The gravity of the situation

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

By 'idealism', Marx means 'divine production', not 'using ideas' or 'active consciousness'.

He also referred to 'idealism'  as the belief that the material world is a reflection of the idea. That all we have to do is 'think' something into existence.If that is the case then why didn't the working class create communism 1000 years ago?. A question I would like you as an idealist to answer.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Once again, Vin, who creates 'the material conditions' that they, according to you, passively   'find at hand'?

Well whoever created them, created them out of the conditions the found at hand. Hisorically or otherwise. I have highlight the distortion you added 'passively' your word not mine, but typical of you.

Believe me, comrade, that 'distortion', which I clearly added, was done to clarify for you exactly what the implications, for human activity, the passive formulation 'finding at hand', actually are.As to 'historically or otherwise', Vin, that's precisely what is at issue.If it's 'historically', it's produced by humans; if it's 'otherwise', it's produced by god, outside of human history.Again, for you, who does create 'conditions'? Are they simply 'found at hand'?

[twc]

Re Post #142.Substituting ‘social production’ for ‘materialism’

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

the class which is the ruling socially productive [original = material] force of society

For Marx, the ruling class is not a “socially productive force of society” at all.  The ruling class is quite correctly described as the “ruling material force of society” by virtue of its ownership and control of society’s material means of production.  But the ruling class itself doesn’t socially produce anything with them.In all modes of production that are dominated by a ruling class, it is always the ruled class, and not the ruling class, that is socially productive.Consider the capitalist mode of production.  Only the working class is socially productive in any economic sense.  That is because the working class alone is productive of capital, i.e. it produces surplus value.The working class’s social production of surplus value—and not its production of commodities, which are mere transient material repositories of capital—is the social productivity that the ruling class seeks and lusts after.  Production of surplus value is the only form of social productivity that is meaningful to the capitalist class and recognised by it.Social appearance in a capitalist world is not what our alienated consciousness makes it out to be:For society, the social productivity of capital appears to be the productive activity of the socially unproductive capitalist class.  [You have just fallen for this surface appearance.]For the worker, the social productivity of capital appears to be the enforcer of the worker’s own productive activity.For the capitalist, the social productivity of capital conceals (masks or cloaks) the capitalist’s exploitation of the worker.Contrary to the illusory social consciousness that we manufacture out of our social experience in an exploitative capitalist world, the process of working-class exploitation really does take place in the objective world, of which the conceptions we hold are socially necessary alienated appearances.

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

The class which has the means of social [original = material] production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production

Marx’s original text is a clear application of his divide-and-conquer, ‘social-being – consciousness dichotomy’.Here Marx is saying [or was saying before your change] that ownership and control of the material means of production effectively confers control over social thought production, i.e. the material social base determines the social superstructure, or social consciousness.Materialist Marx here acknowledges that it is physically impossible for anybody to actually own and control that insubstantial “substance” thought.  But, he also recognises that nobody has to.  All they need to do is own and control the material means of social production—as in the SPGB’s Object—and the social superstructure (or social consciousness) will follow materialistically in its wake.That’s what happens under capitalism, and it’s what the SPGB proclaims will also hold under socialism, based upon our Object.  This is a direct consequence of the materialist conception of history taken dichotomously, as Marx intends it to be taken.So we are witnessing here the materialist foundation of the socialist party’s case being expressed for the first time by Marx and Engels, way back in 1845.Of course, it need hardly be said that Marx’s materialist explanation is not possible for an idealist, who thinks that people’s social behaviour is the product of their will and thought, and for whom material production follows in the wake of thought production.Because it is impossible to own someone’s thinking, the idealist in you forces you to impose a Jacobin reign-of-terror that mandates universal thought control over us all.As in my first post against you, I record my opposition to your policy of social thought policing, and I express contempt for your idealist philosophical advocacy of it.  A socialism that requires thought surveillance and censorship is not worth fighting for, but is rather necessary to oppose!Yet here is you, the extoller of precious human thought—that essential expression of our active inner selves—advocating its social shackling, and justifying its curtailment in the name of Marx, in part to satiate your wacky conspiracy theory about bourgeois scientists conspiring to control the socialist world and to conduct Mengele horror experiments upon its members.The only possible way open to you to directly appropriate thought is to physically appropriate the conscious thinker, as in chattel slavery.  But the history of slavery reveals that imposed thought control backfires on the mind enforcer, as the modern legacy in the old Confederate States amply testifies.If Hegel comes anywhere near close to discovering the laws of motion of abstract thinking, then we can rest assured that our active brains will involuntarily resist imposed thought channelling.  We will think the very opposite of what we are compelled to, and then re-think the synthesis of these moments into a single sublated thought, and so on, outrunning the defensive thought police.  Try controlling thought and expect revolt!So to return to Marx’s original materialist version, this quote only makes sense if Marx held, dichotomously, that social production excludes mental production!  Your imposition of entanglement, that social production includes mental production, simply turns Marx’s profoundly novel conception into a mere senseless tautology, that entanglement generates entanglement.

