the difference between Marxism and original communist theory/ideology
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Pharmaceutical companies are well-known for medicalising social problems, turning normal behaviour into pathologiesThe pharmaceutical companies create imaginary illnesses, doctors and their patients are led to believe these are real complaints and then prescribe the treatment conveniently manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies based upon falsified research. (Advertisers follow a similar process…create imaginary needs that require to be satisfied.) I suggest that indeed in the real world we are told that "the sun revolves around the earth" by science. Fortunately, better later than never, the scientific method does kick in and the supposed reality we were all led to think as really reality is exposed for what it was – make-believe. In our political world, is false consciousness the same? I believe it is an Engels' word, not used by Marx.
LBird wrote:Brian wrote:LBird wrote:The roots of party control, and the death of class control, lie in 'materialism', of the Engelsian variety.I completely disagree. In actual fact the death of party control and the roots of class control lies not in 'materialism' or any other 'ism' for what it matters, but in a majority putting into practice their understanding of democracy and what the decision making process will consist of. When a majority allows a political party to establish the democratic framework of the decision making process it follows, that all outcomes, by default are going to be a reflection of what that political party deems to be truth and reality.For the guidelines and rules for debate and discussion have been predetermined by a minority. Therefore, all methodology, including the scientific method, will have been pre-determined by an elite.On the other hand, when the democratic framework and decision making process is introduced and established by a politically concsious majority it's they and they alone who deem what is truth and reality and not any political party. In this regard, the WSM have consistently stated that once socialism is attained its the majority who will decide the framework of democracy and the decision making process and not the party. This being the case the claim that a party elite consisting of 'materialists' will continue to dominate the decision making process after the revolution has succeeded fails at the first hurdle. For the purpose of a revolutionary party will have disappeared on the eve of the revolution and not after the revolution has taken place.This essential part of the revolutionary process, the democratic framework and the decision making process, will of course be worked out in the pre-revolutionary period and not post-revolutionary period. In essence it means the understanding of what democracy and the decision making process actually means in 'reality' will be determined by the majority and not a political party.And in reality will be the first step in the demise of a political party and political party discourse. And subsequently, the true beginnings of real political discourse, and not party political discourse.
From what I can tell, Brian, I agree with what you've said here, about 'conscious majority', 'democracy', 'revolution', 'reality determined by a majority'.I'm not sure where any 'disagreement' is.
I thought you would be unable to see where the disagreement lies. You are assuming the discussion is at heart over the various claims of materialism versus theory and practice, or idealism and materialism and therefore concluding such a discussion will continue after the revolution due to the presumption that a politcal party will still determine what is and what isn't. I'm attempting, and it's no easy task, to explain this premise is false by outlining that in actual fact it's the construction and creation of the democratic framework and the decision making process itself, by the majority – and not a party elite – which will be the ultimate determing factor on deciding on what is truth and reality. Unfortunately, you have become so focused on thinking that for socialists materialism is the only deciding factor you have lost sight of the fact that Engels himself declared otherwise:According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.[Engels, Letter to J Bloch (1890)Note the emphasis on ultimately and only. In effect Engels is categorically stating that when conducting a system analysis of the "production and reproduction of real life", everything has to be taken into consideration. Not just materialism, economic, theory and practice, etc, etc but everything, and hence reiterating Marx by declaring he's not a Marxist either.How that decision is reached on what the system analysis actually consists of will be determined by the democratic machinery installed by the majority and not the eternal wangling of party and non-party members.
Once again, Brian, I'm not sure why you think we disagree.Engels and 'ultimate' I have a problem with (elsewhere he talks of 'finality'), but I don't want to sidetrack yet again into the detail of Engels' mistakes (and his contradictory assertions), since most of what you've written seems to me to be incompatible with 'materialism', which is why I think I agree with what you've said.
alanjjohnstone wrote:In our political world, is false consciousness the same? I believe it is an Engels' word, not used by Marx.You're correct, alan, 'false consciousness' is an Engelsian invention.BTW, with your 'medical' focus, have you read Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact ?It's about the social creation of 'syphilis', written in the 30s, and influential on Thomas Kuhn's views of 'science'.Fleck served time in a concentration camp, as an aside.edit: Auschwitz and Buchenwaldedit 2:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genesis-Development-Scientific-Ludwik-Fleck/dp/0226253252For a glance at, and reviews of, Fleck's brilliant text.
LBird wrote:Once again, Brian, I'm not sure why you think we disagree.Engels and 'ultimate' I have a problem with (elsewhere he talks of 'finality'), but I don't want to sidetrack yet again into the detail of Engels' mistakes (and his contradictory assertions), since most of what you've written seems to me to be incompatible with 'materialism', which is why I think I agree with what you've said.Like I've mentioned, I knew this would be no easy task. You need to unpick what Engels means by ultimate and only. He like Marx were on a learning curve when they originally took on the MCoH and the LVToV and combined them into a methodology for an analysis of "production and reproduction of real life", albeit when investigating a political economy. With time they came to realise this methodology was incomplete and it suggested they had the answer to everything.In effect what they both admitted in later life (it took Engles a bit longer to catch up with Marx) was the actual methodology or system analysis would only become a complete whole once the majority were in a position to decide for themselves what is and what isn't without the hinderance of ideology. Or like when Marx hinted at 'the demons of the past weighing like an incabus on the present'. Obviously, this all harks back to the philosophers becoming proactive rather than reactive.Personally, being a generalist and not a specialist, I could not care two hoots what is and what isn't in the present. For my end goal is that essential change where I can decide what is and what isn't. And to that end I not only seek fundamental change by democratic methods but also am ultimately determined that the future decision making process will not be constructed by a party elite, or any other elite for that matter, but by the majority.For more on this see#27.
