailing Marx penned a private response to the first direct attack upon the materialism of his Capital. His antagonist was the belligerent economist Adolph Wagner who precipitated the dismissal from the University of Berlin of Capital’s first academic critic, Eugen Dühring.As it turned out, Marx’s “Notes on Adolph Wagner” became an economic testament to his life’s work. Marx in his sixties calls upon the materialist Theses II and VIII that he penned in his twenties.Marx’s Defence of Capital’s MaterialismAdolph Wagner’s “general theory of value” [„allgemeine Werttheorie“] proclaimed “exchange-value” to be determined by “use-value” or, in vulgar terminology, price determined by utility.Marx tooth-combed his way through Wagner’s book, in the manner of his working life, simultaneously excerpting and critiquing it.In this post I consider a characteristic thread in his argument that exposes its predication upon Marx’s “materialist ontology”.I interpret “materialist ontology” to mean no more than what Marx says about it, in highly abstract form, in the Afterword to Capital Volume 1.
Marx wrote:the ideal is nothing other than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.I point out that no-one yet comprehends the biochemical–physiological processes involved in thinking. Materialists, unlike idealists, merely commit to considering these processes to be natural processes, subject to continued scientific investigation. No-one seriously considers that our current state of comprehension of these processes constitutes a “materialist ontology”.And now, to Marx…Notes on WagnerMarx: Mr. Wagner forgets that, at the outset, neither “value” nor “exchange-value” are subjects for me, but the commodity.Marx: It is from the value-concept, that “use-value” and “exchange-value” are supposed to be derived by Mr Wagner; not as with me from a concretum, the commodity. Marx characterises any attempt to build a practical science upon a foundational abstraction, and not upon a concrete object, for what it really is, unadulterated scholasticism. This necessarily characterises LBird’s anti-practical plan to constrain all human science to ideology, which LBird falsely dogmatises to be approved Marxian practice.Wagner: At the outset, man finds himself in relation to the things of the outside world as means of satisfying his needs.Marx: But men do not by any means begin by “finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the outside world”. Of course, for a professorial schoolmaster, the relations between men and nature are, a priori, not practical, that is, they are not relations rooted in action, but are theoretical {relations rooted in human thought}.Here Marx asserts that man forms practical social relations because he must, not because he theorises them. He is refuting LBird’s dogma of the diametrically opposite practice–theory relation.Marx: Men begin, just like animals, by eating, drinking, etc. Men begin by actively behaving, by availing themselves of certain things of the outside world through their action, and thus satisfying their needs.Marx grounds social practice in necessity. Without the necessity of social practice, deterministic theory is impossible—which is why LBird’s anti-practical necessity-denying “science” is stillborn.Contrary to LBird’s dogma, Marx never hallucinated that theory was active and practice was passive. Never. Only a blinkered dogmatist could assert that practice was passive, i.e. that activity was inactive. Marx made his great discovery by merely recognising that materialists up to Feuerbach had failed to comprehend the creative role of practice in determining theory [which is the essence of Marx’s materialism].Marx: Men start, then, with production.Marx now embarks on the most materialistically abrasive part of his argument…Marx: Through the repeated process of social production, the capacity of things to “satisfy men’s needs” becomes imprinted upon their brains; men, like animals, learn “theoretically” to distinguish the outer things which serve to satisfy their needs.At a certain stage of social development, men linguistically christen entire classes of such things, because in their production process—i.e. the process of appropriating these things—men are continually engaging in active contact with their fellows and with these things, over which they and their fellows will soon have to struggle against other humans for possession.Social practice is the necessary ground of abstract thought, and is therefore the independent variable, while theory is the dependent. Theory can only be the rational comprehension of practice. This is the practical reason, and the sole reason, why theory is capable of serving as a guide to successful