Marx, and the myth of his ‘Materialism’

[jondwhite]

Happy new year Lbird, I think you elevate the level of discussion here even if some users find it a bit repetitive.

[alanjjohnstone]

Quote:

Happy new year Lbird, I think you elevate the level of discussion here even if some users find it a bit repetitive.

I also like seeing a good battle of wits too, even when i have little clue of what is being argued…. Ding Dong, Next round …

[Anonymous]

Well perhaps Alan and John can explain LBird's 'contribution'  He's contribution has been summed up accurately by YMS a few posts up.But I and others have said the same for years. There is nothing new at all in his arguments.  It's a game   

[LBird]

jondwhite wrote:

Happy new year Lbird, I think you elevate the level of discussion here even if some users find it a bit repetitive.

Happy new year to you, too, jdw.The problem with your analysis, though, is that to 'elevate the discussion here' requires lifting on behalf of both parties. No elevation or comprehension ever seems to really take place, because, as you've noticed, I have to repetitively keep answering the same questions.Now, we're onto them asking for the same quotes from Marx, all over again!We're barely bumping along on the bottom, continuously, round and round…At least if you yourself asked me some different questions, we might at least have different round of repetition for the new year.

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Quote:

Happy new year Lbird, I think you elevate the level of discussion here even if some users find it a bit repetitive.

I also like seeing a good battle of wits too, even when i have little clue of what is being argued…. Ding Dong, Next round …

I know you're joking, alan, but if only you and some others would join in, and ask some different questions about something that you don't quite grasp, we might make some advances.Perhaps I might suggest an issue for you to ruminate upon.If you're believer in democratic politics within the workers' movement now, and in social production in any future socialism (which I think that you are, as am I), why wouldn't you extend this democratic sensibility to, say, physics or maths (which perhaps you wouldn't, at first sight)?Your admission, that you 'have little clue' about these issues, doesn't forbode well for the ability of the proletariat to run the means of production.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

OK fine, I have no problems using the term "naturalism". I think everything of use has been summed up in YMS's post a couple above this one.

But YMS's post is in support of 'materialism'.If you are to agree with Marx's use of the term 'naturalism', it's to agree to stop using 'materialism', and to agree to Marx's unifying of idealism and materialism.So, 'naturalism', for Marx equals 'idealism-materialism'.So, we all stop calling Marx a 'materialist', and all start calling him a 'naturalist'…… which is tantamount to calling him an 'idealist-materialist'.Which is the exact opposite of YMS's post. Your illogical post baffles me, DJP.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

But YMS's post is in support of 'materialism'.

"materialism" is a kind of "naturalism".

LBird wrote:

So, we all stop calling Marx a 'materialist', and all start calling him a 'naturalist'…

He was both.But it is your "idealism-materialism" that is nonsensical.FIN.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

But YMS's post is in support of 'materialism'.

"materialism" is a kind of "naturalism".

LBird wrote:

So, we all stop calling Marx a 'materialist', and all start calling him a 'naturalist'…

He was both.

[my bold]So, why not call him 'both'?

DJP wrote:

But it is your "idealism-materialism" that is nonsensical.FIN.

Putting your hands over your ears, shouting 'La, La, La, La…', and stamping your feet, is not solution, DJP. We're all grown-ups, not to mention Communists.You're nearly, there, comrade! One last effort, now, to use your own words, all chant together now with DJP, in unison…He was both, he was both, he was both…But… 'both' what?[over to DJP]

[Anonymous]

More twaddle

[alanjjohnstone]

Quote:

Your admission, that you 'have little clue' about these issues, doesn't forbode well for the ability of the proletariat to run the means of production.

To each to their own. Why should i choose to have a say in the running of how to manufacture glass at the other side of the world if it does not have an impact of any sort upon myself or something i care about as a world citizen? It would be different if the glass manufacture was spewing out pollutants and contaminating the environment…then, with many others, i would have an interest in declaring involvement in the decision-making at the glass-works. It would also be different if no-body was making glass, then perhaps i would start learning the process along with many others in my community of acquiring the technical knowledge. Democracy is also about the privilege of being passive in matters that do not concern you…(seems most on this forum in regards to this thread, take the same view.) Just to be pedantic to provoke…do you say in a classless communist society there is still a proletariat and it won't be just all people, collectively and individually…

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Quote:

Your admission, that you 'have little clue' about these issues, doesn't forbode well for the ability of the proletariat to run the means of production.

To each to their own.

