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Funny you should mention this as I’m reading a book on “Anarchist Economics” that AK Press have sent us for review. And what does the first article advocate but “parecon”? I see there’s an Afterword by Michael Albert himself. I’m hoping that in between some more sensible ideas will emerge. After all, there are anarchists who are communists and want the same sort of classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society we do.I can’t understand why some anarchists should fall for Albert’s detailed blueprint for a society which would be a bureaucratic nightmare of form-filling with your consumption monitored by your neighbours and your work performance by your work mates, and with rationing taking place through plastic cards registering the “labour-credits” you’ve earned instead of conventional money.

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Just remembered. Nader can’t plead the Lesser Evil since wasn’t he once a candidate for the US presidency with the result, some say, that George W. Bush (Chomsky’s Greater Evil) got elected instead of Gore?

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Actually, the “Nobel Prize” for Economics is not a real Nobel Prize as it was not provided for in the will of Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896). It was started by the Bank of Sweden in 1968 and seems to be awarded to whoever happens to have put forward the economic theory that is the flavour of the moment. So, when Keynesianism was in it went to one of them. When Monetarism was in one of them got it. I don’t know who gets it today but someone who knows nothing about economics seems appropriate.

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I wonder how Stuart will respond to Nader’s argument !

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Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Or does SPGB stand for ‘Spiritual Party of Great Britain’?

Of course not and the spiritualists don’t think so either, but they do have the honesty to draw attention to our criticism of them as here:http://www.spiritualismlink.com/t1529-science-v-spiritism-socialist-standard-1927-ukAnd here’s the Society for Psychical Research publicising this too:http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=373797202648627&id=295503008217Obviously they consider us worthy, materialist opponents.The full exchange (recently added to our archives section on this site) which went on for months can be found here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1926/no-268-december-1926/materialism-v-spiritism-criticism-and-our-replyhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1927Incidentally, Isabel Kinglsey was a Leninist, expelled from the CPGB for her spiritualist views.

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There’s also this, especially the last two, more general chapters:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/strike-weapon-lessons-miners%E2%80%99-strike

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stuartw2112 wrote:

In the narrower sense of money, ie, money as a commodity (coinage) that facilitates trade, it is as much a myth that it arises naturally out of exchange (barter) as is the idea that markets arise naturally as a result of our tendency to “truck and barter”. (There is no evidence that money or markets ever arose in this way, plenty of evidence to contradict the idea)

Whatever Adam Smith and those who followed him might have thought about money (coinage) emerging out of barter which itself emerged out of some supposed human nature to “truck and barter”, Marx for one was well aware that barter originally arose, not within societies, but between them. He says so explicitly in this passage in one of his published works A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

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The exchange of commodities evolves originally not within primitive communities, but on their margins, on their borders, the few points where they come into contact with other communities. This is where barter begins and moves thence into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating influence upon it. The particular use-values which, as a result of barter between different communities, become commodities, e.g., slaves, cattle, metals, usually serve also as the first money within these communities.

While the State obviously had a role in coinage, surely Graeber can’t be saying that the emergence of money as a “general equivalent” (i.e. a commodity that can be exchanged for all other commodities) had nothing to do with facilitating trade (the exchange of commodities)?

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My argument is not that Dietzgen never read or studied Hegel but that, when he wrote The Nature of Human Brain Work in 1869, where he first put forward his view that all that existed was the ever-changing world of phenomena which was a whole, he was not influenced by Hegel and had probably never read him by then. Later he did, yes. Just re-read this work and with your knowledge of philosophy you should be able to conclude that there is no trace of Hegelian influence in it.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

If he read Feuerbach, then he will have read Hegel (in view of Feuerbach’s own concerns).

What sort of logic is that? Dietzgen read Feuerbach. Feuerbach read Hegel. Therefore Dietzgen read Hegel ! Come on, you’ll have to do better than that. I don’t know which of Feuerbach’s writings Dietzgen would have read but Feuerbach’s reputation and popularity was based on him being a materialist and an atheist, not on being an ex-Hegelian.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

The evidence of his son, and the circumstantial evidence I mentioned suggest that he was influenced by German idealism and/or mystical Hermeticism, most probably from Hegel himself.Indeed, we read this in Some of the Philosophical Essays:”Philosophy has discovered the art of thinking. That it has thereby occupied itself so much with the all-perfect Being, with the conception of God, with the ‘substance’ of Spinoza, with the ‘thing in itself’ of Kant, and with the Absolute of Hegel, has its good reason in the fact that the sober conception of the universe as of the All-One with nothing above or outside or alongside of it, is the first postulate of a skilled and consistent mode of thinking, which both of itself and of all possible and impossible objects that they all belong to one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” (pp.274-75.).