practice. [Thesis VIII].Marx: But [a] linguistic label purely and simply expresses, as a concept, what repeated activity has turned into an experience, namely that certain outer things serve to satisfy the needs of human beings already living in definite social context {this being an essential prerequisite because they have language}.Humans endow these things with the attribute of utility, as if the things actually possessed it, although it would hardly occur to a sheep that one of its “useful” qualities is that it can be eaten by human beings.Marx has lost patience with muddle-headed Wagner’s “linguistic drivel”, and finally points out—contrary to ideological dogmatists like LBird—that “the content is not altered by this change of linguistic expression. It is still only the distinguishing or fixing in the mind of the things of the outside world which are means of satisfying human needs”.Marx: From the outset, I do not proceed from “concepts”.This is devastating news for LBird, who lives and breathes in order to dragoon every last one of us into marching lockstep in ideological subservience to LBird’s “democratic communist” dogma, in parody of his mythologised Marx.Marx: What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.To proceed, non-conceptually, from the way a social form “presents itself in contemporary society” [appearance] rubs against the grain of everything LBird confidently attributes to his fantasy Marx. For LBird, the way social forms appear to us is irredeemably “conceptual” and ideologically relative.Here Marx is scathingly contemptuous of the skeptical anti-objective relativist that LBird wants to be, and of the illusory Marx he emotionally hankers after.Marx: I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears. We remind LBird that the dogmatism of his supposedly active “ideology” has the unintended effect of immobilising himself—practically and theoretically—to the extent that he takes comatose refuge in abject passivity, beyond normal human comprehension, when asked how in practice he goes about determining whether his shoelaces in the form in which they appear to us are tied or loose.LBird’s paralytic impotence when confronted by practice (in the world as it presents itself to us in contemporary society) is explained by LBird modestly priding himself as being an exemplary “impractical communist” unlike us “practical socialists” of the SPGB. He might reread Thesis VIII to learn what coruscating opinion his mythical Marx has of him.To proceed further is to venture into Marx’s defence of the first three chapters of Capital, which contains his materialist analysis of the concretum, the commodity.I halt here at a lost cause because the ideological LBird has pontificated that Marx’s materialist analysis is not to his taste and is, in any case, utter nonsense, and likewise incomprehensible to everyone else.However, I couldn’t close without letting the materialists savour the idealist absurdity of the following Wagnerian excerpt, presented just as it left Marx’s pen…Wagner: “This acquisition” {of goods through commerce} “necessarily presupposes a definite legal system, on whose basis” (!) “commerce takes place,” etc.Finally, I ask LBird why, it was not a dereliction of soi disant “democratic communist” duty when Marx—who allegedly asserts the dogma that theory precedes practice—scoffed at Wagner, “I have never established a socialist system, this is a fantasy foisted upon me by Wagner” [or, as in most idealist fantasies, by LBird].
You really should read Kline's article, twc.Your biggest problem is your Engelsism, which reduces our choice to either materialism or idealism. This is Engels' dichotomy.This is displayed by your insistence:
twc wrote:Materialists, unlike idealists, merely commit to considering these processes to be natural processes…'Naturalism', according to Marx, is the unity of idealism and materialism in a philosophy of practice, ie. theory and practice.So, like Marx, I'm neither an idealist nor a materialist, but an idealist-materialist.You don't recognise this category, and I've explained why you don't.Your personalising of the issue, by abusing me, just displays your inability to put together a coherent, socio-historical explanation of these issues.If any comrades wish to adopt your position, they'll both remain stuck within 19th century thought and be unable to account for our human ability to change our world.Finally, your dismissal of workers' democracy (their ability to control physics and maths by a vote) should give any other comrades, unsure of where your Engelsist thinking leads, the impetus to look at the politics of Engels' inheritor, Lenin.Materialism is a philosophy for an elite.
