LBird
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robbo203 wrote:
“[LBird wrote:] If you argue ‘the specialists themselves should control the social theory and practice of the specialists, not society as a whole democratically‘, that’s fine, it’s a political and philosophical position which I don’t share.Lets look at this
firstly I don’t really know what you are getting at when you say this.”
robbo, you’re arguing that “the specialists themselves should control the social theory and practice of the specialists, not society as a whole democratically“. I’m not arguing this, it’s you.
I’m at a loss when you then state you ‘don’t really know’ what this means.
The debate is because I don’t agree that “the specialists themselves should control the social theory and practice of the specialists, not society as a whole democratically“.
Now, we can go on to discuss and debate the issues regarding this difference, but you can’t keep saying that you don’t understand what our differences are. Aren’t you interested (not ‘why don’t you agree with’) in understanding this opposition to your view.
I’m interested in your view, even though I oppose it. I characterise your view as an ‘anti-democratic’ view of science. I’m not misleading anyone, I’m not lying about your view, I’m not building a strawman to knock down. I’m interested in getting to the heart of why we disagree, or, less personally, why self-proclaimed ‘democratic socialists’, like the SPGB, should support ‘anti-democratic’ science.
robbo203 wrote: “So are you now backtracking on your earlier position when you seemed to agree there would indeed be specialists in a socialist society in the sense of individuals who have undergone intensive training over a long period of time to equip them with the particular skills required to accomplish certain very complex tasks?”
I wish that those that disagree with my political and philosophical positions wouldn’t keep mischaracterising them. It only leads to us going round in circles, in which I have to keep saying what I’ve already said, to correct an allegation which I’ve already corrected.
I’m not ‘backtracking’, robbo. I’ve never argued that there won’t be ‘specialists in a socialist society’.
Once again, I’m not sure what you have to gain by not reading and understanding what I write, and then arguing against that. We both waste our time by this refusal to read what I write, not make up false allegations of false positions ascribed to me.
Once again, the political and philosophical argument is ‘WHO should politically control those ‘specialists’?’.
If you argue ‘the specialists themselves should control the social theory and practice of the specialists, not society as a whole democratically‘, that’s fine, it’s a political and philosophical position which I don’t share.
This is the nub of the argument robbo. WHO should have power? An elite, or society?
You seem to want to assume that ‘specialists themselves controlling their specialisms’ is a ‘common sense’ argument, that can’t be sensibly argued against.
Please try to focus on what I’m writing, and if you disagree, OK, let’s talk about those political, philosophical and ideological disagreements.
I’ll have to deal with the rest of your post later, so I’m not ignoring it.
robbo203 wrote: “…we are talking solely about the development of scientific theories themselves…”
No, I’m talking about ‘social production’ (just as Marx did), which includes ‘theories and practices’, which are inescapably linked. You write about ‘theories themselves’ as if they exist outside of their own social production. No, ‘theories’ emerge from societies, not from ‘themselves’, nor ‘clever individuals’.
So, if you argue that ‘theories’ will not be subject to democratic controls, you must specify to whose control they will be subject. This is a political (and thus philosophical) question. If you want to argue ‘specialists’ (who apparently will have abilities not available to the majority), then fine, but that’s a political position that I don’t share, and that I think will prevent the self-emancipation of the proletariat and the development of democratic socialism. It’s also Marx’s position – it will lead to the separation of society into two, with the smaller part controlling the larger part.
robbo203 wrote: “…at the end of the day its still going to be the specialists who are going to be, perforce, the ones who will be involved in expanding the frontiers of science, rather than us, if only because they have the necessary expertise and training to do so in their specialized field of science and we don’t. There is no getting around this point however much you try to, LBird“. [my bold]
Well, I’ve never ‘tried to get around this point’, robbo!
My whole point is that it’s a political and philosophical stance that I don’t share, and that I argue Marx didn’t, either.
Your political and philosophical ideology separates society into two (‘specialists’ and ‘us’), and takes present social production (‘they have’ and ‘we don’t’) as eternal.
