Materialism, aspects and history.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Lbird, have done.  So, bourgeois science throew off the shackles of feudal superstition, and cleared the way for us to understand the world clearly, and it is the job of socialism to put that understanding to use.  Cheers, glad to know I was right all along.

[my bold]At least you now openly admit your reverence for the bourgeoisie and their supposed 'clearing' of the way for us workers (although, as usual, you don't mention classes).So, nothing left to be done, eh?So much for your passive message to workers – but some of us think that the bourgeoisie mystified the way for us to misunderstand the world as opaquely as possible.Take 'political economy' for example – who was that guy who wrote a critique?But that's not your method, is it, YMS? For you, 'the way is clear!'Do as you've been told, YMS, and keep listening to teacher, and don't ask daft questions, like those naughty socialists.

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

You play with your 'logic' and 'words',

Logic you are unable to refute.  To retiterate, if the only way to know the validity of a ruth claim is to vote on it, how can we know the result of the vote?

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

You play with your 'logic' and 'words',

Logic you are unable to refute.  To retiterate, if the only way to know the validity of a ruth claim is to vote on it, how can we know the result of the vote?

Is that 'bourgeois logic' or 'True Logic, as given to us by God himself'?Back to the playpen, YMS.

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

Truth can be elected, and thus the good life for humans can be established, by active humans employing social theory and practice.

This is demonstrably untrue.A) A truth claim can only be verified by a vote. The polity votes on the truth claim.C) The result of the vote is itself a truth claim.D) The result of the vote can only be discovered by a further vote.

 Science is necessarily ideological  in some sense – and I don't think anyone here disagrees with that – but the proposition that we, all 7 billion of us on planet Earth, must therefore vote on scientific theories in order to determine their  supposed "truth" status – a ludicrous  and totally impractical idea anyway – is to completely misunderstand what democracy is about and what it is for.  It is about practical decisions that affect our wellbeing.  In other words its about the application of scientific discoveries to particular end uses not about the process of scientific discovery itself even if the latter may be indirectly influenced by the former. And yes you are right.  There is something inherently absurd about the the whole idea of voting to determine the truth of a scientific theory .  This is an idea that springs from a religious cum dogmatic cast of mind.  So 4.2 billion people vote in favour of String Theory in Astrophysics while 2.8 billion vote against it.  So what?!?  What actually has been accomplished by this grand folly of a gesture?  Absolutely nothing except an incredibly pointless waste of peoples time and resources. Are the 2.8 billion minority of the global population now expected to toe the Party line and renounce their adherence to any rival theory. If that is what is being asked of us than frankly we would still be stuck in a geocentric ptolemaic paradigm of the universe when the great majority of people believed the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way round..  It is intrinsically conservative in its implications The proposition that we should vote on scientific theories is anti scientific and stems from the mindset of religious Ayatollahs albeit dressed up in the paper thin veneer of a commitment to "democracy" but which will soon enough reveal its true character in the crushing and banning of any kind of dissenting scientific opinion in order to give credence to the empty ritual of such a vote in the first place

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

Is that 'bourgeois logic' or 'True Logic, as given to us by God himself'?Back to the playpen, YMS.

Logic you are unable to refute, and which seems to have reduced you to bluster.

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

LBird wrote:

Is that 'bourgeois logic' or 'True Logic, as given to us by God himself'?Back to the playpen, YMS.

Logic you are unable to refute, and which seems to have reduced you to bluster.

Hear hear

[LBird]

A whole post on the development of the ideology of 'science', and its role in class understanding, and a recommendation for further reading, and you two blather on, as usual, about nothing in particular.I don't know why I bother.

[LBird]

Perhaps a history of ‘materialism’ within science will help to explain its emergence, successes and demise.‘Materialism’ (the belief that ideas can be reduced to ‘matter’, and so that ethics plays no part in the production of knowledge) emerged with the establishment of the bourgeoisie as an important productive force in society.This can be dated to the mid-17th century, with the creation of institutions of bourgeois ‘scientific research’ across Europe. Some of these were:Accademia del Cimento, Florence, 1657Royal Society, London, 1662Academie des Sciences, Paris, 1666The key ‘change of concept’ that underwrote these creations was the alteration of the very meaning of ‘science’ itself. Prior to the bourgeois colonisation, science had meant, since ancient times, the building of the good life for all of humanity. This was called by the ancient Greeks eudaimonia. So, the purpose of science was making the world a better place for everybody. As part of this, thinkers just prior to the bourgeoisification of science, like Francis Bacon and Comenius, stressed: (a) the need for education to be available to all, not just to those able to pay; (b) for education to be conducted in vernacular language, not Latin which most people did not understand; and (c) the social and ethical content of human knowledge, rather than a disembodied, non-political understanding of nature.As an example of the new rejection of third belief, that is, the new bourgeois view that ‘politics should be kept out of physics’ we have Robert Hooke’s draft for the Royal Society, which makes this change very clear:

Hooke, quoted in Mendelsohn, p. 18, wrote:

This society will not own any hypothesis, system, or doctrine… (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick).

