Science for Communists?

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

Answer, it doesn't matter, so long as the same shade/wavelength is consistently called the same thing by both of us.

So, the answer is a popular vote?Will you abide by a vote, YMS, or return to the elitist insistence, constantly made by you on this thread, that your individual senses (which you also deny are socially-produced) are a better judge of 'reality' than a democratic vote?Have you now accepted that 'truth' is a social product, and not a 'copy of reality' which allegedly can be determined by an elitist method, which is not available to the proletariat?Have you recanted your religious claims, YMS?

[SocialistPunk]

Hi mcolome1The link for the WSM didn't work, it doesn't register when I try to click on. Tried pasting the link into my browser but it failed also.Anyway, I don't want to have to go through a long discussion on another socialist forum to find out why socialism is not an ideology. A long discussion sounds as though there is some disagreement, otherwise it wouldn't be a long discussion.It would be easy just to explain in your own words why socialism isn't an ideology.

[Anonymous]

SP I have used the link OK. My browser is chrome 

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

Will you abide by a vote, 

 Will you?  If workers vote for objective truth and against ideology? 

[Anonymous]

SP You may be interested to read this post fro mcolome1's link. 

OK it baffled me too, so I did some reading around and discovered a huge semantic puddle of ….. When you remove all the spooky verbiage, the question being batted around the site seems to be this: When Marx used the term 'ideology' was he just referring to our consciousness of social reality, or to a specifically 'false consciousness' of it – in other words, to a *distored* view of reality.  I found a couple of articles on the web by writers who had taken the trouble to get down and do a textual analysis of what he wrote.  Their conclusion is that no, he didn't specifically mean a "falseconsciousness" (a term derived from Engels and never used by Marx).  He spoke of "ideology" as though it was sometimes a distorted view of reality and sometimes not. Apart from a number of references that do suggest a distortion in consicousness, there are also comments like these: from Preface to A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the materialtransformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." from The Communist Manifesto: "Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now aportion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."  The conclusion arrived at by several writers from textual analysis in simple terms is that Marx used"ideology" in a neutral way. The best article I found on this is at: http://marxmyths.org/joseph-mccarney/article.htm It's a bit heavy going and academic but is just 6 pages long so it not too much of a swamp to wade through. 

[SocialistPunk]

Thanks Vin, I found success with the link via my email msgs from this site. Weird how I couldn't access it from here directly.What I'm getting here is the neutral reference is essentialy the everyday known use of the word, is that correct?

[LBird]

I think this is another link to Vin's article, which should work.https://www.marxists.org/archive/mccarney/2005/false-consciousness.htm

[LBird]

Extract from Vin's link:

Joseph McCarney wrote:

The correct conclusion is surely that, for Marx, ideology is conceptually compatible with both theoretical comprehension and incomprehension. This is to suggest that ideology is not, for him, an epistemological category of any kind. In more concrete terms he is, it may be said, indifferent to questions of truth status in deciding to designate items as ‘ideological’.

Whether an ideology gives 'comprehension' or 'incomprehension' depends on one's class viewpoint.Bourgeois ideology gives incomprehension to the proletariat, but comprehension to the bourgeoisie.Proletarian ideology gives incomprehension to the bourgeoisie, but comprehension to the proletariat.And so it is, too, with science.

[LBird]

Once again, Engels as the unwitting culprit for nonsense assigned to a 'Marxism', which is nothing to do with Marx.

Joseph McCarney wrote:

Any appearance of supporting the dominant view has thereby vanished and it is left without a basis in Marx’s work.The discussion should seek by way of conclusion to trace the false consciousness theme to its source. This is to be found beyond all question in Engels:‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces’.[10]It would be idle to deny that some conceptual connection is being proposed here between ideology and false consciousness. Yet more needs to be said if its weight is to be assessed correctly. The first point to make is that the proposal, Engels’s only explicit reference to ‘false consciousness’, comes from a letter written some ten years after Marx’s death. Moreover, Engels himself has a sharp sense of the division between private correspondence and work intended for the public realm. A short time later he was to warn another correspondent: ‘Please do not weigh each word in the above too scrupulously… I regret that I have not the time to work out what I am writing to you so exactly as I should be obliged to do for publication’.[11] The conception that was sketched in his private correspondence plays no part, it should be noted, in Engels’s own use of the concept of ideology in works written for publication, even in those of which he was the sole author.[12] Moreover, his warning has in one sense been thoroughly heeded. For very little attention has been paid in the later literature to the particular shade of meaning he wished to attach to the notion of false consciousness. What he seems to have had in mind is a quite specific kind of cognitive failure on the part of an individual, a failure of self-awareness, a lack of insight into the ‘motive forces’ of their own thinking. What is generally in question later under the rubric of false consciousness is, as was suggested above, some form of collective illusion of much more general scope. Plainly this cannot claim even so much of the authority of Engels as would otherwise attach to the contents of the false consciousness letter.It should be added that this letter is not the only source of guidance on the question of ideology that Engels has to offer after Marx’s direct influence on him was removed. In a text Engels did intend for publication, and indeed over which he might be assumed to have taken particular care, he speaks of ‘the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more less clear expression of struggles of social classes’.[13] This may surely be taken as a version of the formulation of Marx’s ‘Preface’ that is helpfully more explicit in one important respect, its reference to ‘the struggles of social classes’, than the earlier work could afford to be in its own time. An attempt to develop a positive account of what ideology means to Marx and, a lone aberration apart, to Engels also, could hardly do better than to start here. To do so would be a more fitting tribute to Engels’s intellectual legacy than that represented by the pursuit of the spectre of false consciousness he so lightly conjured into existence.