I regard Marx’s ‘revolutionary science’ as the self-emancipation of the proletariat and its democratic organisation of all social production. The whole point is that ‘we’ will have the ‘necessary expertise and training’, because the creation of this is a necessary part of building socialism. In fact, I think that the emergence of (for want of a better phrase) ‘proletarian universities’ which challenge those of the bourgeoisie, and eventually begin to replace them in both ideas and activities. I would think that proletarians would get a better education, which would give them a scientific advantage over those still stranded in bourgeois academia.
robbo203 wrote: “For the general population, and even the scientists themselves, large chunks of science will inevitably remain obscure if only because the whole body of scientific knowledge has grown so huge and complex that no one individual is capable of absorbing anything more than a tiny fraction of it.” [my bold]
Ironically, robbo, I see this as an argument for the democratisation of science.
There are, even at present, no ‘specialists’ who can out-think the rest of society. This will be even more the case in the future.
‘The whole body of scientific knowledge’ is a social product, which changes with time and place (ie. it’s a socio-historical ‘body’), and since it’s the product of society, only society can determine its shape and content.
And for a democratic socialist society, that determination can only be democratic.
robbo203 wrote: “It is not my view that there wont be “social power” in a socialist society”
So, once again, who (ie. what active social subject) will control that ‘social power’?
You seem to agree with me that if it involves social power, it should be under democratic control.
As far as I can tell, the political and philosophical difference between us seems to be how we define ‘science’ and its power.
For me, if ‘science’ is a ‘social power’, it must be under our democratic control.
You seem to see ‘science’ as a ‘practice’ which is ‘obscure’ and ‘has no practical impact’ on society.
Any knowledge of the history and social importance of ‘science’ makes me wonder how you can assume those three beliefs: ‘practice’ (no, it’s a ‘theory and practice’), ‘obscure’ (no, this is a conscious product of bourgeois science, to hide it from the majority), and ‘no practical impact’ (no, the impact on society of science is enormously important).
I think you are massively underestimating (an understatement!) the social importance of science in any social production, and especially within democratic socialism.
I would regard Marx’s ‘revolutionary science’ as a fundamental part of democratic socialism, the theory and practice of which would be taught through a democratic education system, to enable all to understand and participate in this ‘science’.
Bijou Drains, robbo203.
It’s a political and philosophical question.
If neither of you (nor the SPGB) will give an answer that corresponds to democratic norms, then it is politically valid to assume that you have in mind an elite which will decide.
Of course, in response to any argument that ‘no-one’ will determine, it’s politically valid to assume that you are not aware that someone will.
It’s a simple question ‘Where will power lie?’
You seem to believe that there will be no social power, no politics, within democratic socialism – that ‘individuals’ will determine whatever interests them as individuals, within their individual ‘practice’.
There is no social or historical context to your beliefs, no awareness of the dangers of ‘power’, and the necessity to ensure that humanity collectively must control any ‘power’.
ALB wrote: “Suggesting that Marx was a critic of materialism…”
This is well established, and has been for over a century. You’re clutching at straws (and strawmen), ALB.
ALB wrote: “When someone who has known us for over five years repeatedly accuses us of arguing that socialism will not have to be brought “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat”, there are only three possible explanations.”
There is apparently a fourth, ALB.
Whenever I ask ‘Who determines truth within socialism’, you don’t answer that it will be brought “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat”.
You answer that truth will be determined by ‘Specialists’, an elite separate from “the thinking, conscious, proletariat”.
The scientific method “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat” is democracy.
The fourth answer seems to be that you are unable to read, reason, and reply, when asked a political question.
Bijou Drains wrote: “If you are going to ask me that question, you first have to define what you mean by science, as the notion that science is some part of human existance divorced from the rest of that existence is, at least for me, problematical.”
Who argues “..the notion that science is some part of human existance divorced from the rest of that existence…“?
The ‘materialists’, that’s who, BD.
Otherwise they’d agree to democracy within science.
That’s Marx’s whole point, in his criticism of ‘materialism’.
I’m never sure quite what the SPGB is defending in these discussions about ‘science’.
Its members/sympathisers never seem to mention humanity, social production, proletariat, or democracy.
Who do you think your ideas will appeal to? Those ideas about ‘matter’ and a non-democratic science?
They won’t appeal to anyone who’s read Marx, who wants the self-emancipation of workers, who wants democratic production.
Don’t you ever give any thought to the certain demise of your party, and the whole ‘materialist’ ideology?