twc wrote:…to build a practical science … upon a concrete object, for what it really is…[my bold]Comrades who are also following the other thread started by DJP on the subject of 'Truth', will recognise which of the two theories that I outlined is the one embraced by twc.That is, twc is starting from a theory.He's pretending that he's not starting from a 'theory of truth', but is simply reflecting the 'concrete object' as 'it really is'.This is 19th century positivism, pre-Einsteinian physics.twc is over a hundred years out of date.It's got nothing to say to 21st century socialists, and indeed insists that we can't change 'what really is', that is, 'what reality is' prior to our changing of it.The active element in this ideology is 'matter', the 'concrete', rather than humans. But it's a lie: humans do change their world, and so the materialists must posit an elite who, if the proletariat doesn't supply its democratic consciousness, themselves supply an elite, special, consciousness.This is Leninism. The 'active side' is the cadre, not the class.
LBird wrote:twc … is simply reflecting the 'concrete object' as 'it really is'.No, not twc, but Marx, who assertsI do not proceed from “concepts”.I analyse a concretum, the commodity.I proceed from the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears.Why would Marx, or anyone else, analyse something he already knew as “it really was”?But logic does not prevent you from seeing the antithesis of your ideology in everything that fails to conform to it, just as with the crank and the bigot, and so now you accordingly slam Marx for seeing objects in their immediacy “exactly as they are”.Even an opponent of Marx might have stopped to analyse what Marx is actually doing; but analysis as we know is your professed weak point.I’ll give you three hints to reassure you that Marx is under no illusion about what he is undertaking, and why he is proceeding cautiously from uncontroversial familiarly-recognised observed phenomena, from which he will tease out his foundational concepts by analysis.In the above bullet list we see Marx laying down his starting point for a materialist science of the object domain—capitalist society— that he wants to comprehend as a historical, or dynamic, process.He will employ the appearance–essence methodology described in http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx‘s-scientific-method.He will prove his theory in practice [Thesis VIII], by comprehending scientifically our false consciousness or perverted conception of the capitalist world—the ultimate reductio ad absurdism.
twc wrote:LBird wrote:twc … is simply reflecting the 'concrete object' as 'it really is'.No, not twc, but Marx, who assertsI do not proceed from “concepts”.I analyse a concretum, the commodity.I proceed from the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears.Why would Marx, or anyone else, analyse something he already knew as “it really was”?
Let's look at the logic of this.I assert twc is talking about 'it really is'.twc then asserts that it is 'not twc, but Marx, who asserts' this.Then, twc asks, apparently askance, why would Marx analyse as 'it really was'.But, a 'commodity' is a 'social form'.'Society' involves 'ideas'.No wonder workers ignore this 'materialist' nonsense.If the SPGB continues along this non-democratic path, in which the 'concrete' is the 'active side', it will disappear. And it's nothing to do with Marx.
I have to say, LBird, in all my time in academia and political debate I have never come across so much twaddle Happy new year
Vin wrote:I have to say, LBird, in all my time in academia and political debate I have never come across so much twaddle Happy new yearProblem is, Vin, you have never come across academic and political debate, otherwise you would engage in a debate, for example, about 'theories of truth', as on DJP's thread about that.The 'twaddle' is the materialism of Engels, which is entirely outdated, and can't stand up to informed debate, and has degenerated into a 'faith' followed by people who put their trust in other misguided socialists.Anyway, happy new year – perhaps this year, we'll make some progress in our discussions.
My original sentence: “Marx characterises any attempt to build a practical science upon a foundational abstraction—and not upon a concrete object—for what it really is, unadulterated scholasticism”.I revised the dashes to commas, incautiously allowing you to misread the posted sentence to your heart’s desire.Conjuring the “that-sidedness”, without mediation of practice, out of the “this-sidedness” can never be foundational science. It is pure magic.Here is Marx’s characterisation of Wagner’s attempt to derive the phenomenal from the abstract, for what it really is: scholasticism.Marx: It is from the value-concept, that use-value and exchange-value are supposed to be derived d’abord by Mr Wagner, not as with me from a concretum, the commodity, and it is interesting to follow this scholasticism in its latest “Foundation”.I culled the bold clause, when posting it, because nobody now cares that the title of Part One of Wagner’s book happens to be “Foundation”, the substance of Marx’s private pun.