[my bold]Engels is the source for much misunderstanding of Marx, including in questions of science.

[Anonymous]

mcolome1My interpretation of Marx is that socialist ideology will correspond to the economic base of socialism and in that sense it is 'true' while capitalist ideology reflects the interests of the ruling class and is 'false' when held by workers. You say socialism will have no 'superstructure'. I have always assumed that it would. I have assumed that the passage from Marx below applied to the socialist revolution, too. I would be interested to hear your views on that.  "Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure."  Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

[SocialistPunk]

This is my favourite post from the WSM forum discussion link provided by mcolome1."I think it is about "baffling them with bullshit, although that may be afalsely conscious ideology."http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.politics.socialism.wsm.general/15643

[LBird]

I've decided to re-post my outline of CR, in an attempt to get this discussion moving again.I'm not going to answer any queries unless they are directed at my post, rather than somebody else's hidden ideological views on science.

LBird, post #398 wrote:

I thought I’d begin today by trying to outline the basics of Critical Realism, for any comrades who are unfamiliar with CR. As usual, there is no substitute for actually reading deeper into these necessarily skimpy outlines, but I always think that it is a central role for Communists to try to explain, to other workers, complex ideas in far simpler terms than academics do. Much of what bourgeois academics write is intended, not to explain, but to hide, as part of their elitist ideology. I do think that Communists have a didactic role within the class, but this is a two-way relationship. If the class shout “Piss off, and come back when you’ve thought of a way to explain it better, in a way that we can understand!”, I would recommended this as the scientific method in action for the proletariat, when dealing with professors (or, indeed, with Communists). Science, in every discipline, must be explained and be accessible. This attitude must be at the forefront of any movement which claims to be the forerunner of the organised revolutionary proletariat, whose final aim is the democratisation of the means of production. Democracy, by its very nature, demands widespread understanding of all issues, whether these issues are classed as political, economic or scientific.The four key concepts in CR are: components, structures, levels, and emergent properties.A component is a building block of a structure.A structure is a set of components organised in a specific way, that is, a set of components in particular relationships to each other.A level is a certain set of structures which are themselves related to each other. The key points here are: a) that structures can themselves as act as components for higher level structures; and b) that components can be examined as structures formed from lower level components.Emergent properties are properties, attributes, powers, etc. that only emerge at a certain structural level. This means that the ‘emergent’ does not exist at the component level of that structure. One can’t break up the structure in search of the origin of the property, because it isn’t there. It exists as part of relationships. This applies at all levels, too. Higher and higher levels of structures have properties emerging at each level, which can’t be reduced to a lower level structure or component, and certainly can’t be reduced to some notional ‘lowest’ level component, because, according to our concepts, any so-called ‘lowest’ level component is always a structure, too.Some example would obviously help here, for those comrades entirely unfamiliar with CR, and for whom the above outline is a bit ‘dry’.Perhaps an example of a structure is a car. Notice, that I have chosen this as at a structural level for my explanation. This structure is made up of components, like engine, wheels, seats, etc. But these components are themselves structures, too, and I could have chosen to use any of them as a structure, rather than as a component, within my explanation. An emergent property of a car is speed. But this only exists at the car structural level, and examining the seats, wheels or engine for speed won’t reveal it. If these components are laid out, unstructured and unrelated, on a garage floor, they do not contain ‘speed’. Similarly, if cars are brought together in a specific structural relationship called traffic (that is, the structure ‘car’ is now acting as a ‘component’ for a higher structure), other properties emerge which don’t exist at the car level, like a ‘jam’. A hundred cars spread out over a city do not constitute a ‘traffic jam’ (with its lack of speed); it’s only a jam if the cars are brought together in the same street at the same time, in a certain relationship. A ‘jam’ does not exist at the car level, nor at the seat level.Four points: I think that CR can help explain scientific issues in both physical and social science; CR is the imposition of human theory upon the world (not 'induction' nor 'practice and theory') and thus follows the slogan 'theory and practice'; CR is essentially ‘relational’; CR is bound up with ideology, and it is anathaema to ‘individualist’ or ‘reductionist’ thought. In all these ways, I think CR is compatible with Marx’s views on science and nature.Science necessarily focuses upon a certain level: this is a human choice, not something that a structure forces upon the human. Perhaps the next stage is to show how this theory can be applied to help us to understand both rocks and value (ie. both physical and social phenomena), as I’ve already insisted that a ‘unified method’ must be able to do.

