Science for Communists?

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Same thing.

I'm afraid it isn't the same thing, YMS.Right, I've had enough of you and your non-Communist and non-democratic ideology.I'm interested in discussing the issue of democracy within scientific method, because of the social demands of epistemology, with comrades who share my ideology of Democratic Communism.

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Same thing.

I'm afraid it isn't the same thing, YMS.Right, I've had enough of you and your non-Communist and non-democratic ideology.I'm interested in discussing the issue of democracy within scientific method, because of the social demands of epistemology, with comrades who share my ideology of Democratic Communism.

 You should create your own personal discussion forum. I think this forum is taking a wrong route

[LBird]

mcolome1 wrote:

You should create your own personal discussion forum. I think this forum is taking a wrong route

That's a rather uncomradely thing to say, mcolome, especially given that I've been entirely accommodating to your less than clear previous posts on these questions.If you are too ignorant to follow the discussion, why not ask, and I'll try to help you understand.Or do you secretly prefer the Leninist method, but don't like me pointing out that what you believe about science is Leninist in its political implications?Are you opposed to my ideology of Democratic Communism? If so, why not outline your ideology?

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

You should create your own personal discussion forum. I think this forum is taking a wrong route

That's a rather uncomradely thing to say, mcolome, especially given that I've been entirely accommodating to your less than clear previous posts on these questions.If you are too ignorant to follow the discussion, why not ask, and I'll try to help you understand.Or do you secretly prefer the Leninist method, but don't like me pointing out that what you believe about science is Leninist in its political implications?Are you opposed to my ideology of Democratic Communism? If so, why not outline your ideology?

 Probably, it is more uncomradely to call me ignorant. Probably, you do not know me, and probably,  I do have more academic education than you, first, I have a doctorate degree in law, and second , I am a medical student, and third i have spent more times than you in this type of discussion, it is not a new topic. I do not have any ideology because I do not have a bourgeois mentality. The problem is that you want to convert your personal ideas into an universal conception

[Anonymous]

Is it permitted in this forum to call another person an ignorant ?  if It is permitted , I can call him a mother fucker

[LBird]

mcolome1 wrote:

Is it permitted in this forum to call another person an ignorant ?  if It is permitted , I can call him a mother fucker

Well, since I often admit to being ignorant myself about all sorts of things, and try to learn, I've got no problem pointing out when others, like you, are clearly ignorant about particular issues.You might be a lawyer, doctor, or whatever, but that in itself gives you no insight into these epistemological and political issues, as you have shown.Why can't you engage with the arguments, rather than attacking me personally, and then throwing your dummy out of the pram when I point out your problem?

[Young Master Smeet]

OK, lets try this.Socialism is a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all: one for all and all for one, as some dumb ass put it.  Another reformulation is to state that the objective of a socialist society will be to produce well rounded human beings, individuals who are ends in themselves and not a means to an end.In order to develop, and be free human beings, we will need to co-operate, since we can only be as free as were are produced to be (or, which is the same thing, as free as we can help each other to be).  Another way of saying this, is that a given individual can only be free by helping others to be free.  This is the underpinning of the concept of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.The person with the best information regarding an individuals capacities is themselves (what might be a comfortable jog for some might be unendurable agnony for otehrs, I cannot measure another's pain).  That is not to say there isn't a role for democracy in co-ordinating and organising the discussion of needds and abilities, but its role is to facilitate not dictate.  The ends of producing humans describes (and circumscribes) the need for socialist democracy.This means socialism is an ongoing dialogue between flesh and blood human beings, not abstractions like 'society'.So, only the Tory party can deliver the abolition fo the wages system and real socialism.  Hail David Cameron.  Sorry.  That slipped out. *wanders off twirling moustache*

[LBird]