Brian wrote:LBird wrote:Once again, Brian, I'm not sure why you think we disagree.Engels and 'ultimate' I have a problem with (elsewhere he talks of 'finality'), but I don't want to sidetrack yet again into the detail of Engels' mistakes (and his contradictory assertions), since most of what you've written seems to me to be incompatible with 'materialism', which is why I think I agree with what you've said.Like I've mentioned, I knew this would be no easy task. You need to unpick what Engels means by ultimate and only. He like Marx were on a learning curve when they originally took on the MCoH and the LVToV and combined them into a methodology for an analysis of "production and reproduction of real life", albeit when investigating a political economy. With time they came to realise this methodology was incomplete and it suggested they had the answer to everything.In effect what they both admitted in later life (it took Engles a bit longer to catch up with Marx) was the actual methodology or system analysis would only become a complete whole once the majority were in a position to decide for themselves what is and what isn't without the hinderance of ideology. Or like when Marx hinted at 'the demons of the past weighing like an incabus on the present'. Obviously, this all harks back to the philosophers becoming proactive rather than reactive.Personally, being a generalist and not a specialist, I could not care two hoots what is and what isn't in the present. For my end goal is that essential change where I can decide what is and what isn't. And to that end I not only seek fundamental change by democratic methods but also am ultimately determined that the future decision making process will not be constructed by a party elite, or any other elite for that matter, but by the majority.For more on this see#27.
I can only reiterate that I can't see why you think we disagree, on the substantive issue of 'social production'.Perhaps we'd argue about Engels, if we had to, but I'm content to register my general agreement with your position, which I take to be that there is no 'neutral method' of science, which is only available to an elite, and so the social production of 'scientific knowledge' is amenable to workers' democracy. That is, the class conscious workers (pre-rev.; post-rev, the associated producers) can elect their 'truth' and determine their 'reality'.
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LBird wrote:alanjjohnstone wrote:In our political world, is false consciousness the same? I believe it is an Engels' word, not used by Marx.You're correct, alan, 'false consciousness' is an Engelsian invention.BTW, with your 'medical' focus, have you read Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact ?It's about the social creation of 'syphilis', written in the 30s, and influential on Thomas Kuhn's views of 'science'.Fleck served time in a concentration camp, as an aside.edit: Auschwitz and Buchenwaldedit 2:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genesis-Development-Scientific-Ludwik-Fleck/dp/0226253252For a glance at, and reviews of, Fleck's brilliant text.
You are accusing the SPGB without any supporting evidences, or without reading our index,or publication. We have indicated, and it was discussed by several members of the Socialist Party at the WSM forum that the expression: False consciousness is , a creation of Frederick Engels, and that we do not support that idea, and it was also indicated that the concept was only expressed by Engels on a private communication, but it was never indicated in any of his public works.Taking Engels as the fault guy, remind me of the excuses of the Democratic Party and the voters of the USA who have indicated that the main problem in the electoral process is Donald Trump, and for the Republican the fault guy are the Mexicans and the Muslim, instead of blaming the crisis on the capitalist economyThe problems that we have inherited within socialism-communism can not be blamed on Engels, or even Lenin as individuals, it is based on the same law of development of capitalism, and we have also indicated that there is not any leader able to change the economical base of any society, probably , at the very beginning the Bolshevik had good intentions of establishing a new society, but the economical reality forced them to do something different.The ideological disagreement among socialists-communists started before the emerge of the First International and the Second International, therefore, it is not Engels fault the deviations that were later shown on the socialist movement. Lenin used concepts of Marx and Engels in order to develop his own ideas, including the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is wrong conception created by Marx, as well it was a wrong decision of Marx to apply the labor voucher taken from the 'Utopian socialists" The question is: Is Engels was always wrong as you say all the times, Why Marx did not tell to Engels that he was wrong ? You spend more times attacking Engels and the Socialist Party than toward capitalism and the ruling class. PS The concept of the Vanguard Party came from Ferdinand LaSalle who was always in opposition to Marx all the time, it did not come from Materialism, or the Materialists, and later on Karl Kautsky adopted it , and Lenin developed it later on, and he said that it was only applicable to Russia, and it was a temporary measure, even more, Lenin was not planning to republish his books named: What is to be done ? The concept of manipulating from the top to the bottom existed before the emerge of many socialists, even more, The Prince of Machiavelli is based on that conception
As for Marx:
Quote:Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.The original German of the bolded part is "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun" which has in the hands of some writers become the Marxian dictum of ideology.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4
Quote:Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.So that is Engels:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htmObviously, as an Anarcho-Monarchist I cannot endorse this view.
