Question about historical materialism

[robbo203]

Vin wrote:

Your full of contradictions, LBird. The Sun has not changed only our interpretation of it . Admit it – your goose is cooked

 Indeed,  This whole tedious discussion could have been avoided had LBird chosen his words more carefully.  To say that the material world is socially created is potentially misleading if understood literally.  Human beings obviously did not create the sun, it is the idea of the sun that is socially created or culturallly conditioned.  But LBird's elliptical and dogmatic way of expressing himself does not allow for this fine distinction to be made and hence we have to put up with his totally unwarranted and endless jibes about "rocks speaking" to "Engelsian materialists " For clarification, I suggest in future the word interpret be used instead of create in conjunction with the expression "material world".  Our interpetation of the material world is indeed a social product but not literally the material world itself even if we can never apprehend this world except through our particular  interpretation of it.  If you dont make this distinction then you are indeed vulnerable to the accusation of idealism – the notion that human beings literally created the sun in this instance presumably becuase they thought it would great idea to brighten up their world 

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Thus, 'The Sun' is a social product. We can tell this because different societies through history have had different accounts of what 'The Sun' supposedly 'really is'.

The Sun has not changed only our interpretation of it .  

So, if you 'know' what the Sun 'is', outside of 'our interpretation of it', you should be able to tell us all how you got to know what this unchanged, ahistorical, non-social, Sun 'is'.You separate a 'thing' from 'our knowledge of the thing'. You should be able to tell us how you do this, because it means you have access to the thing 'as is it'. And if you do so, you have rendered history un-needed, because 'as it is' doesn't need history.Unfortunately, Vin, your claims are nothing to do with Marx, and everything to do with bourgeois brainwashing, that, at last, they, the bourgeoisie, have overcome history, and have unmediated, non-socio-historic, access to 'reality', and so the world 'as it is' hasn't been created by them, but just 'is'.Perhaps you can't see the conservative formulation of this approach, but surely others here can.On the contrary, though, Marx stresses social production, history and change, not 'reality' as it supposedly 'is', and is thus fixed forever, and can't be changed by humans.'The Sun has not changed' is the statement of a conservative, not of a revolutionary.

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

 Human beings obviously did not create the sun, it is the idea of the sun that is socially created or culturallly conditioned.  …For clarification, I suggest in future the word interpret be used instead of create … 

You'll have to tell us how you know the sun, robbo, outside of our social 'idea of the sun that is socially created'.Marx uses the word 'create', because we 'create' any 'sun' that we 'know'. So, to switch to 'interpret' is a political and ideological step away from Marx.You clearly think that your knowledge of the 'sun' is not socially created, but your individual knowledge from your biological senses. You should be open to us and yourself, that your method is a non-social method, and also a non-historical method, because you claim to know the 'sun' as it 'is', outside of our historical creation of 'our-sun'.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

Marx effected a unity of Idealism-Materialism, taking something from both, and rejecting something from both.  He realised that the Idealists were correct about ‘activity’, and thus united the ‘active’ with ‘the human’, but rejected the ‘divine’ and the ‘passive’.

