[Hud955]

"Socialism must be materially caused or it remains forever unattainable. Socialism must reproduce itself causally, or it is totally unsustainable."That's a grand, abstract statement, twc, and one that is gnomic enough to make it impossible for me to respond to it with any clarity.  One problem is that I'm unclear how you are using the word 'determines' which has a strong and a weak sense, and 'causal', which has an accurate and loose meaning.Marx establishes a number of global axioms, such as 'social being determines consciousness' founded on the claims of historical materialism and then, holding these as his principles of enquiry, goes on to observe, at a certain level of generality,  historical movements within specific societies, those movements being explined through the interconnections of  property, classes and class struggle.   Strictly causal (ie deterministic in its strong sense) explanations are not possible at this level of generalisation.  Society is a complex system, and strictly causal explanations would be beyond us.What Marx does do, is to investigate the developing inner connections within actual historical movements and shows, in particular, where they 'contradict'.  In other words he shows the material forces which have shaped the historical route actually taken.   I can find nothing in Marx's writing, however, which suggests that he believes this actual historical pattern of events was inevitable,  that historical contingencies (determined or undertermined beyond the scope of his or anyone else's investigations) did not play a part within the actual progress of history, or that the class struggle might not have taken a different turn.  it is one thing to analyse the past, another to predict the future.  There is nothing in the MCH, for example,  that in his own time, would have allowed Marx to predict the occurrence and course of the Bolshevik revolution as the form of capitalist revolution in Russia.That means there is no determinacy about socialism either.  On a materialist analysis we have reason to believe that material forces in society: the class struggle and workers' day-to-day experience within it; will tend to shift worker's consciousness in that direction, but how long that will take, what countervailing forces might arise, and how it will play out we have no idea.  We know nothing about how material historical contingencies may affect or even derail this social movement.  Nuclear war or the results of climate change, for example, have the potential to take us on a lengthy detour or set the class struggle off on a different trajectory altogether.  And while the materialist conception of history has the capacity to free us in some degree  from 'necessity', that can only happen if the working class comes to adopt and understand it.So socialism is not materially caused (in the accurate sense), at least at any level that we can comprehend, since the MCH is not deterministic.  It does however give us grounds for believing that it is possible and even likely, because certain material forces that we can comprehend are tending in that direction.  And those of us who are conscious of them can in the meantime act to further social understanding.  An all or nothing –  determinism or bust –  prescription is unnecessary and, indeed, fallacious. 

[Hud955]