This new view of ‘science’ dealt a death blow to the science that regarded knowledge as a human product, inevitably entangled in ethics and politics, and ensured that concepts like the ‘good’ life for the many, and the ‘betterment’ of all, fell from consideration by the new ‘practical men’ of bourgeois science. Clearly, since ‘good’ and ‘better’ are entirely ethical concepts, and thus amenable to social discussion and voting, the bourgeoisie made the democratic control of science an impossibility by the new nature of ‘science’. The myth that science produces ‘objective knowledge’.In a nutshell, the bourgeoisie wanted a science that dealt with ‘things’, hard items, a world reduced to individual components, which could be identified for profit. ‘Matter’ played the same role in science as did the commodity in political economy. Both were outside of ethics or relationships: the atomisation of the material mirrored the atomisation of production (and the atomisation of society itself). From this ideological perspective, neither a rock nor a commodity was ‘political’: they were both amendable to individual understanding (the weighing of a rock in one’s hand under one’s own eyes, as an estimation of ‘what it is’, is matched by the psychological theory of ‘value’, in which the ‘value’ of a commodity is estimated by the individual buyer). Relationships between rocks and the society that tries to understand them, or between commodities and the society that produces them, are ignored.This ‘bourgeois science’ had its greatest successes during the 19th century, with the method of positivism, and Engels was so impressed by the technical advances made by ‘positivist science’, that he either forgot or never understood Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’, which by its very nature places ideas and matter on the same footing, and thus can allow humans to control their social knowledge, a knowledge that is inherently ethical.With the 20th century, after the deaths of both Marx and Engels, the development of physics started to undermine the ideological basis of physics. We are still living with the discussion of what ‘relativity’ meant, in both narrowly scientific, and wider philosophical, terms. But one thing is clear for workers: Einstein’s theories provided scientific support for Marx’s epistemological views, and completely undermined the positivist science which is the basis of Engels’ views.If one is an Engelsian ‘materialist’, and thinks that our understanding of ‘matter’ is outside of consciousness (that scientific knowledge is ‘True’ eternally, and is not social and changes  over time), and which is fundamentally based upon the bourgeois ideological belief that the purpose of science is to produce ‘objective knowledge’ (ie. physics outside of politics), then one will disagree with Marxian ‘idealism-materialism’, which looks back to pre-bourgeois science and the production of ‘The Good Life’ as the purpose of science.Science is political, the production of knowledge is ideological, and the purpose of science is a human choice, not a self-defined, self-evident practice just ‘done’ by physicists.Religious Materialism denies that science and knowledge have ethical content, a content which can, and must, be voted upon. Truth can be elected, and thus the good life for humans can be established, by active humans employing social theory and practice. That theory and practice must be available to all, so that it must be conducted by everybody, educated to a suitable standard, in a language which all understand, for the purposes of eudaimonia.We must reject the bourgeois science of the priest-physicists, conducted in Latin-maths, with the mythical aim of knowing ‘matter’ outside of social consciousness. We must democratise science, which includes determining what science actually is, how it is conducted, and how we ‘know’ ‘truth’.Further reading: Mendelsohn, Weingart and Whitley (eds.) (1977) The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge Reidelhttp://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2184192[edit]just another link to a copy of the paperback for just under £16http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/9027707766?SubscriptionId=AKIAIWBZRQIIPF7IKQPA&tag=bookbutleruk-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=12734&creativeASIN=9027707766&condition=used

[alanjjohnstone]

Is this the right thread to link to what i think is an interesting article by Herman Gorter.https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/historical-materialism.htmPlenty of references in it to "truth" and as he concludes:

Quote:

the development of technology proceeds in such a way that one class rises or falls not only materially, but also mentally. When the relations sought by a class become reality, its ideas, which expressed its desire for the new relations, then become true. Nor is this surprising, since ideas are nothing but the theories, the considerations, and the summaries of reality in a general concept…..The power of the truth must live in the mind of the proletariat

I think many of us may well relate to much of what Gorter says and how he says it

[LBird]

Thanks alan. From the fifth paragraph of Gorter's text:

Herman Gorter wrote:

But the worker who wants to become a free being, who wants to place the State under the power of his class and seize the means of production from the possessing classes, this worker must understand that the bourgeoisie, with its way of depicting things, turns them on their head and that it is not mind which determines existence [nor, it is implied, 'existence alone which determines mind], but social existence which determines mind.

