Marx was a Productionist, not a Materialist

[DJP]

Yes he's the son of PF Strawson according to wikipedia. I'm glad that the linguistic turn was old hat by the time I started studying philosophy…The talk is called real naturalism, but he does see himself as a kind of materialist. I think he said he chose naturalism for the title as it is the widest of the terms. The real is related to realism as in scientific realism. Some of the content is the same as in the book "Real Materialism". He says the materialism of people like Dennett who deny the existence of pnenomology is not real naturalism since it denys the only thing we can only know.Might be worth a watch as it does touch on most of the stuff that we've been talking about…. The more I read or hear of this guy the more I'm persuaded..

[ALB]

And I'm glad that I missed the subsequent descent into "post-modernism". Bring back ordinary language, I say.But to return to young Strawson (interesting and maybe revealing that his dad should have given him a non-christian name), I haven't listened to the whole of his talk but I thought I heard him say at one point that only the physical forms part of "concrete reality". But isn't thisbegging the question since "concrete" and "physical" mean more or less the same?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

…I thought I heard him say at one point that only the physical forms part of "concrete reality". But isn't thisbegging the question since "concrete" and "physical" mean more or less the same?

It's just playing with words, to avoid the point that Dietzgen, amongst others (and agreed with by Critical Realists), that the 'ideal' and the 'material' are the same 'stuff'.Unfortunately, those comrades who follow Engels intepret 'material' to mean 'concrete' or 'physical' or 'reality' or 'object'. This is why the Leninists/Trotskyists are always going on about the 'concrete'.Those who follow Marx interpret Marx's 'material' to mean 'real', and 'real' is both 'ideal' and 'material'. This interpretation of Marx's use of 'material' to mean 'real' (and not 'concrete' or 'physical') is the only interpretation that fits with Marx's usage of 'material' as always linked with 'production' (which is human, and thus related to 'theory and practice', which requires both 'ideas' and 'reality').These opposing interpretations of what 'real' means (either 'material' meaning 'concrete', or 'ideal' and 'material') are ideological beliefs. The former ('material' means 'concrete') is based upon 19th century positivism, which deflected Engels from Marx's meaning ('material' meaning 'human production').As ideological beliefs, they have political implications. The 'materialists' will pretend that they have access to the 'concrete', which humans don't, because Marx argued that humans produce their 'material' world, and so the 'concrete' is a product of human ideas practiced upon nature.The 'concrete' of the 'materialists' is uncriticisable, because 'what is' is, well, 'what is'. It is 'being'.For Marx, since 'material production' is by humans, and human products can be changed or proved wrong with new theories, the 'concrete', being a product (including ideas/knowledge, as much as bricks) can be criticised. Marx does not separate 'being' from 'consciousness', but unites them in a philosophy of praxis, of 'theory and practice', the interaction of subject and object (and not merely the 'object', as for 'materialists'). Change can only come from criticism, which is human ideas. Pretending 'ideas' are less worthy than the 'concrete' will lead to a minority providing the 'ideas' to the class; a minority like elite scientists and Party Cadre. The 'concrete' or 'materialism' is the philosophical basis of Leninism. It's roots are in bourgeois positivist science of the 19th century.Whilst workers listen to the 'materialists', they will not understand Marx's views. Marx unified insights from both idealists (like Kant and Hegel) and materialists (like Feuerbach). He was not a 'materialist'.Read the Theses on Feuerbach, comrades.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird,how do you square the above with the Critique of the Gotha Programme?

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

LBird,how do you square the above with the Critique of the Gotha Programme?

YMS,how do you keep avoiding the issue, by constantly moving the goalposts? If I spend days addressing the CotGP, you'll just ask, 'LBird, how do you square that with his Letter to Bloggs?'.After spending days addressing the LtB, you'll just ask, 'LBird, how do you square that with Engels' Dialectics of Nature?' (or Pannekoek, Dietzgen, Untermann, Korsch, Lukacs, Mach, Lenin, etc. etc.)After chasing round the houses for months, nay years, you'll return to the discussion above, as a contrast to whatever text you had last thought of.And off we go again.Why don't you, just for once, try discussing Marx's philosophy and epistemology?Why won't you tell us your ideological view of science?[edit: I consider your method to be the equivalent of trolling, after my continuous experience of that method over the last 15 months. And it is a method, not just the innocent questions of one keen to learn, but the deliberately obstructive technique of the religious threatened by critical thinking – the constant return to 'textual' proofs, the view that 'But, Marx says 'material' in the Bible', rather than engaging in critical discussion about sources using the advances since the texts were written]

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird, well, i was thinking of

Quote:

First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.

Which seems to me, at a basic reading, as being a refuattion of your case of what Marx's views were.  If Nature is a producer of use values, that means there is, necesarilly, a nature beyond human production, a reality, if you will.This isn't 'referring back to a bible' but given your proposnsity to read texts sideways (as in your overreading of the theses on Feurbach) going back to the text becomes necessary.  All we can establish through this is what Charlie said, but given you make claims about what he said, we do need to test them.