Apparently,Idealists teach active✓and divine✗Materialists teach passive✗and human✓.Idealist–Materialists teach active✓and human✓.∴ Materialist–Idealists teach passive✗and divine✗.Little does LBird realize that Marx was defending Materialism when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach.  Thesis X makes this indisputable:“The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new materialism is human society, or social humanity.”As correctly recognized by Engels when he published the Theses on Feuerbach (after Marx’s death) Marx is here seen laying the foundation of his new Materialism.The Theses capture Marx’s genesis of his new Materialism, a re-invigorated Materialism that transcends — in Hegelian fashion — Feuerbach’s old Materialism, that is forced to reduce:the religious world into its secular basis by reducing man’s religious essence into a fixed human essence.Feuerbach’s old Materialist blindspot thrusts fixity upon his discussion whenever he undertakes to discuss material man.  This is despite Feuerbach relying heavily for inspiration on the non-fixed, dynamic, Hegelian Idealist system that he sets out to oppose materialistically.Marx identifies Feuerbach’s old-materialist blindspot, and this allows him to critique the old Materialism itself:Thus, Feuerbach does not conceive sensuous human activity — in contrast to thinking activity — as beingdynamicobjective.By contrast, Marx does.  He takes the objectivity of dynamic human sensuous activity as his scientific foundation.This allows Marx to transcend (in Hegelian fashion) the old Materialism by recognizing that material Man makes himself dynamically — actively — through his own objective sensuous practice.For Marx, it is man’s sensuous objective practice that is his foundational activity, not his thought.So, is Marx here denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?No, of course not.  Forms of appearance are what have to be explained.  Explanation of thought, from the exterior of thought, has always been the role of Materialism.By contrast, the Idealists (at least those rarefied ones of the LBird variety) comprehend thought by thought alone — by the interior of thought — and also comprehend action, likewise hermetically sealed from exteriority, as being grounded by thought alone.But, grounding thought and action in thought alone leaves thought and action bereft of any non-thought criterion of objectivity — anything external to thought — which for Marx (in the Theses) is tantamount to scholasticism.By contrast, the new Materialist, Marx, grounds thought in [the necessity] of man’s sensuous activity.  Man’s thought, for Marx and Engels, is ultimately the thought of his sensuous practical activity.Thus to return, and answer the question: is Marx denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?…Marx explains this appearance as follows:  Man’s thought can only be a reliable guide to his sensuous activity when it is the product of his successful sensuous activity.[In passing:  This conception of successful thought, in its Idealist form, accords with absolute Idealist Hegel’s Phenomenolgy, which Marx forever prized, castigating poor Dietzgen for stumbling across it too late in his ‘philosophical’ career.]As a consequence of grounding successful thought in successful action, the Theses are not Marx’s grafting of Materialism onto Idealism, because — as Marx points out in the Theses — Idealism disavows Marx’s foundational critique that real, sensuous activity is objective.LBird recognizes the purified brainy stuff, but cannot bring himself to recognize the foundational objectivity of the sensual stuff.  His response is to sneer haughtily at those who do.  As such, he is decidedly anti-Marx.To reiterate…Marx goes to great pains in the Theses to make it absolutely clear — i.e. irrefutably, in no uncertain terms — that he is establishing a new Materialism.Marx is not grafting his sensuously objective Materialism onto an anti-sensuous, anti-objective, purely subjective, version of Idealism to produce a mélange like LBird’s rarefied anti-scientific Idealism–Materialism.Shocking is that Marx’s new Materialism takes sensuous human activity asobjective human activity,the ultimate criterion, or arbiter, of objective truth.  Any alternative is purely scholastic.For Marx, material man ultimately makes, and must make, himself through objective practice.  Marx himself makes it abundantly clear that:“All social life is essentially practical.” (Thesis VIII).Man makes his own world and his own history through his objective sensuous practice in a world he inherits and of which he is a natural part, and whose social laws of motion he is naturally equipped to comprehend and then to wield in his interest.It is the role of his thought to comprehend the objectivity of his sensuous human practice, in his practical world, so that his thoughts can become, by indirection, the objective guide to his successful sensuous activity in changing that world.Man inherits the objectivity of his thought from the objectivity of his practice.The objectivity of practice, in the world of our appearances, grounds everything human.

[LBird]

Your argument, twc, comes down to: by 'new materialism', Marx really meant 'materialism'.My argument comes down to: by 'new materialism', Marx really meant 'idealism-materialism'.Comrades will have to read Marx's works for themselves, to try to settle this debate.The problem for twc is, if Marx was a 'materialist', then he rejected his own unification of parts of both 'idealism' and 'materialism', which forms the basis of 'theory and practice', 'conscious activity', 'social production' – these all need both the 'active side' of 'idealism', and the 'human suffering' of 'materialism'.Neither the idealists, who were worshippers of 'the divine', of 'god', nor the materialists, who were worshippers of 'inert matter', of 'clockwork determinism', could answer the question posed by Marx: how do we social producers change our world?The answer to this question, from both idealists and materialists, is that we don't. Their answers, respectively, are: 'we don't, god does' and 'we don't, matter changes itself'.Any interested comrade reading, ask Vin, Tim, YMS, robbo, twc, how we change the sun? They say, 'we don't'. Just like the bourgeoisie says, too.For Marx, 'objects', like 'the sun', were our social products, and so we can change them. Thus, our scientific knowledge is 'socially objective', and not 'objective', as bourgeois materialism claims.