A little more on Einstein’s epistemological development, for those interested. Although he seemed to move beyond the 19th century empiricism of his youth (he left Mach’s empiricism behind him after the publication of his general theory of relativity in 1915), and was able to point towards Marx’s anti-inductive position, with his later view about the impossibility of moving from ‘observation to theory’ (see my post #928 for Einstein’s quote in van Dongen), he seems to have failed to make the jump to the social construction of theories, and for him this construction remained an individual one.Einstein wrote of “intuitive selection”, “the intuitive grasp” and “the intuitive view of the researcher” (see van Dongen, pp. 42, 43 and 45).If we employ Schaff’s trichotomous model of object, subject and knowledge (which I detailed on the thread dedicated to Schaff), this shows that, although Einstein got beyond the 19th century ‘objectivist/positivist’ view that ‘knowledge’ reflects the ‘object’ (where the ‘subject’ is absent), he still didn’t get to Marx’s position that the interaction (through practice) of ‘object’ and ‘subject’ produces ‘knowledge’.Einstein stalled at the subjectivist position that the ‘subject’ creates ‘knowledge’, through individual ‘intuition’, which later led him to stress ‘subject’ alone (without any need for ‘object’), which led him to move away from conducting experiments, and to rely almost entirely on his ‘individual intuition’. Einstein defined the ‘subject’ as ‘an individual’, whereas Marx’s theories mean that we have to define the ‘subject’ as ‘a society’. Marx constantly stressed the social production of knowledge.To summarise, Einstein rejected ‘objectivist’ (19th century positivist/empiricist/inductivist) theories of scientific method, but only got as far as did many others, in the social reaction of the early 20th century which moved to ‘subjectivist’ theories (Carr in What is History? describes this social process that “…after the First World War, the facts seemed to smile on us less propitiously than in the years before 1914…”, p. 21). Einstein did not develop to the position Marx had outlined in the 1840s.As Communists, we must adopt the method that holds that ‘knowledge’ is something actively produced by a ‘social subject’, a society in its historical and social interaction with the ‘object’ of a really existing world of ideas and materiality. That is, ‘theory and practice’, both of which are always social, not individual, upon our physical and social world.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

This means socialism is an ongoing dialogue between flesh and blood human beings, not abstractions like 'society'.So, only the Tory party can deliver the abolition fo the wages system and real socialism. Hail David Cameron.

Yes, Tories always denigrate talk of 'society' as an 'abstraction', and alternatively stress the individualist ideology of 'flesh and blood human beings'.The Tories emphasise the biological, at the expense of the social.

YMS wrote:

Sorry. That slipped out.

No, it didn't 'slip out'. It's entirely consistent with your ideological views, YMS.I don't think that you are conscious of your 'Thatcherite' view of the world. That's not meant as an insult, but a plea for you to re-examine your views, and try to locate their origin outside of yourself as an individual, in the society within which you've grown up, saturated by its ideas.As we all have, of course. That's the point of discussing these issues, to help each other develop a consistent Communist/Socialist outlook of our world.We're not individuals, we're workers; and that structural category is a social category, not an 'abstraction'

[alanjjohnstone]

Aren't we social individuals? That is to say that we exist in two simultaneous dimensions with the self-directed individual integrating his or her own life with the development of the whole community.

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Aren't we social individuals? That is to say that we exist in two simultaneous dimensions with the self-directed individual integrating his or her own life with the development of the whole community.

I knew you wouldn't be able to resist eventually getting involved in this 'science' discussion, alan!Your point about 'two dimensions' is at the heart of the Critical Realist, and thus Marx's, view of components, structures, levels and emergence.In sociology, 'individuals' as biological beings and 'individuals' as social beings, parallels the economic category of a 'tin of beans' as biological food and a 'tin of beans' as a social commodity.That is, if one can distinguish, in economics, between a use-value (a component) and an exchange-value (a structural relationship), although those 'two dimensions' are 'simultaneous' (as you term it), in a 'tin of beans', then one will have no trouble using this economic insight in other areas, like sociology or epistemology.A brick is only part of a wall in certain specific relationships with other bricks; if the brick simply lies on the floor, surrounded with other individual bricks in random piles, it is not part of a wall.From economics, sociology and bricklaying emerge value, ideology and protection from dogs.Your 'dimensions' are simply different levels, within CR. Hope this helps.

[Young Master Smeet]

A Tory wrote:

Above all we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.[…]Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality – the ideal totality – the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.

Expell that man from the party!

[LBird]

Unfortunately, YMS, your quote from Marx agrees with me, not you.Can't you see the word 'social' all through the text, and no mention of 'biological' or 'isolated individuals'?

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

The individual is the social being.

I have never talked about isolated individuals.  Also

Quote:

even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others

People alone on desert islands are social beings!  Real,. sensuous human beings, individuals.

[LBird]

If you've got this far, YMS, and you can see that you're not an 'individual', but a 'social individual', why don't you thus ask where your 'social' aspect comes from, what it consists of, how it affects your theory and practice, etc., etc.?Especially in relation to all of us and 'science' and its 'method'?

[Author]

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