And, of course, Marx-Engels wrote:
Quote:The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htmAs a Post-Hebredian Exophagist, I endorse this view.
mcolome1, I'm criticising 'materialism', and only criticising the SPGB inasmuch as the members and supporters here espouse 'materialism'.Where those SPGB members seem to follow the SPGB study guide (and some other things that I've read), I don't criticise the SPGB.It seems to me, that there is a contradiction between much of what the SPGB 'officially' says, and what many (most?) of the members actually believe.In pointing that out, it's up to the SPGB to address that contradiction.Of course, it's always open to the SPGB to declare that it as yet takes no side on the issue of Marx's 'idealism-materialism' versus Engels' 'materialism', because the organisation is yet to form a democratic opinion.But, in taking that route, the party can no longer claim to be 'materialist' in its approach to 'science' and epistemology. Which would suit me just fine – it would show an openness to new opinions by fellow workers.
Young Master Smeet wrote:And, of course, Marx-Engels wrote:Quote:The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htmAs a Post-Hebredian Exophagist, I endorse this view.
The real problem is to see an universe on a particular idea. In order to understand Marx and Engels we must be able to see their whole body of ideas. It is the same problems of the ruling class and the enemies of socialism who have blamed the problems of the Soviet Union on socialism, or Marx and Engels. Many peoples have always said that Marx was a philosopher, personally, I think that he was more of an Anthropologist than a Philosopher
LBird wrote:I can only reiterate that I can't see why you think we disagree, on the substantive issue of 'social production'.Perhaps we'd argue about Engels, if we had to, but I'm content to register my general agreement with your position, which I take to be that there is no 'neutral method' of science, which is only available to an elite, and so the social production of 'scientific knowledge' is amenable to workers' democracy. That is, the class conscious workers (pre-rev.; post-rev, the associated producers) can elect their 'truth' and determine their 'reality'.At long last we seem to be getting somewhere positive, in that we've reached an agreement that the actual design of the democratic structure and the decision making process will be down to the majority in socialism and this well eventually determine the system analysis. And also Marx and Engles had reached an understanding that their methodology was incomplete.Ok now lets put this reasoning into the historical context of how Marx reached this conclusion earlier than Engels. To do this you need to take a step back and take a further look at your claim, gained from the quotes of Marx that in actual fact he was an idealist-materialist. And I'm sure you will find that Marx was just making tentative suggestions on what elements provided a complete picture of system analysis.And knowing Marx I'm also sure he was not foolish to put himself in the dogmatic position of claiming that idealism-materialism was the key methodology. He explored that possibility but eventually he reached the conclusion that there was far, far more to a system analysis than even he, Engles, et al (and since) were able to uncover. And only a socialist society would be in a position to discover what this system analysis involved and consisted of.Right let's now fast forward to socialism to try and visualise how a complete system analysis will work in theory and practice or practice and theory for when you use system analysis it's constantly evolving and eventually it becomes immaterial which comes first – the chicken or the egg!. For the point is to utilise all the productive forces at your disposal to uncover what is and what isn't.So what do these productive forces consist of? Well firstly there's the division of labour, then there's technology and the capacity for critical thinking and critical reasoning to go off the scale. There are of course other elements of the productive forces but just these elements alone imply and suggest that there will be millions of people who will only have a sectional interest on fitting the jigsaw together to arrive at a system analysis, in the knowledge this is a social task of such huge proportions that team work and project management, plus constant scrutiny of the findings are essential requirements to arrive at a conclusion which is acceptable and appropriate to the rest of society via the decision making process for establishing what is and what isn't. Obviously, all the contributory factors uncovered by Marx and Engles will be taken into consideration when a conclusion is reached and an outcome is arrived at but these alone will not be the ultimate and only contributionary facors taken into consideration.Hence, robbos dig at the impracticalities of your claim for theory and practice. The truth of the matter is we'll all be doing our little bit to bring about a system analysis which a majority are comfortable with. Until that day arrives the constant wangling between party members and non-members will only be scratching at the surface appearances and revealing nothing of a substantial nature and even less on fundamentals.Hope this helps.
LBird wrote:mcolome1, I'm criticising 'materialism', and only criticising the SPGB inasmuch as the members and supporters here espouse 'materialism'.Where those SPGB members seem to follow the SPGB study guide (and some other things that I've read), I don't criticise the SPGB.It seems to me, that there is a contradiction between much of what the SPGB 'officially' says, and what many (most?) of the members actually believe.In pointing that out, it's up to the SPGB to address that contradiction.Of course, it's always open to the SPGB to declare that it as yet takes no side on the issue of Marx's 'idealism-materialism' versus Engels' 'materialism', because the organisation is yet to form a democratic opinion.But, in taking that route, the party can no longer claim to be 'materialist' in its approach to 'science' and epistemology. Which would suit me just fine – it would show an openness to new opinions by fellow workers.The Socialist Party is not an organization composed of robots,
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