Hi twcIf there were no material ‘constraints’ on humanity’s ability to make its own history, then there would be no materialist conception of history.  For socialists, this is a given and we don’t need to elaborate on it.  But it is not legitimate to slide from talking of ‘constraints’ to talking of ‘compulsions’ or from the idea of being ‘constrained’ to that of being ‘thwarted.  The one does not imply the other. Material constraints restrict the range of human agency in both its activity and effect but they do not compel or thwart. To speak of man making his own history is to claim only that the active agent of human history is the human race itself operating within a material and social environment.  It makes no claims about whether the actions of men and women are themselves caused or uncaused, compelled or free.  The force of this statement lies in its inference that the material constraints placed upon humanity, the necessary production and reproduction of real life, the dead hand of past societies, and so on, are not deterministic in the strong sense of that word.Marx, in fact, very rarely speaks in the language of causation.  In the Ethnological Notebooks for example, he analyses pre-state and state societies materially and dialectically.  He searches for their inner connections and identifes their  ‘contradictions.’  He does not analyse them for their causes and effects.  He points out, for example, that ‘common usage’ cannot exist unchallenged alongside state-imposed law, and that communal property cannot long exist alongside a patriarchal form of social organisation.  By elucidating ‘contradictions’, he also discovers possibile trajectories of development.  And it's because material conditions offer possibilities not tram lines that the human race can make its own history.  Nowhere that I know of in Marx is there any sense of an evolutionary or determinist theory of history.  Nowhere does he say, for example, that this form of society must follow that one as a matter of necessity.  He always treats forms of social organisation as individual and specific.  If they share common features, he may identify these, but he never abstracts those features to build them into a typology.It’s also illegitimate to slide from the idea of a human race that 'makes its own history' to one that 'controls its own history'.  The players in a game of cricket are the agents that collectively 'make' each individual match.  Though each match follows certain rules and has certain regularities, no two games are identical.  Yet, despite making the game, the players don't control the outcome.  If they did, we would soon see bookies going out of business.  I agree, of course, that the greater our conscious understanding of our own social (as well as our physical) environment, the greater the freedom with which we can carve out our lives from our material environments, but it does not follow that because we do not consciously control our own history that we are not the agents that make it.  I think two distinct ideas are being conflated here.I would also contest generalising and universalising statements about the ability of foraging groups to consciously comprehend and manage their own social processes. There is always a matter of degree.   If by ‘primitive’ you mean ‘first’, or ‘earliest’ and are referring to peope who lived in pre-class groups before the modern human era  (the only accurate use of the term ‘primitive’, I think), then there is little we can definitely say about how conscious they were of their own social processes because, despite the ingenuity of archaeologists,  they have left little evidence behind them that we can ‘read’.  We can’t project the results of modern hunter gatherer studies back onto ancestral societies, but, we can use our knowledge of them to raise a few hypotheses.  Although you are right that modern hunter gatherer societies understand themselves and their world partly through the medium of myth, that is by no means the only way they understand it.  All of these groups appear to have a deeply ‘rational’  understanding not just of their physical environment but also of their own social processes, and that gives them the ability to manage their communities in very subtle and complex ways.  I suspect socialists could learn something from how they go about this.

[Hud955]

Hi SteveI think given the history of all that has happened, and so recently, there is still a lot of raw feeling about and some resentment is bound to leak out in any discussion.  And because, in situations like this it is so easy to misconstrue even the most innocent remark, I think you are absolutely right to just let the process of debate take its course for now without comment. And painful though it has been, I think there have been some positive lessons learned from all this.  Let's hope we can build on that.Richard

[Hud955]

twc wrote:

"I see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history in the very domain where it can most readily be tested. But that’s matter for another thread.Suffice to say here that, if we treat the materialist conception of history as only “a guiding principle”, we remain scientifically bankrupt — bereft of any definite principle on how to proceed other than by what suits us.Moreover, Marx didn’t say that the materialist conception of history was a guiding principle of his studies. He said it was the guiding principle of his studies. That tiny the, in Robert Frost’s estimation, makes “all the difference”.

 No I see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history either, nor to treat it as anything other than the fundamental principal of socialist analysis, but that still leaves open the question of how we apply it.   Marx's own use of it was to oppose the dialectical to the aetiological, the materially specific to the abstract, and the historical to the evolutionary.  Beyond that he has left us a wide open road.  We know though that the MCH can't be used deterministically.  But this is no argument against it.  Scientific theories do not have to be deterministic at all levels of organisation. According to the MCH, man makes his own history and is not a mechanical puppet whose strings are being pulled  by some (impossible) meta-historical process. At some point we have to come out of our heads, drop theory and start to function as practical socialists, ie as actors and agents within history and not theorists of it.  And though these two aspects of our existence as socialists in a capitalist society are related, they do not make exactly the same demands on us.  So the way we understand the behaviour of hunter gatherers requires one approach.  The way we treat information about them as socialist propagandists requires another.  If we find, therefore, that band hunter gatherer society is egalitarian then we value and make use of that.  It gives us an uncomplicated way of promoting our case as well as enabling us to dismantle many of the myths of capitalist ideology.  Within an emergent historical process, such things may be of no little significance. 