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

And I'm glad that I missed the subsequent descent into "post-modernism". Bring back ordinary language, I say.But to return to young Strawson (interesting and maybe revealing that his dad should have given him a non-christian name), I haven't listened to the whole of his talk but I thought I heard him say at one point that only the physical forms part of "concrete reality". But isn't thisbegging the question since "concrete" and "physical" mean more or less the same?

I think Strawson would say that there are concrete and abstract elements to nature. We can only abstract from the concrete and can't really know that much about the nature of the concrete. Concepts belong to the experiential side of the physical are abstract not concrete. Numbers, beauty and love exist but you can't touch them so they are abstract not concrete. Though mental goings on are part of the concrete..Or have I missed the point of what you're asking?Surely abstract and concrete is a valid way of classifying things? You have to employ them to read Marx…http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/FWIW a simular version of Strawsons talk is available in text here:http://www.metodo-rivista.eu/index.php/metodo/article/view/48

[alanjjohnstone]

Oh, how i dread entering these debates, but i'm alway succumbing. Yes i always thought Dietzgen's contribution was to say that ideas are a material force. i often say so when engaged in debates about class struggle, actual experience and the need for ideology as well  Anyways, I sought refuge Andy Pancakes (to follow YMS's informality first name relationship with Charley and Fred) . https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/society-mind/ch01.htm 

Quote:

The relations which the productive system establishes between men have the same stringency as biological facts; but this does not mean that men think only of their food. It means that the manner in which man earns his living – that is, the economic organization of production – places every individual in determinate relations with his fellow-men thus determining his thinking and feeling. It is true, of course, that even up to the present nearly all the thoughts of men have been orientated around the getting of food, because a livelihood has never been assured for everybody. The fear of want and hunger has weighed like a nightmare on the minds of men. But, in a socialist system, when this fear will have been removed, when mankind will be master of the means of subsistence, and thinking will be free and creative, the system of production will also continue to determine ideas and institutions.

 

Quote:

Natural science, by investigating the forces of nature, develops into the important productive force. All the technicalities in developing and applying science, including the most abstract mathematics, which is to all appearances an exercise in pure reason, may therefore be reckoned as belonging to the technical basis of the system of production, to what Marx called the “productive forces.” In this way material (in a physical sense) and mental elements are combined in what Marxists call the material basis of society….we may understand their erroneous view of Marxism as a theory dealing exclusively with the material side of life.

 Not sure if those quotes bring anything worthwhile to the table but i did think this comment has been part of LBird's underlying case and the reason he will call himself a communist.  

Quote:

 As a view of life, however, Marxism is real only through the class that adheres to it. The workers who are imbued with this new outlook become aware of themselves as the class of the future, growing in number and strength and consciousness, striving to take production into their own hands and through the revolution to become masters of their own fate. Thus Marxism as the theory of the proletarian revolution is a reality, and at the same time a living power, only in the minds and hearts of the revolutionary proletariat.

 And Pancakes emphasises:

Quote:

 Of vital importance, however, are Marx’s original scientific contributions. There is first of all the theory of historical materialism, according to which the development of society is determined by its productive forces that make for a certain mode of production, especially through the productive force of class struggles. There is the theory of the determination of all political and ideological phenomena of intellectual life in general by the productive forces and relations.

 http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/materialism/ Hence productive materialist…material productive…i can see is pretty much valid terminology. Bu i probably raise the wrath of Lbird who may well consider Pannekoeks understanding of Dietzgen expresses the same weakness Engels does of Marx ( i have read though Dietzgen's sone Eugene distorted his fathers ideas and led to a weakening of it that the Lenininist diamats exploited)  But i probably posted a simplistic baby-version of what is being discussed here. i better bow out

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

But i probably posted a simplistic baby-version of what is being discussed here. i better bow out

No, what you're saying is very much in line with what I (and many other Marxists) have argued. Don't 'bow out', because you have a better grasp of both the philosophy and the political implications of that philosophy, than most others who have contributed on these threads.One thing worth considering, though.When Marxists use the terms 'material', 'forces', 'production', 'science', 'economics' (and any other terms that I've missed from your quotes from Pannekoek), these terms also include human 'ideas'.So, to argue that 'forces' (for example) determine ideology is to say no more than 'ideas and material' in a 'production of life' (being) capacity determine 'ideas and material' in a 'production of ideas' (consciousness) capacity.That is, a 'base' of 'ideas and reality' determine a 'superstructure' of 'ideas and reality'. 'Being and consciousness' must be taken together, as an indissoluable whole. That is the lesson from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach.It is NOT a division of the 'material' and the 'ideal' or 'being' and 'consciousness'.

AJJ wrote:

Bu i probably raise the wrath of Lbird who may well consider Pannekoeks understanding of Dietzgen expresses the same weakness Engels does of Marx…

This would be a very interesting discussion, because I think I do have criticisms of Dietzgen and Pannekoek, as much as of Marx and Engels, but perhaps a different thread is required, and I would have to read further.