I can't say that I'm not disappointed at your framing of this issue, alan.I'm a Democratic Communist, who wishes to see a society that collectively determines all of its productive activities, by the means of democratic politics.But, to me, a response of 'to each to their own' has a very individualistic ring to it.Using your phrase when talking to, say, office or factory workers about the collective use of their production and who should decide that usage, would lead them to think that you were suggesting a Thatcherite solution to their collective problems, of 'each to their own'. If one worker produces more than another, that worker should have more than another. No notion of all production being 'social', and the social product being put into a 'collective pot', and then distributed according to need, which itself is determined collectively by democratic means.This perspective of yours, of 'to each to their own' throws a lot of light on your hesitation about the notion of what Marx meant by 'material'.That is, unless there is an individualistic category of 'matter', which an individual can identify by their own touch, then the whole notion of 'to each of their own' falls down.If what we experience is social (rather than the individualistic stuff of 'matter'), then we can only identify our product by social means: as Marx says, there is no 'matter' in 'value'. Value can't be seen or touched, and can only be 'experienced' by social theory and practice.Which takes us back to Kline's discussion, about Marx's meaning of his term 'material'.I've suggested that for Marx 'material' means 'human production' (Kline's 'economic'), which Marx contrasts with 'ideal' meaning 'divine production'.That is, Marx in not referring to a category of 'matter' which 'each' produces and controls 'to their own' purposes.Finally, since you are one of the comrades in the SPGB that I thought was committed to democratic production (unlike some who have admitted that they are not committed to workers' democracy, but to 'individualism'), it's brought me up short, and made me actually question the very nature of the SPGB. I had thought that the problems with the SPGB were simply a few individuals ignorant of Marx, but perhaps the issue runs deeper, and my 'Democratic Communist' politics really are out of phase with the majority, including you.

[twc]

Where is “impossible” materialist ontology today?In simplified terms, here’s a glimpse of where neuroscience is at…A place-cell is a neuron that “fires” when a moving animal traverses a specific place in its external world (called the neuron’s place-field) but not when it traverses other places in its external world.  This binary behaviour of cell “firing” is crucial to localisation.Conversely, the firing of a place-cell neuron indicates to researchers, and so presumably to the animal, the animal’s current place-field, i.e. where in the external world the animal happens to be.The ensemble of place-cell neurons is therefore recognised as the “neural correlate” of the animal’s internal “cognitive map” of its external spatial environment. [Discovered 40 years ago by John O’Keefe, Nobel Laureate, 2014]A grid-cell is an even more-astonishing neuron that “fires” at spatial “coordinate points”, i.e. place-fields that fall neatly onto a regular array (geometrical matrix) of GPS coordinates [a simple geometric transform of latitude and longitude] as the moving animal traverses its external region of experience.This, on first encounter, is staggering (or “mind blowing” to use vernacular appropriate to “firing” neurons).What is more “mind blowing”, for the hikers among us, is that there is a hierarchy of grid-cell mapping neurons that encode whole maps at different scales, or map resolutions!It is hard to remain unstirred by images/videos of the equilateral triangular coordinate array of place-fields that efficiently mesh together (by maximal packing density) to form regular hexagons that externally map the animal’s grid-cell neurons “firing” internally deep inside its brain (in its entorhinal cortex).If you were to lay out, over the ground the animal traverses, its array of place-fields—the “neural correlates” of its “firing” grid-cells—they would appear like a transparent overlay of map coordinates covering the external world the animal “cognises” as it traverses. [Discovered a decade ago by Edvard and May-Britt Moser, Nobel Laureates, 2014]There are other specialist neurons that record the animal’s dynamics:  speed-cells, boundary-cells and head-direction-cells, which as their names imply internally encode the animal’s external speed, edge-detection and motion-direction as it moves.How these extraordinary ensembles of specialised “firing” neurons cooperate to form a coherent neural system that “tells” their possessor—a hunting cheetah—how to run down a fleeing gazelle bent on escape (“directed” by its own cooperating ensembles of specialised “firing” neurons) awaits scientific investigation.  But, oh how rapidly “materialist ontology” has matured.One thing is certain:  “materialist ontology” is definitely not letting nay-saying academic philosophers pontificate its absurd impossibility e.g., Kline, who academically dismisses “materialist ontology” by the purely scholastic game of word frequency counts and who, until recently, could mock from the safety of his academic desk, so long as neuronal action-potentials remained inaccessible in the laboratory.  Oh my, how the times, they are a-changing…The following statement by the relatively youthful Nobel Prize winning couple, who have no political axe to grind, appears in the current issue of Scientific American (January 2016):

Moser and Moser wrote:

The ability to figure out where we are and where we need to go is key to survival.  Without it, we, like other animals, would be unable to find food or reproduce.  Individuals—and, in fact, the entire species—would perish.Recent work has shown that the mammalian brain uses an incredibly sophisticated GPS-like tracking system of its own to guide us from one location to the next.

The opening sentence could have been written by dear old Engels, who was never afraid to stick his neck out on rational scientific speculation.  The closing sentence would have burst his merry sides for, whenever he saw his bold ideas confirmed, exploded deliriously in boisterous “jollyment”!

[LBird]

twc wrote:

…no political axe to grind…

Non-political, simple, objective 'science', eh?Marx would weep at the continuing strength of this ruling class idea, a bourgeois myth, of human social activities being practised 'without politics'.And this is supposedly a political site, supposedly providing a socialist lead for workers, to help those workers curious about their social existence to learn about their world.

[alanjjohnstone]

It may well be the anarchist in me, LBird…Because even with a proletarian democratic vote on the "truth" of science, i still rebel and dissent…

Quote:

“The Liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatsoever, divine or human, collective or individual…If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God….I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. …Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination…This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realised in a single man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto: but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralise him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself. ”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm

[twc]

LBird sneering from the safety of his desk.Please tell us what political axe you know for certain—not something conjured out your nasty imagination—that this dedicated scientific couple is wielding, and how it warps their science.

[Author]

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