[Hud955]

There seems to be an ongoing disagreement about what is and isn't Zeitgiest.  Before this meeting I asked a Zeitgeist representative whether Federico was speaking on behalf of the movement or for himself and was told he was speaking for the Zeitgeist movement.  When I introduced him in these terms, Federico corrected me and said that he was speaking for himself.  In a previous debate we had with a Zeitgeist speaker we were given a similarly personal account (focused on the banking system).  And again, when I attended a talk in London by a guy billed as the TZM Education Co-ordinator (or something similar, I forget exactly) he spent a great deal of time talking about the Venus Project as though the two organisations were still linked.  So, would the real Zeitgeist movement please stand up!

[Hud955]

 Some good points twc.  I think we have to be very wary of romanticising hunter-gatherers, as well as drawing inappropriate conclusions from them, even if we would like to claim that of itself common ownership gives rise to harmonious social behaviour.   From a practical propagandist point of view, however, I doubt, for example, whether any woman is going to be reassured by the argument that ‘rape’ in socialistic hunter-gatherer societies is merely a mistaken bourgeois appellation.  I think she is going to be much more impressed by the fact that rape is in reality extremely rare within such societies.  Unfortunately we cannot say the same about the murder rate (or in-group killings, if you prefer.)   But, I agree,  we have to explain hunter gatherer behavour not try to reimagine them .I'm not sure that 'primitive consciousness' as far as we can infer it is as entirely alien as you suggest.  From what I've read it doesn't appear to be that alien at all.  Hunter gatherers perform stupendous feats of collective logistical reasoning (of a kind we can appreciate and understand very clearly) in their daily lives, and their mythologies are simply explanatory models.  Even their fear or witchcraft isn't all that hard to understand in a culture that sustains horoscopes in all the popular dailies, and that touches wood, and takes care to walk around black cats. 

[Hud955]

Hi twcI can't disagree with what you say, except perhaps to add that in oral traditions mythologies are far from fixed and have been observed to develop from generation to generation.  As we would expect therefore, mytholgies adapt relatively freely to changes in the social and natural environements of hunter-gatherer groups.  I'd therefore guess (though I don't know) that the 'dead hand' of the past lies less heavily upon them than upon later class societies whose mythologies (ideologies) support power groups which fight to preserve them.  The egalitarianism of band hunter gatherer groups appears to be very fragile, and can be broken by the smallest changes in productive of distributive methods.  If immediate-return groups start to store food, for example, stratification within their society begins to develop.  There is a current hypothesis among social anthropologists that some groups at least understand this and, wishing to preserve their current egalitarian arrangements, actively avoid the storage of food, even when it would be possible and more convenient to them. As there are no living hunter-gatherer groups of any 'kind' that are not now in contact with class societies (and in some case haven't been for centuries, even going back before colonial contact) many hunter gatherer groups have become very conscious of the specific nature of their own social arrangements and act to preserve them.  Even those for whom hunting and gathering is now a secondary activity are successfully maintining a way of life that is increasingly out of synch with their material conditions.  How long they will be able to maintain this is an interesting question.  In some cases, as with some Australian Aboriginal groups, they are actively reinventing their traditions.  Something that we are familiar with here in the west. 

[Hud955]

DJP wrote:

 What do you think about this one?

from Libcom My mum would understand it instantly. 

[Hud955]

OMG!  Tinkling piano and  'Live as one and speak the language of smiles'    (Samuel Smiles was that?) The problem with advertising companies is that they can only ever reach trade-association consciousness.  V I Abramovich

[Hud955]

ALB wrote:

Forgot to add that I've got A Level Ancient History.

Well, since we are all showing off here.  I have a degree in History and English as well.  It was pants!  And we didn't study anything from the pleistocene epoch – except for one module on the Thatcher administration.

[Hud955]

steve colborn wrote:

As an aside, I will draw your attention to the prior post, re the 1991 conference resolution on "law" etc. it would be of intellectual and personal interest to ascertain your opinion of the same.

