Z A Jordan and Marx’s epistemology

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

.You'll argue for 'elite production' (that 'truth' will not be a social product) and I'll argue for 'democratic production' (that 'truth' will be a social product)..

 For the umpteenth time that fact that something is a social product does not mean you have necessarily to vote on it.  Why can you not understand this simple point?

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

One further point of clarification would be helpful, YMS. Does your 'point' represent the official 'point' of the SPGB? That is, does the SPGB consider Marx's philosophy to be helpful to workers today, or does it consider it, like you do, only a hindrance to workers' self-development?

Nice straw man, there, I didn't say it was a hinderance.  I said we don't need it.  It is useful, but we can live and succeed without it.Marx had considerable achievements: he identified that wage labour is inehrently exploitative, and exploitation does not arise from underpayment of wages.  Along with Engels he developed a method of analysing society which can help us very much (as outlined in the german Ideology), and along with Engels he identified the revolutionary poetential of the proletariat.  Alongside all that he spent years in the service of the workers movement as an aorganiser, educator and propagandist.  He also laid out an analysis on the need for the seizure of political pwer as the way for the workers to make their revolution. All that deserves respect, and we can put the fruits of that effort to the service of our cause today.  But, understanding Marx' views on the object of philosophy and the inorganic subject, is not esential to the cause.

[Young Master Smeet]

Jordan wrote:

What can be said about the Marxian conception with certainty concerns its naturalistic character. As Marx saw it, within an all-inclusive and self-sufficing nature there was no place for the operation of disembodied forces, of a mind, a soul, a spirit. Consequently, in Marx’s view of the physical world, man, society, and history, not the slightest trace of the supernatural was left. Man is a natural entity among others and does not hold a privileged position in the universe. Even when man struggles with and tries to secure his control over nature, he remains part of it.

(My emphasis).  I'd quite agree with the above.This I'd take issue with

Quote:

Nor is the Marxian view justifiably described as materialism, because Marx explains the social activity of man and man’s history ‘by his needs and by the means and methods of satisfying these needs ‘.[128] No historian can avoid resorting to this kind of explanation and, consequently, all historians would be materialists.

Plenty of historians have written ignoring such factors, looking at the history of pure ideas (and today this continues, for example, with ideologists who see Islamic radiclism as an idea that just falls from the sky on people's heads).

[Young Master Smeet]

Ah, the below didn't display in my first post:

Jordan wrote:

Marx also repudiated the materialist theories of history which reduced primary historical factors to some physical characteristics of man’s natural environment.

Marx wrote:

In the historical and political application, Trémaux is much more important and fruitful than Darwin.  Here alone is found a natural basis for certain questions, as of nationality, etc.

Marx wrote:

Trémaux' basic idea of the influence of the soil, is, in my opinion, an idea which only needs to be announced to secure for itself once and for all the right of citizenship in science.

(Letters, Marx-Engels, 1866).Anyway:

Jordan wrote:

In general, Marx could not have accepted an observable part of physical reality as the absolute primary factor of social action and relations, because in his view nature cannot function as a condition determining human consciousness unless it is first defined in sociocultural terms, that is, unless it is a socially and culturally mediated entity. Consequently, Marx could not and actually did not accept any explanation of social activity in any other but social terms. ‘Everything which sets men in motion’, wrote Engels, ‘must go through their minds.’[125] Marx emphasized this fact in The German Ideology to justify the view that not only circumstances make men, as the ‘old materialism’ maintained, but men also make circumstances, as the ‘new materialism’ asserted.

 Lbird also didn't comment on my rebuttal of Jordan's note about historians.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Anyway:

Jordan wrote:

In general, Marx could not have accepted an observable part of physical reality as the absolute primary factor of social action and relations, because in his view nature cannot function as a condition determining human consciousness unless it is first defined in sociocultural terms, that is, unless it is a socially and culturally mediated entity. Consequently, Marx could not and actually did not accept any explanation of social activity in any other but social terms. ‘Everything which sets men in motion’, wrote Engels, ‘must go through their minds.’[125] Marx emphasized this fact in The German Ideology to justify the view that not only circumstances make men, as the ‘old materialism’ maintained, but men also make circumstances, as the ‘new materialism’ asserted.

 

I'm not sure what point you're making, YMS, by quoting chunks of Jordan's text.Do you have a comment to make on it? Do you disagree with Jordan?

[Young Master Smeet]

I think the above quote just got caught up when I was contrasting what Jordan wrote with Marx' actual views on TRemaux and the relationship of nationality to the soil…

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

I think the above quote just got caught up when I was contrasting what Jordan wrote with Marx' actual views on TRemaux and the relationship of nationality to the soil…

Marx was obviously talking nonsense about Tremaux, as Engels told him at the time.I'm afraid selective quoting from 40 years' writing is no replacement for judgement about a body of work.What about the rest of Jordan's article, which addresses Marx's core views, rather than his all-too-human slips?After all, we could simply put Marx and Engels in the box marked 'racist anti-semites', if we judged them on their mistakes.More importantly, what do you think about Jordan's general views about Marx? He clearly regards Marx as closer to the views that I've argued, of the active human creation of their reality, which is incompatible with 'materialism'.

[Young Master Smeet]

IN the context of this debate, Jordan's Distinction between "Naturalism" and "Materialism" sytrikes me as more than slightly jesuitical, and in the final analysis still delivers us Humans as part of a larger system which exists outside humanity and of which humanity is a part: whether we call this Nature or 'The material world/universe' doesn't make much odds.  By any account, still, there is a physical world which we cannot re-order merely by voting.  That nature is mediated through culture is unobjectionable.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

By any account, still, there is a physical world which we cannot re-order merely by voting.