[twc]

Nobody, apart from LBird, thinks that he is sublimely unique in holding the position that our conception of the Sun is fixed.  To even bother making an issue out of it is to reveal at once the non-scientist talking.Every working scientist, without exception, is acutely conscious of his dependence on a dynamic tradition of changing scientific conception.  Without exception!And especially not Engels!Most of the investigators, at least the early ones, who contributed scientifically to our conception of the Sun were scions of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie — decidedly not working class — and typically deeply religious and some even mystical.  Yet those non working-class attributes proved no impediment to them altering our social conception.  Those who change it know it is not fixed.Perhaps, then, in the context of our dynamic scientific conceptions, you might care to respond to some of the materialist statements in the document I mentioned the other day.  Your comments will clarify your view on matters which are dear to me.“The necessity for society to distribute its social labor in these definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production — only the mode of its appearance can change.”“Natural laws cannot be abolished.”“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.”“And the form in which the law of the proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”“Science consists precisely in demonstrating how this law of value asserts itself.”“So that if one wanted at the very beginning to ‘explain’ all the phenomena that seemingly contradict the law, one would have to present the science before the science.”“On the other hand, the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood, though hedged more or less with illusions or, scientifically, as a more or less definite concept.“Since the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, over time, according to the maturity of the development of the conditions, including the maturity of the development of the thinker.  Everything else is drivel.”Try comments 2, 5 and 8.

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

 Human beings obviously did not create the sun, it is the idea of the sun that is socially created or culturallly conditioned.  …For clarification, I suggest in future the word interpret be used instead of create … 

You'll have to tell us how you know the sun, robbo, outside of our social 'idea of the sun that is socially created'.

As usual you display your dazzling ability to completely ignore what other people have said.  Here for the record is what I saidOur interpetation of the material world is indeed a social product but not literally the material world itself even if we can never apprehend this world except through our particular  interpretation of it. Do you understand what I meant by that and how it answers your question or do I need to explain it to you?

LBird wrote:

Marx uses the word 'create', because we 'create' any 'sun' that we 'know'. So, to switch to 'interpret' is a political and ideological step away from Marx.You clearly think that your knowledge of the 'sun' is not socially created, but your individual knowledge from your biological senses. You should be open to us and yourself, that your method is a non-social method, and also a non-historical method, because you claim to know the 'sun' as it 'is', outside of our historical creation of 'our-sun'.

 Once again you totally misrepresent what  I said.  I did  not say our" knowledge of the 'sun' is not socially created" I said that that thing that we interpet as being the "sun" – a physical object –  was NOT created by us and could not have been created for us.  As far as we know its been around for billions of years while homo sapiens as a species has only been around for 100,000 years Stop playing with words LBird.  You know exactly what I am saying.  You know also that the sun as a physical object was not created by us unless that is you have completely lost your marbles.  Nowhere did Marx say we create inorganic matter in this physical sense, That would be too daft for words.   What he said was we transform matter through labour into the products of our labour.  That is something quite diferent to what you are trying to imply

[LBird]

twc wrote:

2. “Natural laws cannot be abolished.”Try comments 2, 5 and 8.

Let's keep it simple.So-called 'Natural laws' are products of the society that creates them.So, being our products, we can 'abolish' them, and replace them with 'natural laws' suited to our needs, interests and purposes, as we create them through our social theory and practice.Simple Marxism, twc. 'Nature', as we know it, is currently a class construct. 'Nature', as we don't know it, is, as Marx said, 'nothing for us'.

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

Stop playing with words LBird.  You know exactly what I am saying.  You know also that the sun as a physical object was not created by us unless that is you have completely lost your marbles. 

More insults. Pretty childish, robbo. Try to stick to reasoned argument. 

robbo203 wrote:

Nowhere did Marx say we create inorganic matter in this physical sense, That would be too daft for words.   What he said was we transform matter through labour into the products of our labour.  That is something quite diferent to what you are trying to imply

No, you're wrong, robbo. As usual.Marx referred to 'inorganic nature' (not 'matter'). You, like Engels, don't understand Marx's philosophical background and concerns. That is why you choose to change 'nature' into 'matter'. And then, quite wrongly, define 'inorganic nature' as 'physical'. You don't understand the concept of 'inorganic nature', and wish, like Engels, to redefine that as 'matter' and 'physical'. It's a concept dating back to the Ancient Greeks, of 'hupokeimenon', the 'underlying'… or, as Marx rendered it, 'substratum'. On the contrary, 'matter' and the 'physical' are social products of our activity upon this 'underlying'.So, he didn't say 'we transform matter', but 'we transform inorganic nature' into 'organic nature'. That is, 'nature for us'.What you write 'is something quite different to what Marx was trying to imply'.Marx was implying that we can change 'nature for us'. Any 'nature' that is not 'for us' is 'nothing for humanity'.'Matter' is a socio-historical product, robbo. Why won't you discuss the social history of the production of 'matter'?