(And thanks, Adam for the quotes)Hiya SteveInteresting point.I agree with the idea that we shouldn't refer to 'laws' in socialism since 'law' is indissolubly linked in our own society with the coercive powers of the state.  For the same reason I think we should avoid terms like 'police' as well.  Language of that sort can give the wrong impression, especially to people who are still struggling to disentangle their understanding of the socialist case from all the unquestioned assumptions of capitalist ideology. And since few of us can escape from our capitalist conditioning completely, using such terms ourselves is likely to confuse our thinking.I'm reluctant, personally, to speculate much about the institutional structures of socialism beyond the fundamentals and what we can reasonably infer from them – which I think is not much. I can't believe, for instance, that once socialism has been introduced and bedded down that its values or institutions will necessarily be the same all over the world or unchanging over time. If I'm right about that, then it becomes difficult to make definite statements at all – even speculative ones about how socialim will be. I'm thinking right off the top of my head here, but perhaps we would communicate more clearly if we focused more on what would not be the case in socialism.  Maybe some fairly clear and definite statements of that kind might be possible, to get the idea across. I don't know.  Any thoughts on that?The particular value of ethnographical studies of living hunter gatherer societies to archaeologists (I'm ruining my future talk on this now) is not that they (archaeologists) can infer anything definite about ancestral societies from them but that they can use them as a fruitful source of hypotheses which they can be tested.  Maybe to socialists their main value is that they provide us with a few hypotheses about what the danger points for socialist society might be, and how they might be handled. (They might also prevent us making rash assertions about the relationship of base to superstructure in classless societies).  I'm very impressed for instance, by the fact that in band hunter gatherers a general state of egalitarianism isn't a natural outgrowth of such societies, but has to be maintained, primarily through social approval and disapproval, and above all by the use of humour and leg pulling.  The main disruptive forces in these societies tend to be young men's egos, sexual competitiveness and status seeking. I'm not sure I agree entirely with twc – if I understand him correctly – that hunter gatherer societies act entirely unconsciously, as there appears to be quite a lot of evidence that they are very aware of the kind of social and even productive activities that can disturb the equilibrium of their groups, and they have very subtle and elaborate ways of dealing with them.This is a very long-winded way of answering your question isn't it?  I think that socialist society will rely very heavily on social approval and disapproval to maintain the status quo.  When that fails, then it will have to take some kind of coercive action. If hunter gatherer societies provide us with any real warnings, then socialism will need to keep coercive activity to an absolute minimum, not for ideological reasons, which are secondary, but because it could pull classless society wide apart. 

[Hud955]

steve colborn wrote:

Hud I think, nay I know, from the discourse so far, that it is you rather than SP who is trying to "intepret cultural 'values' for people whose social conditions are so different from ours". SP does not disavow that a materialist conception of history is very important but he recognises that it runs concurrently with a value system that human beings have. Whereas those who only relate to the materialist idiom, deny any input from the human value aspect, or at the most, relegate it to a very low importanceSteve.

 No sir, this is a vile slander.  I am not trying to interpret cultural values at all.  I don't have the expertise to do that.  All I can do is report what anthropologists collectively say.  I'll leave the in-depth analysis to others.  But on this point, you have consistently traduced those who have promoted the materialist conception of history on this thread as 'mechanistic' and have failed to acknowledge that the materialist conception of history does not 'run concurrently with the value system (I would say systems) that human beings have', as you claim, but includes them.  Nobody here, I think, would deny that human beings have values or that the materialist conception of history ignores them.  But the importance they are given will depend on the perspective from which you apply the MCH.  If we are trying to explain the actions of the working class within capitalism, and showing that those actions are tending towards socialism, then their individual values do not have any historical dynamic and are of relatively little account.  (Unless, of course, you really are a dyed in the wool idealist and you believe that the universe is inevitably progressing towards an embodiment of the idea of empathy – or some such twaddle.)  If we are asking how we can make more individual socialists, then that's a different matter and the values of individuals will clearly have some bearing on the matter.   What I don't believe is that it is necessary for individuals to hold specific values or motivations before socialism is possible, or that the values held at this time will necessarily be the values that will predominate once socialism is established, or even that the values a socialist society will develop will remain fixed from that point on.  Another thing that band hunter gatherer societies can tell us is that though they have some fundamental features in common, they also differ in their value systems in many ways as well. In other words, we can make no 'mechanistic' assumption about the relationship of base to superstructure.  An assumption which I take to be quite vulgar!So, there sir.  Have at you…!