That's the whole point of the article and Marx's ideas, YMS.We produce what we call 'physical'.The 'physical world' is a social product.If you don't agree with Marx (or Jordan's text), that's fair enough. But the belief in a 'physical world' which is not a product of human activity, is an ideology opposed to Marx's ideology.That's what the article is discussing: the 'materialist' view (which you believe in) that 'there is a physical world we cannot re-order'.The opposing view of Marx (which I believe in, and I refer to as 'idealism-materialism') is that 'there is a mental and physical world we can re-order'.The first 'contemplates' the 'physical', wheras the second aims to 'change' the 'physical'.The point that I'm trying to get across to you (and the other 'materialists') is that there are two ideologies at play here. Youse don't have to agree with a different ideology, but do you understand it?I'll reiterate this: I'm not asking for you to agree with Marx, but to understand Marx.If you understand Marx's arguments, but disagree with them, then we've achieved our aim.

[LBird]

If anyone only has a short time/interest/attention, then probably section 3 The Anthropological Conception of Nature is the part to read (in the book, pp. 27-34).

[Anonymous]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

 The point is: we don't need to understand Marx' philosophy.  We have his public work as an active member of a revolutionary party, we have the political documents, we know what he stood for, and we know that communism/socialism is something he learned from the worker's movement, all he did was help and have a certain élan in his writing style.The bottom line is: if Marx is right, we don't need Marx.  The methods of analysis he developed (not originated) are useful, and we should adopt and develop those methods.  Philosophers only interpret the world.

We do not philosophy, and we do not need philosophers, and Marxism is not a philosophy, it is a socialist theory.Most of the conception indicated on the Communist Manifesto they already existed within the working class movement. Some of his conception about socialism he learned them from the AnarchistsFinal conclusion that we made about a critical analysis of Marx:" Do we need a Marx and Engels today? The answer is mainly yes but partly no. We need people of the intellectual stature of Marx and Engels to help put across our ideas.

[Young Master Smeet]

Lbird,I'm having a hard time squaring your reading of this text with passages such as:

Jordan wrote:

By rejecting mechanistic materialism Marx did not adopt a dialectical but an anthropological conception of nature.[40] By the anthropological conception of nature should be understood the view which, in Marx’s words, leaves ‘the priority of external nature unassailed’ but abolishes the distinction between man and nature, for man’s ‘unceasing sensuous labour and creation’ is ‘the basis of the whole world as it now exists’.[41] If the concept of nature became for Marx a social and historical concept, he cannot be called a dialectical materialist, for the dialectical and the anthropological conception of nature are clearly mutually exclusive.

And I think this is quite key

Jordan wrote:

While according to Marx, man’s practical activity creates an objective world in the indicated sense, objectification should not be conceived as a spiritual but as a natural act and, therefore, as an act of production rather than that of creation in the proper sense, that is, of bringing something into being ex nihilo. Consequently, man’s capacity of objectifying what gratifies his needs and provides him with enjoyment presupposes the ‘sensuous external world’. This external world is the material on which man’s labour becomes manifest, from which and by means of which external objects are produced.[46]

We do not produce our world ex nihil, but produce based on transforming the stuff as we encounter it: 10,000 years ago, stars were seen with eyes alone, then we invented telescopes, and then gravtic sensors, it is not a poassivce reception of data, but an active interference to produce thought oobjects.  That doesn't mean we can produce such relationships to ordermion a Stanlinist fashion.It means we will, in all probability, never be able to change the spoeed of light in a vacuum, or change the wavelength of yellow[*]*Yes, we can change our eyes so that wavelength appears to be a different colour in mour minds, but that wavelength will continue to exist.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

…that wavelength will continue to exist.

As I've explained, YMS, your ideology of 'materialism' starts from the belief that 'wavelength' existed, exists and will exist, without it being socially produced by humans.The alternative viewpoint, of Marx (and I think explained quite well by Jordan), is that 'wavelength' is an object created by humans, by their social theory and practice.  This is very similar to Pannekoek's view that we create the 'laws of nature'.Again, as I've said, you don't have to agree with Marx's view (although I do), but the point is to understand Marx's notion of humanity as its own creator and the creator of its own world (a socio-natural world).There's no point just repeating what you believe (ie. your ideology) about 'wavelength exists without humans', because I already understand what you're saying (as I have what all the other 'materialists' here are saying).The point is, the ideology of 'materialism' ('wavelength' exists without being brought into existence by human social theory and practice) is not the ideology of Marx's 'social productionism'.I'm not arguing with you, YMS, about your 'materialism' (you're welcome to hold whatever ideology you think best suits your political purposes), but about the differing views about Marx's ideology: clearly, Jordan doesn't show that Marx agrees with your beliefs; in fact, Jordan's explanation is counter to your 'materialist' ideological views.

[LBird]

I should add, YMS, that the selections that you've quoted from Jordan, above, actually support my argument regarding Marx's views, of social theory and practice upon inorganic nature producing organic nature, and that organic nature is thus socio-historic, and so we can change it.

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

.We produce what we call 'physical'.The 'physical world' is a social product.

 This is why this whole argument is becoming bogged down in boring semantics.  We don't actually "produce" the physical world in the sense that rocks did not exist before human beings came along and then they somehow  brought rocks into existence or "produced" them with a wave of some magic wand. I don't think even LBird is daft enough to suggest that What I think  LBird is trying to say in his cumbersome obtuse academic language is that our knowledge or apperception of "rocks" is socially produced which I don't think anyone here is actually disagreeing with.  As YMS states this idea is "unobjectionable".  I agree. Isn't it high time this conversation moved on instead of forever going around in circles?

[Author]

Posts