Marx wrote:Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.[my bold] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htmPurposive action is 'theory and practice'.'Practice and theory' is the pretence that humans generate theory from their actions. It is induction, and the method of Engels.Marx argues that our 'imagination' comes first, not 'primitive instinct'.
twc wrote:…without mediation of practice…This is why I can't have a reasoned discussion with you, twc.Who, out of any of us, is arguing for 'no practice'?Your posts are full of this, a litany of the supposed faults of Marx's idealism-materialism, which are nothing to do with idealism-materialism, but to do with idealism.I keep explaining why you do this: because the ideology you follow only permits two alternatives, materialism and idealism. Thus, by logic, if my position is not materialism, and it isn't, then by Engels' logic, it must be idealism.So, no matter how many times I stress the necessity of 'practice' in Marx's formula of 'theory and practice', you are blind to this and read it as 'theory', alone.And following Engels, you counterpose the mere 'theory' of idealism, to 'practice and theory' of Engels' materialism.But, Marx's method was 'theory and practice', the exact opposite of the inductive method argued for by Engels.Humans don't start from 'practice', but 'theory'. Read the quote that I gave from Marx earlier, from Capital. [edit: see next post for the quote, again]Anyway, unless you stop arguing with a figment of your own fears and engage with what I'm actually saying, you won't ever even learn the epistemological views of Marx, much less agree with them. You're following Engels, not Marx, twc.
For the record, I note Lbird dodged the point about huimans creating history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. If truth is based on consensus, then necessarily, humans create their conditions. Lbird cannot continue to argue for this position and continue laying any claim to a Marxian perspective. no bad thing, but it should clear up the debate. Lbirde's continuous attempt to separate Marx and Engels breaks down at the point of the joint authorship of the German Ideology.
LBird wrote:YMS wrote:…but her position is in fact an entirely idealist one, in as much as she separates the object from the thought.We're getting down to the epistemological basics, here.Materialism = objectivism (it separates 'material object' from 'conscious subject');Idealism = subjectivism (it separates 'conscious subject' from 'material object');
Nope, Materialism posits that the world is made of matter, idealism that the world is made of ideas, dualism says matter and ideas are separate. The mechanical materialists would say that ideas are pale shadows, reflections, or even illusions that don't exist. Cultural materialists (or historical materialists) would say that ideas exist, as material processes, which can be subject to investigation and analysis.
LBird wrote:YMS wrote:The whole point of MKarx is that as we act in the world, we change the world, but it also changes and acts upon us. We are inextricably parts of a process.Yes, you're spot on.Since 'we are inextricably', which "inextricably we's" social ideas do you employ during your social process to understand reality, YMS?I'm a Democratic Communist. I'm inextricably a part of a social process of understanding our physical and social world. Unity of subject and object, idealism-materialism, Marx's social theory and practice.
Here we come to the nub, Lbird is opbsessed with the nonsen term 'Idealist-Materialist'. It could as easily be called 'fish cake materialism' for all the difference it makes, tyhis is just egoising. There is no disagreement of substance, just a hobby horse beinmg ridden into the ground.
LBird wrote:We could choose another term entirely, which doesn't employ either 'materialism' or 'idealism' (Marx suggested 'humanism' or 'naturalism')Citation needed.
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:We could choose another term entirely, which doesn't employ either 'materialism' or 'idealism' (Marx suggested 'humanism' or 'naturalism')Citation needed.
It's not a citation that's needed, DJP, but for you to question your Engelsian faith.I've given this quote several times on different threads before, and it's not had any noticable affect on your long-held Religious Materialism, but here goes anyway. Other comrades might benefit from reading Marx, even if you, twc and Vin don't:
Marx, EPM, Collected Works 3, p. 336, wrote:Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htmEdit: add YMS to the list.
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