steve colborn wrote:

Hud, no straw men applied by me, moreover, it is you, yourself, who disavow anyone's view that does not coincide with your own. No more dogmatic statements from here, than from the other side of the discussion, either. I do have relevant qualifications, a degree in Politics/Sociology. Whilst not in the fields of anthropology or paleo-anthropology, it is, nevertheless in the field of the "social sciences".Steve.

My goodness, this is fun. You are a feisty soul, Steve! (Ooops! a bit of my Catholic upbringing erupting there). I take it by this that you mean that I disagree with you and SP. And indeed you are right. I do. (Well, I think I do, since I'm not entirely sure what your larger argument is beyond the immediate crossing of swords.) So, that's it, is it? You, me, all of us, we are all dogmatic! That's not a level of honesty you often find among SPGBers in the heat of debate. Does that mean the arguments I and others have been advancing are valueless? Does it mean all of our arguments are valueless? I'm confused. What does it mean?

[Hud955]

SocialistPunk wrote:

Hud955 wrote:

Hud955 wrote:Picking casual quotes from the Daily Mail, (of all places), or isolated pieces of research demonstrates nothing

SocialistPunk wrote:

I chose that piece deliberately because it was in the Daily Mail. The research it refers to can be found in many locations on the internet.

Now this slick piece of willful distortion.

Hud955 wrote:

If SP wants to base his understanding of the world on an article in the Daily Mail, then so be it.  I shan't challenge that any further.

 

Hud955 wrote:

No, I have no qualifications in social anthropology, but I do have qualifications in philosophy of science and mathematics and so I do have a notion or two about the logic of scientific reasoning and can tell a rational argument from a fabricated one.

For a person who claims a knowledge of scientific reasoning, Hud is very fond of distortion. But I guess the world of science is littered with one-upmanship at all costs. Quite sad coming from a socialist.

 LOL  Not distortion SP, blindness, possibly.  I hadn't absorbed that remark.  But it wouldn't have changed my mind In any case.  In your enthusiasm to expose me as a distorter, however, you somehow neglected to respond to the main part of my post which was this: " I'm suggesting though that before he draws knee jerk conclusions from such second-hand and uncontextualised information, which provides no independent reason to accept it, he would do well to read some comparative studies that give a more rounded understanding of hunter gatherers than he will find in individual articles found in odd places on the web." As Steve says you are a man of wide reading, you can appreciate that scientific research is frequently contradictory and not simple to interpret, and that drawing global conclusions from the results of individual research projects is rarely a sound procedure.  You asked me if I would still make the same statements and I replied, yes I would, and the reason for that is I would rather trust a synoptic account of the evidence than a result of one piece of fieldwork, especially of this kind, which requires a fair bit of 'reverse engineering' – drawing conclusions about function from a study of form.   But in any case.  I don't think for one moment that the conclusions of such research in any way contradict the conclusions of most anthropologists about social attitudes among band hunter gatherers.  As I already pointed out (though maybe you didn't notice that) of course we would expect people in hunter gatherer groups to have the same basic emotions as the rest of humanity.  But values are not emotions and as twc has been quietly pointing out values have a historical and material foundation, and are not a simple and direct expression of some kind of innate emotional nature.  