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

.Simple Marxism, twc. 'Nature', as we know it, is currently a class construct. 'Nature', as we don't know it, is, as Marx said, 'nothing for us'.

 Evidence?  Where did  Marx say such a thing? I suspect most of the time you are just inventing things about what Marx said  in order to bolster your belief that you are some sort of Marxist (as opposed to the Leninist we all know you to be),  At any rate if such quote exists it could not mean what you want it to mean.   In order to interpret nature and I agree our view of nature is inescapably a matter of interptation,  there must be something there to interpret in the first place.  Is that not the case or would you beg to differ?

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

LBird wrote:

.Simple Marxism, twc. 'Nature', as we know it, is currently a class construct. 'Nature', as we don't know it, is, as Marx said, 'nothing for us'.

 Evidence?  Where did  Marx say such a thing? I suspect most of the time you are just inventing things about what Marx said  in order to bolster your belief that you are some sort of Marxist (as opposed to the Leninist we all know you to be),  At any rate if such quote exists it could not mean what you want it to mean.   In order to interpret nature and I agree our view of nature is inescapably a matter of interptation,  there must be something there to interpret in the first place.  Is that not the case or would you beg to differ?

You're going to have to read Marx, robbo.I've provided the quotes, time and time again, and I'm not doing your work for you, any longer. Go and pick up a book.

[alanjjohnstone]

As i have done previously, my contribution to this thread was to direct focus it on practicalities and the class struggle for a new society, something others here seemed to think is a secondary topic.Pluto was a planet, then it was not, then it was once more. A vote decided that. And that is my only comment on the Sun.What i want to understand is not philosophy to "know" the world but to understand the means and manner of how to change it. LBird will no doubt say without there being proper sound theory we cannot make any determinations. Others may well take the opinion the principles of the SPGB remains intact although that after 113 years of existence all we could muster under our banner was less than a few hundred votes so they must review their position. This thread is sterile and futile until we begin to engage in debate and discussion of practicalities. It was Marx who after his analysis chose to build a political movement to foster a social movement – IWMA – The First International. Without a body to carry out its will the mind is meaningless (unless you believe in telepathy, telekinesis or whatever)Our challenge is to help create socialism not to discover or proclaim "truth", and we all agree that we cannot define what that is. As a wise man once wrote our demand is most modest…we only want the Earth and we need to know how to take it. 

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

 You're going to have to read Marx, robbo.I've provided the quotes, time and time again, and I'm not doing your work for you, any longer. Go and pick up a book.

 I have read Marx and nowhere does he say what you are suggesting.  You have misundertood Marx and youve misundersood what I have been  saying as well. If you think otherwise then prove it,  Where, for example, did Marx say 'Nature is nothing for us'  Cite your source

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

.'Matter' is a socio-historical product, robbo. Why won't you discuss the social history of the production of 'matter'?

 This getting so tedious.  The very fact that you put matter in inverted commas signifies very clearly you are talking about our social interpretation or construction of matter.  Now I have already stated that we cannot apprehend matter without some idea or theory of matter – I agree with Popper in this respect that theory precedes facts – and that this idea is socially constructed.  But I have also stated that in order to have an idea or interpetation of matter, nature or whatever   such a thing must exist in a physical sense in the first place, must precde out interpretation of it .   You can't have a socially constructed theory of the "sun" with some physical object called the sun existing in the first place to have an interpretation about.  Or do you believe that you can, LBird?  Im beginning to understand Vin's frustration over your pig-headed opaqueness

[Anonymous]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Pluto was a planet, then it was not, then it was once more. A vote decided that. And that is my only comment on the Sun.

Pluto always was a planet of the Sun, even before its 'discovery' in 1930.  What changed was how the way the International Astronomical Union defined the term.  According to a resolution carried by the IAU in 2006, there are three conditions for an object in the Solar System to be considered a planet:The object must be in orbit around the Sun.The object must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity. It must have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.Pluto failed to meet the third criterion.  I don't have any particular opinion about that so I won't be casting my vote should the question arise and neither, I suspect, will 99.99% of Earth's population.

[Author]

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