Would the police force exist in a Socialist world?
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Frankly, twc, I've sifted your last post for meaning and can find almost nothing in it but rhetoric and a bad case of testosterone poisoning. Personally, I hope to arrive at conclusions by using my head and not my gonads – most of the time, at least. I'm genuinely sorry that you find my comments demoralising, but I guess if your conception of socialism is so hormonally charged, then it will take a lot to keep it pumped up. Your post seems to revolve around a straightforward reassertion of your belief in the necessity of socialism. And the only possible response to that is to wish you well with it. If that's what keeps you going, then that's fine by me. Our daily experience of capitalism is reflected in and through our consciousness in many different ways. On the one point of substance that I can find in your post, your assumption that I do not accept the notion of social causality is incorrect. I do think we are caught up in a huge array of social necessities: just not the ones that you suppose.
Determinism or What?Of course determinism can’t explain every possible contingency. No-one ever thought it could; though you seem to think it must.You assert socialism isn’t determined. Why then are you confident that we can establish it? How then do you intend to hold it together?I consider class consciousness to be simply our recognition of the determinism inherent in the materialist conception of history. That recognition is indispensable for establishing socialism. It alone gives us confidence in our social commitment to common ownership and democratic control. If social being determines consciousness, then it alone ensures that socialism will be self-sustaining.There’s enough target material here for you to get stuck into.Determinism or ContingencyYou imply that contingency [chance] destroys determinism [causality, necessity].If so, there could never be any determinism, because the world we inhabit is thoroughly contingent. Yet that world is just as thoroughly alive with determinism, and much of what we take to be pure contingency is readily explicable deterministically.Determinism and contingency are inter-penetrating concepts. Both are abstracted from the same phenomena. Determinism is the abstract view. Contingency is the concrete view. [We usually find competing contingencies, and so competing determinisms.]Marx describes our process of concept formation as the “descent from the concrete to the abstract”. [For Hegel, our descent is a phenomenology.]Abstraction is how we apprehend the concrete in our minds. Marx describes this process as the “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”. [For Hegel, our ascent is a logic.]Science is the union of the descending and ascending arcs. [For Hegel, science is the union of phenomenology and logic, For Thomas Kuhn, it is the union of revolutionary and normal science.]In ascent, [normal] science sees abstractions implementing contingent concrete instances of their abstract selves. Abstractions tell concrete things how to behave [e.g. Newton’s laws].In descent, [revolutionary] science considers contingent concrete forms to distill into an abstraction of themselves. Concrete things tell abstractions how to behave [e.g. Newton, Darwin, Marx, Einstein].For Marx, science is the formal union of contingent concrete things dictating to abstractions that dictate to contingent concrete things. Fortunately, evolution has made us expert at recognizing abstract form in concrete contingent actuality.[Idealist Hegel discovered this formal union but, for him, abstractions and concrete things are forms of the World Spirit.]Contingency is the substance of determinism. Our abstractions, distilled from concrete contingency, constitute the base of a deterministic superstructure wherein we consciously navigate concrete contingency. That is the formal structure of our determinisms.That consciousness is how we, along with all sentient creatures that are compelled to live by their wits, manage to survive. Without being able to comprehend determinism in contingency we couldn’t make our way through the world.Darwinian DeterminismDarwinian determinism has similarities [we ignore differences here] to the determinism of the materialist conception of history. It is thoroughly studied, even debated in public, and yet no consensus seems to obtain.So, as you understand, I’m giving my own view.Karl Popper once adopted the position that determinism was absent from evolution. He declared “the theory of natural selection is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme” [Unended Quest 1976], a view he later repudiated.Stephen Jay Gould stressed that Darwinian determinism was re-directed by random contingency [minor as well as major ones, such as catastrophic mass extinctions]: “wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale [530 million years ago]; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay”.Perhaps so, but winding it back a mere 2.5 million years to the Taung Australopithecine boy, must increase those odds enormously. By then, evolution had solved a host of foundational problems for “anything like human intelligence”, and it now had no choice but to work with the new Australopithecine material. What plastic mental material to manipulate for issuing forth “anything like human intelligence”!The first point I make is that blind evolution, just like purblind social development, is forced to work with material “transmitted from the past”. It must remake its own circumstances out of its own former self. [That looks awfully like determinism to me.]Gould took the panda’s peculiar “thumb” as a wonderful instance of contingency co-opted by Darwinian determinism. But we have already recognized above that determinism working upon contingency of its own making is the nature of actual concrete processes.The second point I make is that both blind evolution and purblind social development solve the problems their development throws up. Species and societies both create their own worlds. They do “make themselves”.photosynthesis turned a greenhouse into a benign atmosphere [capitalism seems hell bent on reversing this archaic 2.5 billion year process],mating created diversity out of cloning,lungs and legs conquered land, and wings conquered airnurture led to training, intelligence, etc.[Marx saw society solving its problems in exactly the same fashion as evolution. Obstacles are there to be overcome. And they are overcome, in society, just as in evolution. Enough for now. To explore determinism in society is to start a new thread.]