[my italic insert and bold]So, three positions:1. Mind determines existence (idealism);2. Existence determines mind (materialism). Social existence determines mind (idealism-materialism).Marx (and Gorter, so it seems – I haven't read all the text) argue for 'social existence', that is, human production as the determining factor.Marx unified 'object-subject', 'existence-mind', 'being-consciousness', 'ideal-material' in a philosophy of 'theory and practice', from which socio-historical 'truths' are created by humans.This is the basis of a proletarian science.

[alanjjohnstone]

I was pleasantly surprised by the contemporary feel and the sentiments expressed in this section upon women and feminism. Although a common enough view these days i don't think i have actually read Gorter being cited or quoted in all the material i have read. It seems his importanc eobservation has been overlooked. (Perhaps experts on feminism will correct me)

Quote:

The bourgeois woman also aspires to freedom. For her, as well, this idea comes from the process of production. First of all, when big industry took off, women’s housework was diminished. Big industry produced all kinds of things so cheaply, such as lighting, heat, clothing, and food, that no one needed any longer to make these things or prepare them at home; secondly, competition has been so fierce that the wives and children of the petit-bourgeoisie have had to go to work and have sought positions in schools, offices, telephone switchboards, pharmacies, etc.; thirdly, among the bourgeoisie the number of marriages has been reduced due to the violent struggle for existence, desires for a better life and the search for pleasure and luxury. All of these things are consequences of the modern mode of production.This is why the mind of the bourgeois young woman is oriented towards greater social mobility; her thought has been modified. Compared to her grandmother, she is a new human being.While the proletarian woman, as a result of the place she occupies in the social process of production, has in mind the liberation of the proletariat and, for that very reason, the liberation of all of humanity, the bourgeois feminist only thinks of the liberation of the bourgeois woman. She wants to lead her to power within bourgeois society; she wants to give her capitalist power, which is evidently only possible if she economically and politically oppresses the workers as energetically as the male bourgeoisie currently oppresses them.The feminist does not want “to free woman from property, but to procure for her the freedom of property”, she does not want “to free her from the filth of profit, but to give her the freedom of competition”. The working class woman wants to free herself and all the other women and all men from the pressure of property and competition and thus to really free all human beings.Even if the contents of the minds of these two women are as different as a lamp is compared to the full light of the sun, their thoughts are nonetheless born from the process of production; their thoughts are only distinguished by the different property relations in which the two “sisters” find themselves.What passionate feelings are inspired in us by the complete liberation of woman, the liberation of the worker, the liberation of humanity!

There are other parts of this essay that particularly strike me such as on nationalism and patriotism and can easily be applied to a contemporary analysis of globalisation. 

Quote:

Although all the capitalists are fighting among themselves over markets, technology has reconciled their interests wherever it is essential to oppress the workers. Technology has organized the workers of every country and has showed them that their interests are the same for all of them wherever it is a matter of expressing the solidarity of all the workers…Naturally, the worker wants to preserve his language, which is the only one with which he can find work. But this is not the patriotism which the bourgeoisie demands of him. The worker also loves the natural surroundings, the climate and the air of his country, amidst which he was raised since infancy. But this is not the patriotism which the bourgeoisie requires of him, either. The patriotism which the bourgeoisie wants to impose upon the worker is the patriotism thanks to which the worker docilely allows himself to be used as an instrument of war by the bourgeoisie and allows himself to be massacred by the bourgeoisie when the latter is defending its profits, or is trying to grab the profits of other capitalists or the property of unarmed populations. This is bourgeois patriotism, and it is completely foreign to the socialist workers. In the bourgeois sense of the word, the worker has no fatherland…The worker of the past thought by slavishly following the lead of the limited ideas of his masters; today’s worker embraces the world, all of humanity, he is independent of his masters and fights against them…

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Herman Gorter wrote:

…their thoughts are nonetheless born from the process of production; their thoughts are only distinguished by the different property relations in which the two “sisters” find themselves. 

[my bold]Yeah, 'thoughts' of all humans are 'born from the process of production'.That applies not only to women, but also to physicists (of both sexes), too.'Production' produces 'thought', 'material' does not produce.Engels' 'matter-in-motion' does not produce consciousness; consciousness is produced active humans, by social production, as Marx argued.Theory and practice (criticism and creation) by societies produces consciousness, of both our material and ideal world.Change the producing society, change the knowledge produced of nature.Change the producing class, change the knowledge produced of nature.Proletarian science – you know it makes sense.

[Author]

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