I should add that I'm assuming agreement with the ontological belief that 'material' and 'ideal' have the same status, so anyone who's an ideological 'materialist/physicalist' will be ignored from now on.

[Brian]

LBird wrote:

I've decided to re-post my outline of CR, in an attempt to get this discussion moving again.I'm not going to answer any queries unless they are directed at my post, rather than somebody else's hidden ideological views on science.

LBird, post #398 wrote:

I thought I’d begin today by trying to outline the basics of Critical Realism, for any comrades who are unfamiliar with CR. As usual, there is no substitute for actually reading deeper into these necessarily skimpy outlines, but I always think that it is a central role for Communists to try to explain, to other workers, complex ideas in far simpler terms than academics do. Much of what bourgeois academics write is intended, not to explain, but to hide, as part of their elitist ideology. I do think that Communists have a didactic role within the class, but this is a two-way relationship. If the class shout “Piss off, and come back when you’ve thought of a way to explain it better, in a way that we can understand!”, I would recommended this as the scientific method in action for the proletariat, when dealing with professors (or, indeed, with Communists). Science, in every discipline, must be explained and be accessible. This attitude must be at the forefront of any movement which claims to be the forerunner of the organised revolutionary proletariat, whose final aim is the democratisation of the means of production. Democracy, by its very nature, demands widespread understanding of all issues, whether these issues are classed as political, economic or scientific.The four key concepts in CR are: components, structures, levels, and emergent properties.A component is a building block of a structure.A structure is a set of components organised in a specific way, that is, a set of components in particular relationships to each other.A level is a certain set of structures which are themselves related to each other. The key points here are: a) that structures can themselves as act as components for higher level structures; and b) that components can be examined as structures formed from lower level components.Emergent properties are properties, attributes, powers, etc. that only emerge at a certain structural level. This means that the ‘emergent’ does not exist at the component level of that structure. One can’t break up the structure in search of the origin of the property, because it isn’t there. It exists as part of relationships. This applies at all levels, too. Higher and higher levels of structures have properties emerging at each level, which can’t be reduced to a lower level structure or component, and certainly can’t be reduced to some notional ‘lowest’ level component, because, according to our concepts, any so-called ‘lowest’ level component is always a structure, too.Some example would obviously help here, for those comrades entirely unfamiliar with CR, and for whom the above outline is a bit ‘dry’.Perhaps an example of a structure is a car. Notice, that I have chosen this as at a structural level for my explanation. This structure is made up of components, like engine, wheels, seats, etc. But these components are themselves structures, too, and I could have chosen to use any of them as a structure, rather than as a component, within my explanation. An emergent property of a car is speed. But this only exists at the car structural level, and examining the seats, wheels or engine for speed won’t reveal it. If these components are laid out, unstructured and unrelated, on a garage floor, they do not contain ‘speed’. Similarly, if cars are brought together in a specific structural relationship called traffic (that is, the structure ‘car’ is now acting as a ‘component’ for a higher structure), other properties emerge which don’t exist at the car level, like a ‘jam’. A hundred cars spread out over a city do not constitute a ‘traffic jam’ (with its lack of speed); it’s only a jam if the cars are brought together in the same street at the same time, in a certain relationship. A ‘jam’ does not exist at the car level, nor at the seat level.Four points: I think that CR can help explain scientific issues in both physical and social science; CR is the imposition of human theory upon the world (not 'induction' nor 'practice and theory') and thus follows the slogan 'theory and practice'; CR is essentially ‘relational’; CR is bound up with ideology, and it is anathaema to ‘individualist’ or ‘reductionist’ thought. In all these ways, I think CR is compatible with Marx’s views on science and nature.Science necessarily focuses upon a certain level: this is a human choice, not something that a structure forces upon the human. Perhaps the next stage is to show how this theory can be applied to help us to understand both rocks and value (ie. both physical and social phenomena), as I’ve already insisted that a ‘unified method’ must be able to do.

I should add that I'm assuming agreement with the ontological belief that 'material' and 'ideal' have the same status, so anyone who's an ideological 'materialist/physicalist' will be ignored from now on.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems you are insisting on a dualist approach with idealism and materialism http://www.enfolded.net/enfolded/consciousness/consciousness-3-views.htmIn short the unity of opposites.  I ask myself is this possible in a non-dialetical sense?  If its a yes you maybe onto something novel.  If its a no we all know how little the dialectic helps in the search for a science for communists.

[Anonymous]

Brian wrote:

LBird wrote:

I

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems you are insisting on a dualist approach with idealism and materialism http://www.enfolded.net/enfolded/consciousness/consciousness-3-views.htmIn short the unity of opposites.  I ask myself is this possible in a non-dialetical sense?  If its a yes you maybe onto something novel.  If its a no we all know how little the dialectic helps in the search for a science for communists.

 He sounds like the Marxist Humanist who have tried to unify idealism with materialism

[Brian]

mcolome1 wrote:

 He sounds like the Marxist Humanist who have tried to unify idealism with materialism

Would appreciate a link to that Marcus.

[Author]

Posts