[DJP]

ALB wrote:

What's wrong in principle with underground coal gasification?

I guess C02 emissions. But this isn't the same thing as shale fracking is it? Not sure what the connection is in the post above?

[DJP]

SocialistPunk wrote:

I get the overall concept….err…. I think. It's like when I compared it to theoretical physics. The general concept forms in my mind but when I try to grasp it, as in trying to explain to someone else, I find I don't understand it quite enough. I then have to go back to the drawing board.Is that a problem? I don't know, should it be?

Think it sounds fairly normal for learning anything new. Get a little notepad and just scribble things down as though you're answering questions someone is asking you, and think of more questions they could ask. That's how I try and learn things now…

[DJP]

Vin wrote:

Believe it or not LBird but, unlike your idealism, materialism includes human beings in 'material conditions' and yes it includes ideasIn fact it is the inculsion of ideas as 'material' that actually defines 'materialism' 

Well yes. But that's a story for another thread…

[DJP]

steve colborn wrote:

There needs to be a rebuttal from the party to this Talley guy.

I don't think the party needs to write a rebuttal since the letter was written to a magazine not us. But there is a forum for anyone so inclined (which isn't me at the moment)http://forum.philosophynow.org/

[DJP]

This was one of the other letters, sounds like he's a Zeitgeist Movement or Venus Project fan

Quote:

We should be aiming for a utopia: the best of societies, the one that provides in the highest degree all that a society should provide to its citizens. In utopia, the individual is the fundamental reality, not the state. Its fundamental concerns are respecting the natural rights of each person, which entails justice and the happiness of each (as opposed to justice and happiness for classes, averages, or majorities). To achieve this, society should be organized under the governance of robots.Utopia would require a minute management of its resources whilst maximizing private liberty and the individual pursuit of happiness. In utopia, the heavy hand of the ruler is not felt, for autonomy is a natural desire and the right of individuals; but the minute management of resources requires absolute power. However, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Utopia is therefore a wonderful balancing act.The most fundamental problem of political philosophy is, ‘Who governs the governors?’ It’s a problem because of the weaknesses of humans: people are too ignorant, too stupid, and too evil to run a utopia. No body of people possesses the requisite vast knowledge and perspective. We cannot think fast enough or rationally enough to make the requisite decisions in a timely way, or perhaps at all. We are too selfish to be trusted to govern others with the requisite altruism. But the problem of who governs the governors disappears when the governors are computers that can be programmed with the requisite knowledge, rationality, and altruism.So the three sciences most needed to create utopia are computer science, economics, and ethics. We have little cause to doubt the ultimate triumph of computer science. Economics – the science of the management of resources – is more difficult. However, there is hope that the economic principles of centralized resource management would be easier to determine than those of capitalism, founded as that is on human capriciousness.Ethics is the most difficult of the three sciences. Philosophers have been working on the subject for over two millennia without yet reaching consensus. Furthermore, the principles of ethics must be reduced to programmable form; and of course they must be correct, else our beautiful robots will turn out to be Frankensteins.John Talley, Rutherfordton, NC

[DJP]

Love like Matteris much Odder than we thought.Auden (1940, ‘Heavy Date’)

[DJP]

SocialistPunk wrote:

What's your opinion?

They're all very good. We showed them at public meetings in Norwich a few years back. This is his website: http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/

[DJP]

Vin wrote:

is a  recognition that a certain group – capitalists – own everything but contribute nothing  sufficient grounds for abolishing the market and wages system?

No. Why would that by and of itself lead to that conclusion? If the only problem is that a minority has a disproportional share of wealth and power isn't a fairer distribution of wealth all that is needed?

[DJP]

Like YMS has said we have to speak of abstract socially necessary labour time because if we didn’t the whole theory wouldn’t be consistent and fall foul of the the “Mudpie” argument and all that…IIncedently what do people think of this guys efforts to explain Marx?

[DJP]

Yes it was in reply to your post immediately above..

[DJP]

How about this? But it would be some help if you could try and say what it is you don't understand first..

Revolutionary Self Theory wrote:

For example: suppose I want a cup of coffee from the machine at work. First of all, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantations and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have all the workers who made the different parts of the machine and assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, drilled the oil and refined it. Then all the workers who transported the raw materials and parts over three continents and two oceans. Then the clerks, typists and communications workers who co-ordinate the production and transportation. Finally you have all the workers who produce all the other things necessary for the others to survive. That gives me a direct material relationship to several million people: in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population. They produce my life: and I help to produce theirs. In this light, all partial group identities and special interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of one's life that is presently locked up in the frustrated creativity of those millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by alienation, warped by the insane rationale of capitalaccumulation! Here we begin to discover a real social identity: in people all over the world who are fighting to win back their lives, we find ourselves.http://theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/revolutionary-self-theory-beginners-manual-anon-1985

Or this

Fredy Perlman wrote:

The everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe. This reproduction is not merely physical, but social as well. Through their daily activities the tribesmen do not merely reproduce a group of human beings; they reproduce a tribe, namely a particular social form within which this group of human beings performs specific activities in a specific manner. The specific activities of the tribesmen are not the outcome of "natural" characteristics of the men who perform them, the way the production of honey is an outcome of the "nature" of a bee. The daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social response to particular material and historical conditions.The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master's authority. To men who live in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.The practical everyday activity of wage-workers reproduces wage labor and capital. Through their daily activities, "modern" men, like tribesmen and slaves, reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations and the ideas of their society; they reproduce the social form of daily life. Like the tribe and the slave system, the capitalist system is neither the natural nor the final form of human society; like the earlier social forms, capitalism is a specific response to material and historical conditions .Unlike earlier forms of social activity, everyday life in capitalist society systematically transforms the material conditions to which capitalism originally responded. Some of the material limits to human activity come gradually under human control. At a high level of industrialization, practical activity creates its own material conditions as well as its social form. Thus the subject of analysis is not only how practical activity in capitalist society reproduces capitalist society, but also how this activity itself eliminates the material conditions to which capitalism is a response.http://theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/reproduction-everyday-life-fredy-perlman-1969

[DJP]

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

A single brick (as a unstructured component) = a use-value,A brick in a wall (as a part of a structure) = an exchange-value,Dog protection (an emergent property of a wall) = value.Or,A tin of beans for eating = a use-valueA tin of beans for sale as a commodity (the structure of capitalism) = an exchange-valueThe emergent causal power of many commodities to destroy human relationships = value.

Kind of reads like a failed answer to a "what is value, exchange value and use value" exam.I suggest you read those first three chapters again…

[DJP]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

DJP, as I said, Value is a simplification, average socially necessary is the next complication.

Actually isn't that what "value" is? Though you probably do need a two step argument..

[DJP]

Wouldn't you have to add "socially necessary average" before "labour time" in the above, and then explain what is meant by that…But I don't really see how it's that difficult. If someone doesn't understand something you just track back to a concept or frame of reference that you both understand then start from there…

[Author]

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