[Hud955]

LOL, Steve.  You are setting up a straw man here.  No, I have no qualifications in social antrhopology, but I do have qualifications in philosophy of science and mathematics and so I do have a notion or two about the logic of scientific reasoning and can tell a rational argument from a fabricated one.  If SP wants to base his understanding of the world on an article in the Daily Mail, then so be it.  I shan't challenge that any further.  I'm suggesting though that before he draws knee jerk conclusions from such second-hand and uncontextualised information, which provides no independent reason to accept it,  he would do well to read some comparative studies that give a more rounded understanding of hunter gatherers than he will find in individual articles found in odd places on the web. and can I suggest that you are in no position to preach about credibility, since your own lack of professional qualificants in this field did not prevent you from making some pretty dogmatic statements on this subject a few posts back – statements which I am sure you intended to be taken very seriously.  If socialists only spoke about subjects they had academic qualifications in we would all be a lot less vocal than we are.  We can all read and we can think and we can all debate.  So, let's not get too quickly into undermining each other for dubiously partisan reasons. 

[Hud955]

steve colborn wrote:

I could not disagree more with your post twc. Once again you, as others have done before, argue on the purely "mechanistic" level. You talk about the materialist conception of history, as if it were some holy grail, when in fact, it is merely an overarching theory of social development. No more no less. It pays no heed to the fact that, what is under the microscope are thinking, conscious human beings! Each individual in so many different and varied ways.The values that are so glibly sidestepped, as of no more than a side issue, are not merely fundamental to the case for Socialism but are intrinsically linked to it, intertwined if you like.If you take the "human element" away from the case for Socialism, you devalue not only it but any resultant society, that will be brought about by, "human beings", working together cooperatively, on a conscious level.By the way, I fundamentally disagree that a thoroughgoing knowledge of Marx is a necessity to understanding the case for and the need for a change in society and with it, the concomitant change in societal relationships. Steve.

 Calling people's views 'mechanistic', Steve isn't an argument; it is just a way of trying to dismiss them.  The question is not whether they are 'mechanistic' but whether they are true or reliable. Nobody, is removing the human element from socialist theory.  That's a complete misconception, as far as I can see, and a probable cause of your calling it 'mechanistic.'  I certainly don't have a mechanistic view of Marxian socialism, but I do have a materialist one.  Marx did not claim that the materialist conception of history was even a 'theory'.  He called it a 'working method'.  And that is what it is.  A set of principles we can use to get a handle on the movements of society through historical (and pre-historical) time.  And the MCH comprehends values and the individual just as much as it comprehends material conditions and society.  But it acknowledges that society is not just a summation of random individuals with random types of relationship.  Society is ordered – into classes principally – and that creates structured not random relationships.  It claims that these relationships are likely to focus 'values' in a certain direction. It recognises, in fact, that society is greater than the sum of its parts and that it has its own dynamic.  By placing your primary focus on the individual is to deny this, and as a result to deny any reason we have to suppose that socialism has any chance of coming about.  In fact, the undue emphasis that you put on the individual and values is as limiting as the udue evidence your imaginary opponents place on 'mechanical' considerations.   So maybe this debate is really a big non-argument.  Have we just got polarised?  From the point of view of propagandising for socialism and for growing the SPGB, we need at this point in time to relate to and talk to individuals, who are going to receive what we say through the medium of their 'values' whatever those values might be.  (Personally, I dislike this term.  It's a technical coinage of the social sciences and used to include all sorts of things that no-one would call 'values' in ordinary speech.) The MCH argues however, that among the working class majority those values, whatever form they take, will ultimately tend to conform to, or be overwhelmed by,  their interests and eventually focus on socialism as a goal.  In claiming that, it gives us a reason for being socialists and propagandising for socialism in the first place.  it creates purpose and direction out of randomness.  And we need some reason to believe that there is some tendency in that direction, since human values have been many and various over time, some co-operative and altruistic, some divisive and selfish, and they have not so far shown an independent tendency to evolve in the direction of socialism as far as I can see.  That needs to come from somewhere else – from history and material conditions as propsed by the MCH. Looking at this another way.  If values were all we needed we could have got socialism during the middle ages.

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