twc. I'll reply shortly to this when I have some more time, but I've just seen your response to Emily Chalmers on another thread."Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes."Which very succinctly states the case; I agree unreservedly. The difference that remains between us I believe, is that I conclude from this that socialism is not inevitable and you appear not to (unless we mean something different by 'inevitable'). I think we have got into a terminological misunderstanding because your remark only makes sense to me if 'determine' is being used here in its weak sense. In the strong sense 'determine' implies a grand Laplacean determinism or at least a local interpretation of that. I take this to be an ordinary distinction in the way the word is commonly used. In the strong sense, socialism could only be determined if there were no other determined processes, which we both agree is not the case. In both uses, a determined process is a causal process only in the sense that its inner events are causally linked. So there is no contradiction in saying that the class struggle is a causal process (in this sense) but the outcome, socialism, is not inevitable (a direct and inevitable effect of that restricted set of causes).With a bit of luck we might even agree – on the main point, anyway.
.I agree with much of what you say (though it is a very roundabout way of making your point). As I said in my last post, we appear to have been mostly disagreeing over terminology. I think that is obvious once the connection is made. So, rather than go through a point by point analysis and bore everyone including ourselves I’ll just to clear up a few points. No, I do not assert that socialism is not determined in the sense that you are using the term. I argued that it isn’t secure or inevitable, meaning, nothing could get in the way of it happening. Nor, as a matter of fact did I imply that contingency destroys determinism. That's your reading.You say: "I consider class consciousness to be simply our recognition of the determinism inherent in the materialist conception of history. That recognition is indispensable for establishing socialism. It alone gives us confidence in our social commitment to common ownership and democratic control."I disagree. There are as many different reasons for working for socialism as there are socialists, all of which reasons can be described as ‘class consciousness.’ My personal commitment to common ownership and democratic control is strong, not because I think socialism is inevitable or even determined but because I believe the alternative is unthinkable. If the working class all had to understand your argument from necessity to acquire class consciousness, those tricky contingencies would rapidly mount up against us.
Determined and Inevitable?
Quote:Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes.It’s great to realize that we do agree on the underlying determinism of the materialist conception of history.
Quote:The difference that remains between us I believe, is that I conclude from this that socialism is not inevitable and you appear not to.Yes, like you, I certainly believe we have to fight for socialism. It won’t happen without us — man is the agent of his own history.But socialists can’t simply make history blindly — that’s the stuff of class society, which has scant interest in society as such.We socialists can gain mighty help from history itself — that substance inherited from the past. That substance can only be comprehended by the materialist conception of history, and we must wield it as our tool for achieving and maintaining socialism.Our Object is the greatest challenge ever hurled at the world, and it is pure scientific prediction. As such, our Object is the one great consequential conclusion [i.e. consequence of determinism] of the materialist conception of history.Our Object puts class society on notice: we understand property [ownership and control], we can defeat property’s ownership and control of mankind and its hijacking of our common human social process, and we can forever sustain that triumph over the socially destructive private ownership of our individual lives.We wield the substance of past history for our own future. That substance of history distilled into its abstract essence is the materialist conception of history.Our future is determined by our past [that’s the determinism of all autonomous processes, like the serpent shifting its past fulcrum into its future one]. If man is the product of his circumstances [determinism] we’ll change those circumstances, and so change man.We know how to make man human in concrete actuality, and no longer just in our minds — something mankind has excelled at during the tenure of class society.The materialist conception of history gives us the confidence that we can weave our future out of our past by overcoming the desperate barriers necessary for sustaining our present.For that purpose, I believe that the materialist conception of history and our Object are precisely equivalent to the necessary class consciousness.
:-)Once again, I've no quibble there.I think your comment: 'Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes.' is a an extremely neat and precise way of summing up the argument. Thanks for that. I shall nick it.Good to know that we agree on a fundamental point.
"Our Object is the greatest challenge ever hurled at the world, and it is pure scientific prediction. As such, our Object is the one great consequential conclusion [i.e. consequence of determinism] of the materialist conception of history."Do not like the use the term of"determinism". A very good mate of mine, did his dissertation on, "is Marxism a determinist ideology", The quote, "the emancipation of the working classes, is the work of the working class themselves", proves that even Marx disagreed with this position! Otherwise he would have said, "history will take care of itself". Steve.
LOL. I think you and your mate were using the word determinism in the way that people like Sam Harris use it and not in the way twc is using it, which, is different. That's the real danger here, the danger that using the word is very likely to be misunderstood.
Then you've got quite a job on your hands, Steve, to justify your view. Your mate's opinion is not sufficient. After going over this in some detail (see previous discussion) with twc it's very clear to me, at least, that given the way he is using the word determinism, there is absolutely no contradiction between saying that socialism is 'determined' and saying 'the emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself.' By determinism he means 'a determined process', one subject to cause and effect. This does not imply that socialism will automatically happen or that we don't consciously have to bring it about. That is a fatalist position, not a deterministic one, in this sense. Over to you…
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