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant social production [original = material] relationships, the dominant social production [original = material] relationships grasped as ideas

As for the first quote, this is another application of Marx’s divide-and-conquer, social-being – consciousness dichotomy.Here your substitution naively clings to the alienated appearance of capitalist experience, and merely states the uncritically comfortable dualism that social-being — consciousness entanglement generates social-being — consciousness entanglement, which is what everybody thoughtlessly thinks when he blindly mistakes the immediate appearance of our alienated social existence under capitalism for capitalist reality itself.You have not yet reached first base in recognising that the problem of social being and consciousness involves first-of-all how to untangle the tangled mess we find it in.  You might then have greater respect for Engels’s rational insistence on untangling it one way or t’other, rather than leaving it mixed up like a crazy bowl of tangled spaghetti.  Otherwise rational science is impossible.For once set aside your New Left prejudice, and make a conscious effort to think freely about what the writer is actually saying.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

By 'idealism', Marx means 'divine production', not 'using ideas' or 'active consciousness'.

He also referred to 'idealism'  as the belief that the material world is a reflection of the idea. That all we have to do is 'think' something into existence.

[my bold]I have never said humans can simply 'think into existence'.That's the reading of a materialist, who can't understand Marx, and has to condemn those who argue for human creativity as 'idealists'. They get this from Engels' dichotomy, that all philosophy is either materialism or idealism, which is nonsense.Marx argues that human theory and practice brings things into existence.I ALWAYS say 'theory and practice', and never 'theory', alone.

[LBird]

twc wrote:

All they need to do is own and control the material means of social production—as in the SPGB’s Object—and the social superstructure (or social consciousness) will follow materialistically in its wake.

[ my bold]I know what you're arguing, twc.And this argument is Engels not Marx.It's tantamount to saying 'consciousness' follows 'matter'. Or, to put it in terms any workers can understand, that 'the rocks talk to us'.It's exactly what the Leninists argue, too: let the Party 'own and control the material', and then the wider class 'social consciousness will follow materialistically in its wake'.Because, if the wider class themselves already 'own and control', then the 'social consciousness' must have preceded, not 'followed'.'Materialism' requires a passive class, lacking class consciousness. It allows an elite with a (supposed) special consciousness to provide the 'active side', as Marx warned.

[SocialistPunk]

LBird,In your post #142 you decide to rewrite Marx claiming to know his mind better than he did.You then accuse YMS, "You very conveniently ignore Capital,"  and "Try reading Marx". Then when YMS posted the following you conveniently ignore it, instead launching in to your usual "Leninists", "Engelist materialists" accusation strategy, designed to distract by provoking emotional responses. 

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Oh, I forgot capital:

Quote:

The Devil Himself wrote:My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

So much for your claim to be a Marxist, in fact you keep claiming to be the only Marxist in the village.To think myself and one or two others once gave you the benefit of the doubt, in the hope that given time you may have been able to explain clearly what you thought you understood. It's clear to me now that you are seriously confused and rather than admit it, you bluster on, accusing everyone else (living and dead) of being wrong.Why some people fail to heed the law of holes is beyond me.

Bruce Lee wrote:

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

 

[LBird]

twc wrote:

…for whom material production follows in the wake of thought production.

Marx wrote:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

[LBird]

SocialistPunk wrote:

Why some people fail to heed the law of holes is beyond me.

Bruce Lee wrote:

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

 

I'm waiting for you to do so, SP.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird,can you explain how consciousness is formed/changed and how socialist consciousness would grow?

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

Ahem…

Quote:

man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.

So, man takes nature as he finds it, changes it, in accordance with his own imagination, and is in turn changed by nature.  See what happens when you highlight different bits?So, just to make clear, nature "produces" (according to Marx); action in the world changes the human being (accordinmg to Marx); these "reactions" are "material" according to Marx.Of course, Marx never says what he means.  Nature here means "fish", reaction means "social productive forces", material means "Spain". 

[Young Master Smeet]

The point, for Marx, and historical materialists, is that material determination is not like clockwork, but occurs precisely because humans live in the world, in whole ways of life (to borrow from Raymond Williams).  That produces culture, which also produces humans.  We are not mechanical materialists but cultural materialists.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

Ahem…

Quote:

man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.

So, man takes nature as he finds it, changes it, in accordance with his own imagination, and is in turn changed by nature.  See what happens when you highlight different bits?So, just to make clear, nature "produces" (according to Marx); action in the world changes the human being (accordinmg to Marx); these "reactions" are "material" according to Marx.Of course, Marx never says what he means.  Nature here means "fish", reaction means "social productive forces", material means "Spain". 

I don't know how you can ignore what Marx says, about just 'who' is the initiator.There is not one word about 'matter' telling us humans what to produce.

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

adapted to his own wants.

human wants, which are linked to the

Quote:

natural forces of his body

shape what humans will.  Initiator be buggered, though, there is no unmoved mover, there is an ongoing process.

[Young Master Smeet]

Oh, and

Quote:

existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

doesn't tell us how the imagination got there neither, so no claim to initiation on that score, neither.  Try practicing close reading, it helps when folks dabble in English.

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

So, we have the nonsense about 'idealism' and Kant.

Indeed, we do. For instance

Quote:

'Inorganic nature' is an unknowable 'in itself' ingredient for active human social theory and practice.

Quote:

No matter how many times I repeat that 'inorganic nature' is an 'ingredient into activity', your ideology tells you to ask 'But, what is it, when it's not an 'ingredient into activity?'.

This theory that "ultimate reality" is an unobservable and so unknowable Ding an sich is pure Kant, which opens the door to all sorts of idealist and theist views. You are one and it is dishonest as well as ignorant to try to saddle Marx and certainly Pannekoek with such a view.Why not admit it instead of spreading lies about us being crude mechanical materialists who think that the mind is merely a mirror reflecting what's out there?

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