I don’t see anything wrong with this statement of Dietzgen’s. It’s merely saying that the unity idealist philosophers had talked about as being something non-material (God, etc), as did the famous Hermeticists you keep banging on about (was Buddha one?),  was in fact something material. Or what do you think the universe is?

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Well, I didn’t mention the occult, so I think you and I are operating with a different understanding of the word ‘mystical’

You may not have done yourself but you quoted with approval this passage from Glenn Magee which certainly does:

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“…The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.” [Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition  (2001), p.13.

What are these “cosmic energies” if not occult forces? In any event, there is nothing in Dietzgen to suggest that he thought the universe was pervaded by such energies.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Be this as it may, the passage you quoted is full of a priori dogmatic pronouncements and Hegelisms. Dietzgen has plainly bought into Hegel’s mystical notion of a ‘contradiction’ (even though it is plain that the thing he calls a ‘contradiction’ isn’t one, and does not even look like one), among other things.

If you read that passage again you will see that the contradiction was one raised by Kant not Dietzgen and that Dietzgen says it can be resolved by dropping the whole idea that there is a world of things-in-themselves behind the ever-changing and single world of phenomena that we experience.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

It [the theory that everything is interconnected] becomes mystical when applied to the whole of nature since it pretends to give us knowledge that is way beyond anything we could ever espouse to, and which we could never confirm, no matter how hard or how long we tried

In Dietzgen’s version it is not a claim to knowledge but a methodological assumption. Your mistake is to assume that what Dietzgen is saying is that all the physical things in the universe exist as separate entities and are interconnected as such, and that this is statement of alleged fact that can be empirically verified or falsified. If he did make such a claim you might be right that it can’t be verified. But this is not what Dietzgen means. He is saying that, to understand the world around us, you have to start from the assumption that all that “exists” is  the “one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” and so physical objects don’t exist as independent entities but as parts of this whole distinguished and named by the human mind.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Incidentally, this view also provides the ‘rationale’ for Astrology and other assorted ‘New Age’ nostrums. There’s hardly a  mystical system on the planet, as far as we know, that does not or has not viewed the cosmos in this way.

Another example of your eccentric logic. Some “holists” are mystics. Dietzgen is a holist. Therefore Dietzgen is a mystic. 

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stuartw2112 wrote:

As for occult forces, what could be more occult and mystical than Newton’s force of gravity?

For Dietzgen gravity is not a force on its own but a description and explanation for particular events we repeatedly and regularly observe and can predict in the world of phenomena. On the other hand, Buddha’s Seventh Heaven is a figment of the imagination and exists as that, ie it’s a real figment of the imagination.

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Although we criticise syndicalists who think that the way to end capitalism is through a general strike (that would be suicidal with the state machine still in the hands of the capitalist class), this does not necessarily mean that we think that a general strike can never be useful for the working class. Under certain circumstances, this can be an appropriate means of trying to defend living standards and trade union rights. So, for instance, we supported the General Strike in Britain in 1926 and here’s what we commented on a general strike in Belgium in 1960-1The planned general strike in Spain is not going to be a real strike (as these two were) but more of a one-day protest demonstration.  There’s nothing wrong in that but it’s probably not going to have much effect as the law that is being protested against has already been passed by the Spanish parliament and the government (recently elected) is not likely to repeal.  Also, the situation in Spain is (I think) complicated by rival trade union centres. You on the ground in Spain are in a better position than us to judge whether there is an element of one union confederation trying to show that it is more militant than some other one.There was a one-day protest public sector general strike in Britain on 30 November last year. Our discussion of this (and the text of the leaflet we handed out) can be found on this forum here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/30-november-tuc-day-actionIn the end, while showing solidarity to those on strike and joining it if we’re involved, we can’t do much more than JohnD says: argue the case for political action to end the wages system altogether by converting the means of production into the common property of society under democratic social control.

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Gilbert McClatchie.

