DJP
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LBird wrote:Put simply, Marx wasn't a 'materialist', in the common usage of that term, which is the exclusion of the 'ideal'.
And this is where you are going wrong. Most people that use the term "materialism" will not be denying the existence of ideas / mental phenomena / experience etc (though they won't be calling it the 'ideal'). It just that 'mental' is a catergory of "material" phenomena, just as "cow" is a catergory of the phenomena we refer to as "animals". You just seem to keep reverting to the same Cartesian dualisms..I'm putting a longer quote in the hope that it might inspire a ligtbulb moment…
Strawson wrote:Materialism is the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical. It is a view about the actual universe, and for the purposes of this paper I am going to assume that it is true.It has been characterized in other ways. David Lewis once defined it as ‘metaphysics built to endorse the truth and descriptive completeness of physics more or less as we know it’, and this cannot be faulted as a terminological decision. But it seems unwise to burden materialism—the view that every real concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical—with a commitment to the descriptive completeness of physics more or less as we know it. There may be physical phenomena which physics (and any non‐revolutionary extension of it) cannot describe, and of which it has no inkling, either (p.20) descriptive or referential. Physics is one thing, the physical is another. ‘Physical’ is a natural‐kind term—it is the ultimate natural‐kind term —and no sensible person thinks that physics has nailed all the essential properties of the physical. Current physics is profoundly beautiful and useful, but it is in a state of chronic internal tension. It may be added, with Russell and others, that although physics appears to tell us a great deal about certain of the general structural or mathematical characteristics of the physical, it fails to give us any further insight into the nature of whatever it is that has these structural or mathematical characteristics—apart from making it plain that it is utterly bizarre relative to our ordinary conception of it.It is unclear exactly what this last remark amounts to (is it being suggested that physics is failing to do something it could do?), but it already amounts to something very important when it comes to what is known as the ‘mind–body problem’. Many take this to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But those who think this are already lost. For the fact is that we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena. If we consider the nature of our knowledge of the physical, we realize that ‘no problem of irreconcilability arises’. Joseph Priestley saw this very clearly over two hundred years ago, and he was not the first. Noam Chomsky reached essentially the same conclusion over thirty years ago, and he was not the last. Most present‐day philosophers take no notice of it and waste a lot of time as a result: much of the present debate about the ‘mind–body’ problem is beside the point.[…]Genuine materialism requires concerted meditative effort. Russell recommends ‘long reflection’. If one hasn't felt a kind of vertigo of astonishment, when facing the thought, obligatory for all materialists, that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon in every respect, including every experiential respect—a sense of having been precipitated into a completely new confrontation with the utter strangeness of the physical (the real) relative to all existing common‐sense and scientific conceptions of it—, then one hasn't begun to be a thoughtful materialist. One hasn't got to the starting line.Some may find that this feeling recurs each time they concentrate on the mindbody problem. Others may increasingly think themselves—quietistically, apophatically, pragmatically, intuitively—into the unknownness of the (non‐mental) physical in such a way that they no longer experience the fact that mental and non‐mental phenomena are equally physical as involving any clash. At this point ‘methodological naturalism’—the methodological attitude to scientific enquiry into the phenomena of mind recommended by Chomsky—will become truly natural for them, as well as correct. I think it is creeping over me. But recidivism is to be expected: the powerfully open state of mind required by true materialism is hard to achieve as a natural attitude to the world. It involves a profound reseating of one's intuitive theoretical understanding of nature.I think you're mistaken. Marx was clearly a goatist, that is he thought that everything is a goat. I have used the Microsoft Word autocorrect feature to correct the entire Marx and Engles collected works so now every reference to "material" and "materialism" has been changed to "goat" and "goatism" respectivly.More on goatism can be found here:https://philosophynow.org/issues/71/Everything_is_a_Goat
This could have been written in responce to Brand and his "spiritual" revolution:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1989/no-1020-august-1989/personal-growth-or-social-revolution
alanjjohnstone wrote:Lets be very clear…the Enclosure Acts deprived the rural workers of a livlihood and drove them to seek work in the new factory sustem in the growing urban centres.It's not quite that simple. Yes those things did happen but that is not till quite late on and wasn't the only process whereby the formation of capitalism took place, eclosure laws where pretty much one of the last pieces of the jigsaw. See my article here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1284-august-2011/rise-capitalism
SocialistPunk wrote:As I'm not the one claiming our class conceived the "work ethic", it's up to YMS to present the evidence. But I'll log it in my books to read list.FWIW no-one's obliged to spoon feed you. If you really are interested in these things you should take the time to learn about it yourself. The origins of capitalism where not some kind of clever con trick inserted by a clever elite from the outside but the result of a process of which the to-be working class did play an active role….
