[DJP]

LBird wrote:

… Piketty can logically argue that it can happen again?Can reforms once again reduce the 'top 10% wealth share' to '60%'?If not, why not?

That begs the question. Was it reforms that affected the distribution of wealth, or something else i.e economic conditions?

[DJP]

gnome wrote:

This issue will be discussed again by the EC this coming Saturday and hopefully some decisive action will finally be taken.  Among the various submissions made to the EC is a personal email from myself.

That's presuming "decisive action" hasn't already been taken.Work moving the site over to a new server with a different company has been ongoing for the last two weeks, and is nearing completion. It is a long and complicated process and we have been working on fixing other outstanding issues with the site (i.e search function). No changes in performance will happen until we actually flick the switch.Unfortunately you'll just have to bear with us..

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Marx wasn't a materialist

Karl Marx wrote:

I am a materialist

Obviously it was Marx that was wrong.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

If 'ideas' are 'just another part of the material', why don't rocks have ideas? Why don't ideas come from humans, animals and rocks, if the term 'material' is sufficient to cover all aspects?

I might suggest the highly contronversial hypotheisis that this is because rocks don't have brains.Ideas are just the functional activity of the brain. Nothing more and nothing less, just like digestion is the functional activity of the gut.What's your take on it?

Quote:

In a nutshell, DJP, 'materialism' is crude. So crude, that it provides us with no defence against the 'religious', who can also read of the travails of 'science' since Einstein. 

What's crude is your narrow understanding of what is meant by physicalism / materialism. Einstein was a materialist after all!Watch the Dennett or Harris video's I posted. Or re-read the quote by Sokal. All these people are materialists and in no way put forward the kind of two dimensional thinking that you think that "materialism" should amount to…

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

The materialists insist 'ideas' come from 'material', whereas we communists insist ideas come from humans. 

Ideas come from humans (and other animals) yes I agree. But humans and their ideas are just another part / aspect of the material / physical world *because that is all that exists*.Remember I agreed with you about the faults of a crude "base-superstructure" model of "historical materialism"…

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

No argument or debate – just the dismissing of critical views. Bit like 'religion', eh?

Well if you think that having pretty much the same conversation for about a year now amounts to no argument or debate, feel free..I'm pretty sure everyone's bored of it now.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Unfortunately, as many thinkers have pointed out, ‘materialism’ is a form of ‘idealism’.

Was that the same guy that said that circles are a type of square? He was friends with the guy that thinks that it was true that the sun used to go around the earth wasn't he?

[DJP]

Actually despite the media harping UKIPs percentage of the vote has actually fallen.http://www.libdemvoice.org/about-that-ukip-earthquake-farage-partys-national-voteshare-down-on-2013-40267.html

[DJP]

stuartw2112 wrote:

When I say knows it inside out, I mean, he knows it inside out. I don't mean he repeats it verbatim for the satisfaction of dogmatists and sectarians. 

i don't think that's a really fair comment about Kliman or Aufheben.Yes it's true they both criticise Graeber, I think there criticisms are sound.Any theory is good if it offers some explanatory and predictive power, if another theory comes along that does both better the older one should be rejected. I don't see Graeber as offering any improvements..

[DJP]

stuartw2112 wrote:

I have read Graeber, who knows his Marx inside out

LOL. I have don't think that's the case at all. But that's probably one for another day!

[DJP]

I was just trying to tease something out of you..FWIW worth these are a few things that I'm running with

Alan Sokal – Defense of a Modest Scientific Realism wrote:

Since no existing theory purports to be a final theory, there is no reason to consider it as literally true or to worry too much about whenether the entities it postualtes "really exist". Or rarther, when worrying about whether the unobservable entities of a given theory "really exist", it is important to distinguish existence as a fundamental constituent of the universe for existence in some course-grained sense. It is a reasonable guess that none of the theoretical entities in our present-day theories are truly fundamental, and that all of the theoretical entities in our present-day well-confirmed theories will maintain some status as dervied entities in future theories.

Simon Blackburn – Truth wrote:

..once we have an issue to decide, it comes with its own norms. Once the issue is the issue, relativism becomes a distraction

[DJP]

What makes a theory beautiful?What is it that makes something seem true?

[DJP]

stuartw2112 wrote:

"For starters the question remains when faced with competing 'stories' how do we go about choosing one of them."If Kuhn is right, you don't. You just wait till the last old fucker desperately clinging on to the old ideas is dead, and the new generation can take up the better ones.

Hmmm, not sure about that one.What is it that makes some theories better than other ones?

[DJP]

stuartw2112 wrote:

Sorry, but I think LB is doing such a lousy job at keeping up his end of the argument that I'm going to take it over. The reason, Stuart, that you think you can get everything you need from the FT, and can make some kind of critical sense of it, is because you have had such a thorough grounding in Marxism and socialism, thanks to the SPGB and your own efforts. Even if you are not always conscious of it, this provides a narrative framework, an ideology, a theory, through which you can observe the otherwise disconnected facts presented in the Economist, and make sense of them. This is what Marxism, and all science, provides – a story that makes sense of the facts. As time goes on, you're not even aware that it is a story – it's just "how things are", and it takes an effort of will and thinking and imagination to even begin to see things differently.To which I would say, yes LB, precisely, but sometimes we do need to see things differently if we are to learn anything new.

Well I don't think anyone will disagree with much of that that. In fact you'll even be taught this in the borgoiuse university…The trouble is there's more to it.For starters the question remains when faced with competing 'stories' how do we go about choosing one of them.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Empiricism and common sense are useless for building understanding;

More gush and drivel. Empiricism and 'common sense' are not the same thing for starters.

LBird wrote:

IMO, Marx’s views of capitalism provide us with the best way of understanding the capitalist system. In a nutshell, that means I start from the notion that any owner of socially productive property is a thief, a liar, and doesn’t have a clue about what they are really doing, and know nothing about the history of capitalism. That includes the queen, all religious leaders, The War Criminal Tony Blair, and The British, amongst others.

How does any of that come from Marx's theory of value? Or perhaps you're talking about Groucho Marx?

LBird wrote:

Empiricism and common sense will just gather ‘data’ which supports the unspoken and unacknowledged ‘theory/ideology’ that has been given to the thinker by society. That is, those methods will just produce results that support capitalism.

You seem to be willfully ignorant of the many results from empirical sceince that support the case of socialism.

[Author]

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