[ALB]

DJP wrote:

I think Strawson would say that there are concrete and abstract elements to nature. We can only abstract from the concrete and can't really know that much about the nature of the concrete. Concepts belong to the experiential side of the physical are abstract not concrete. Numbers, beauty and love exist but you can't touch them so they are abstract not concrete. Though mental goings on are part of the concrete..Or have I missed the point of what you're asking?

I was just concerned that he was apparently ruling out ideas as being part of "reality" but I see he seems to be saying that thinking is a form of experiencing like hearing or touching and that experience is the only reality, so thinking is an experience of reality. But I'm still not sure where this leaves thinking about thinking.There was one passage which has some relevance to what we are discussing here:

Quote:

All materialists until the twentieth century were real materialists, where this means, crucially, that they were real realists about experience, and took experience so conceived to be wholly physical. It seems to me that present-day participants in the debate need to be more aware of this—aware that the view that experience is wholly a matter of what is going on in the brain (or body) is not new. Joseph Priestley, a strict materialist, holds in the 1770s that «the faculty of thinking is the result of a certain arrangement of the parts of  matter»; that «sensation and thought do necessarily result from the organization of the brain»; that «mind […] is not a substance distinct from the body, but the result of corporeal organization». This is also Hobbes’s view in 1641, as remarked. It’s Regius’s view in 1647, Locke’s suspicion in 1689, Toland’s view in 1704, Collins’s view in 1707–8. It’s extremely widespread in eighteenth-century France, it’s old news in the powerful nineteenth-century movement in Germany that followed German idealism and was known as German materialism.There’s no reason to doubt that Democritus and other ancient materialists and atomists held essentially the same view.

He adds a footnote to "German materialism":

Quote:

German materialism is really just a kind of straightening out of German idealism, which is itself arguably best described as a form of naturalistic realism. The present resurgence of interest in panpsychism among German-speaking analytic philosophers may help to bring this point into the light

I'm trying to remember my grammar here and the significance of the comma after "German idealism". Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism"  is?Anyway, it seems that Marx wasn't the only "German materialist" who straightened out "German idealism".

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

I was just concerned that he was apparently ruling out ideas as being part of "reality" but I see he seems to be saying that thinking is a form of experiencing like hearing or touching and that experience is the only reality, so thinking is an experience of reality. But I'm still not sure where this leaves thinking about thinking.

There's this in "Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism"

Galen Strawson wrote:

For the purposes of this paper I will equate ‘concrete’ with ‘spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located’, and I will use ‘phenomenon’ as a completely general word for any sort of existent. Plainly all mental goings on are concrete phenomena.11 More strictly, ‘concrete’ means ‘not abstract’ in the standard philosophical sense of ‘abstract’, given which some philosophers hold that abstract objects—e.g. numbers, or concepts—exist and are real objects in every sense in which concrete objects are. I take ‘spatio-temporal’ to be the adjective formed from ‘spacetime’, not from the conjunction of space and time.

ALB wrote:

Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism" is?

Can't quite work it out either but after watching the questions and answers in that video (the last 15 minutes) wouldn't be suprised if he is talking about Idealism..

[Young Master Smeet]

I was chatting with a colleague who is a student of Hegel, I mentioned these discussions, and he mentioned that basically every bugger and his brother in the 19th century claimed to have resovled the philosophical disctinction between idealism and materialism…

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

Galen Strawson wrote:

More strictly, ‘concrete’ means ‘not abstract’ in the standard philosophical sense of ‘abstract’, given which some philosophers hold that abstract objects—e.g. numbers, or concepts—exist and are real objects in every sense in which concrete objects are.

In the hope that you're genuinely interested in this discussion, DJP, I'll say that it's obvious that Strawson separates 'concrete' and 'abstract'. He argues that numbers are not 'real objects'.Strawson does not follow Marx, Dietzgen or Pannekoek here, because they don't separate ideas (eg numbers, abstractions) from the 'real'.If you wish to follow Strawson, DJP, then fine, but be aware that Strawson is not a Marxist or Communist, and that he separates out the ideal from the material in the same sense as 19th century positivists, and Engels in his non-Marxist works.Please be aware that one's choice of ideology in science has political implications.This is not merely a meaningless philosophical debate, but will affect one's politics.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

I was chatting with a colleague who is a student of Hegel, I mentioned these discussions, and he mentioned that basically every bugger and his brother in the 19th century claimed to have resovled the philosophical disctinction between idealism and materialism…

Does your colleague think Marx did so?Or isn't your colleague a Communist?If not, why do you place any weight on his opinions?Do you think studying philosophy and Hegel can be separated from one's political ideology?If so, where is this 'objective' position for study, which does not even exist in physics?I think that your colleague is probably a bit of a bluffer.Most workers will learn more on boards like this, than at university, and from 'academics'.We should have the confidence to know that Communists will start to replace academics as sources of social authority, as we move closer to the 'big day'.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

I think that your colleague is probably a bit of a bluffer.

And herein, ladies and gentlemen, we have LBird's scientific method: theorising in advance (or without or even irrespective) of the facts.  They are prepared to make that statement without knowing the person, their background, details or even the precise nature of the discussion.

[Author]

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