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I have been following my own advice and re-reading Dietzgen’s The Nature of Human Brain Work (together with Pannekoek’s introduction to it). I can’t find any evidence for him having been influenced by Hegel either in ideas or terminology. The only philosophers mentioned are Kant, David Hume, Alexander von Humboldt and Ludwig Feuerbach.For the record, here is the essence of Dietzgen’s position that is being criticised:

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In the practical world of sense perceptions, there is nothing permanent, nothing homogeneous, nothing beyond nature, nothing like a “thing itself.” Everything is changing, passing, phantomlike, so to say. One phantom is chased by another. “Nevertheless,” says Kant, “things are also something in themselves,” for otherwise we should have the absurd contradiction that there could be phenomena without things that produce them.” But no! A phenomena is no more and no less different from the thing which produces it than the the stretch of a twenty-mile road is-different from the road itself. Or we may distinguish between a knife and its blade and handle, but we know that that there would be no knife if there were no blade and no handle. The essential nature of the universe is change. Phenomena appear, that is all.The contradiction between the ‘thing itself,” or its essence, and its outward appearance is fully solved by a complete critique of reason which arrives at the understanding that the human faculty of thought may generalize any number of varied sense perceptions under one uniform point of view, by singling out the general and equivalent forms and thus regarding everything it may meet as a concrete part of one and the same whole.

Nothing mystical there. No occult forces at work. Nothing occult at all.You say, RL, that you accept the materialist conception of history. This means that, unless you think history is a series of unconnected events, you must accept the concept of history being a continuous stream and a “whole”, from which historians extract, describe and form theories about parts. So, if seeing things as an interconnected whole is acceptable here why does it suddenly become “mystical” when applied to nature and the universe?

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But, Stuart, isn’t this is the thin end of the slippery slope? Where, and how, do you draw the line? How, and when, do you apply the brake to stop ending up arguing that, if you want a particular reform, the best way to get it is to support a party that has a chance of forming a government and so be in a position to implement it (and other reforms), say, Labour? The only other possibility is what we’ve got now: a myriad of single-issue pressure groups campaigning to get existing governments to implement their particular reform.Surely in all this, there’s a need for a group of people to put forward the bigger picture — that only socialism can provide the framework within which the problems facing ordinary people (and which these pressure groups campaign on) can be lastingly solved. Otherwise we’ll never get beyond struggling to go up a downward escalator (or is it a slippery slope?).

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Yes, very interesting. Also this comment:

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These changes in attitudes over a relatively short period of time may reflect the income and wealth inequality message conveyed by Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country in late 2011 that led to a spike in media attention to the topic.

Raising awareness of capitalism by name and its consequences may turn out to be the main achievement of the Occupy movement (they haven’t achieved any concrete reforms, not that some of them wanted to anyway). This raised awareness is certainly something that is making it easier for us to put across the case for socialism as a system of common ownership and democratic control with production for use not for the market and profit.

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Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

So, Dietzgen more closely resembles these mystics than he does scientists. Indeed, he pinched this idea from Hegel and the German naturphilosophers — who in turn lifted it from Jakob Boehme and Plotinus, among others.

I think you need to re-read Dietzgen The Nature of Human Brain Work (1869). He didn’t pinch his basic idea from Hegel (there is no evidence that he had read any Hegel by then, Hegel being a “dead dog” by 1869). He got it from Kant. In fact, one way of seeing his theory is that it is Kant’s without the idea that behind what we experience there is a thing-in-itself that can’t know anything about. So all that exists is the ever-changing world of phenomena which humans try to understand by naming, describing and classifying its parts (Dietzgen’s theory of knowledge and of science). This doesn’t imply the existence of “cosmic energies” (in fact it denies this) or anything mystical like that (which I agree Hegel was).

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

And thanks for the Pannekoek reference, but I have a copy of the book you mention, and have read it. …  I thnk he is wrong about Lenin (but we can duiscuss this another time)

Actually, it would be interesting to discuss it. Do you mean that you don’t think that Leninism was an ideology for the state-capitalist development of economically backward countries?

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

No, I don’t have a theory of science, and nor do I want one — and nor do we need one. As I pointed out, all such theories are non-sensical

Yes you do, actually. It seems to be that (as in the quote from Glenn Magee) “the cosmos is …  a loosely connected set of particulars”, ie that the “particulars” have an independent existence and are not parts of a greater whole (which inevitably means that there are inter-related if only for that reason). I don’t think this theory is non-sensical, just a different, less adequate one.

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