SocialistPunk wrote:I still need proof of the "work ethic"being a concept of our class and not as my socialist education taught me, before I ditch it. If shown the error of my thinking I will amend it accordingly.If you're feeling brave try reading EP Thompson "The Making of the English Working Class" or something like that…
ALB wrote:Black Blob anarchists reject Brand here:http://blackrobinanarchy.blogspot.nl/2014/10/russell-brand-anarchist-critique-of-his.htmlI think this guy got "Anarchist" and "Ninja" mixed up.
LBird wrote:I think that I've done my best to show why 'materialism' can't provide a critical basisAll you've done is shown that you don't really get what "materialism" means.Perhaps this will help…
Galen Strawson – Real Materialism wrote:Realistic materialists—realistic anybodys—must grant that experiential phenomena are real, concrete phenomena, for nothing in this life is more certain. They must therefore hold that they are physical phenomena. It may sound odd to use the word ‘concrete’ to characterize the qualitative character of experiences of colour, gusts of depression, thoughts about diophantine equations, and so on, but it isn't, because ‘concrete’ simply means ‘not abstract’. For most purposes one may take ‘concrete’ to be coextensive with ‘possessed of spatiotemporal existence’, although this will be directly question‐ begging in some contexts. It may also sound odd to use ‘physical’ to characterize mental phenomena like experiential phenomena: many materialists talk about the mental and the physical as if they were opposed categories. But this, on their own view, is like talking about cows and animals as if they were opposed categories. For every concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical, according to materialists. So all mental phenomena, including experiential phenomena, are physical phenomena, according to materialists: just as all cows are animals. So what are materialists doing when they talk, as they so often do, as if the mental and the physical were entirely different? What they may mean to do is to distinguish, within the realm of the physical, which is the only realm there is, according to them, between the mental and the non‐mental, or between the experiential and the non‐ experiential; to distinguish, that is, between mental (or experiential) features of the physical, and non‐mental (or non‐experiential) features of the physical[…]Materialism, then, is the view that every real concrete phenomenon is physical in every respect, but a little more needs to be said, for experiential phenomena— together with the subject of experience, assuming that that is something extra—are the only real, concrete phenomena that we can know with certainty to exist, and as it stands this definition of materialism doesn't even rule out idealism—the view that mental phenomena are the only real phenomena and have no non‐mental being— from qualifying as a form of materialism! Now there is a sense in which this consequence of the definition is salutary (see e.g. §§14–15 below), but it would none the less be silly to call an idealist view ‘materialism’. Russell is right to say that ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’, but it is reasonable to take materialism to be committed to the existence of non‐experiential being in the universe, in addition to experiential being, and I shall do so in what follows.I wonder if LBird thinks that 'cows' and 'animals' are opposing catergories?FWIW worth this is the same mistake he is making in his understanding of "material" and "mental" (or perhaps better put as experiencial)..
"Externalities" are costs / benefits that are not included in the price of a good or service.It is precisily the type of information above that is not included in the pricing mechanism.Productive decisions in socialism would not be made by isolated "consumers" choosing products as the appear at the end of the production process. Everyone would both a producer and consumer and directly involved in the productive process in one way or another, remember "producers" and also "consumers".
Ah sorry I see the confusion. You're talking about the Yahoo group not this web forum. Unfortunately I can't help you. Try contacting the forum moderator or yahoo…
Just typing something into the comment box should work. Regardless of if you pastse or not. If you have the time and date of the failed posts I could look in the server log. If not we'll just have to put it down to the gremlins.