You seem to put ‘science’ before ‘democratic socialism’. And your notion of ‘science’ is outdated, and was by Marx’s time (as proved by Einstein).
I must admit, I’m baffled by what inspires you. If ‘material conditions’ (TM) will produce ‘socialism’, why would a worker bother to participate? The ideology of materialism cuts its own throat.Matthew, you seem to have a handle on things.
I presume, since you argue that ‘workers are scientists’, then you’d agree that ‘workers’ should determine ‘science’?Bijou, ALB, you’re entitled to draw whatever political and philosophical conclusions that you wish, from Marx.
But… drawing the ones that you seem to want to draw, it’s going to be up to ‘Nature’, ‘Matter’, and ‘Material Conditions’ (excluding ideas, or they would be also ‘ideal conditions’, to your way of thinking) to bring about a change in consciousness amongst the proletariat. Thus, the new mode of production of communism will have been brought about, not by the thinking, conscious, proletariat, but by ‘material conditions’.
It’s never going to happen, comrades. All the ‘materialist’ parties, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, seemingly even the SPGB, will die out. Basically because they argue to workers that workers themselves are not needed to build science. Materialist parties don’t require democracy to learn, because they already know. Marx’s conclusion, too.
Well, workers will leave it to ‘material science’. Good luck organising the Specialists that you really want to appeal to.
The fundamental problem that you’ve got, is that ‘science’ no longer looks to ‘material’, and hasn’t done since the 19th century.
Marx (CW3, p. 305) wrote:
“Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, ||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?” [my bold]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Any notion of a ‘Nature’, supposedly apart from, and preceding, humanity’s creation of a ‘Nature-for-Us’, is meaningless for Marx.
Nature is not ‘discovered’ or ‘described’ (by a specialist elite), but socially produced by humanity. No ‘nature’, no part of nature, is eternal, unchanging, fixed, unhistorical, asocial.
And since we produce ‘nature’, we can change it.
The only political question for Marxists, and those interested in building a future social society, is ‘Who will have the power to determine our nature?’ Is it to be an elite, a conscious minority, as Lenin argued? Or is it to be the whole of humanity, basing its social product upon the interests and needs of the whole of humanity, which are all determined democratically?
In fact, democratic socialism. A new mode of production for humanity, created by humanity itself. Self-emancipation.
I entirely agree with you and Marx, BD!
Everything revolves around humanity – not ‘god’ (as idealists like Berkeley allege), not ‘matter’ (as materialists like Lenin allege) but humanity. [Marx and my italics and bold!]
It’s all there – visible, birth, himself, genesis, ‘real existence of man and nature’ ‘evident in practice’, ‘through [human] sense experience’.
No mention whatsoever of ‘gods’ or ‘matter’. No passive humanity, no clockwork humanity.Whatever you think is ‘outside of human social production’, BD, you should name ‘it’ – and tell us why the rest of humanity can’t make the same decision as you apparently can, about its ‘existence’ or not.
As Marx pointed out, materialists simply have to split society into two – one part, the mass, who can’t be allowed to determine ‘it’, and another part, an elite, who can be allowed to determine ‘it’.
No doubt, you’ve saved yourself a place amongst The Elect, The Conscious Party Members, who will tell those supposedly unable to participate, what ‘it’ is.
Lenin argued quite the same, of course! The proletarians salute your selflessness, Oh Clever One! Show us the light, holy redeemer!
And ‘self-determination of the proletariat’ be damned, eh?
What is this ‘nature’ that is not ‘historical’, that you know? And how do you know it?
ALB wrote: “The claim that Marx held that there is nothing outside of human conscious activity is groundless”
Marx, CW 3, p. 305, wrote: “…for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man…” [Marx’s italics, my bold]
There are pages of similar claims by Marx surrounding this extract.
ALB wrote: “The view that a tree doesn’t exist…”
Once more, ALB, as I explained in my previous post, you (like the idealist Berkeley and his god) are employing the bourgeois ideology of the subject being an individual (active divine creator for Berkeley, passive biological clockwork for bourgeoisie), where ‘exist’ supposedly has no human subject.
For Marx, to ‘exist’ is to ‘exist-for’ a human social creator; so, as in quote, ‘nature for [hu]man[ity]’.
ALB wrote: “Engels explicitly held that the external world existed independently of human perception of it.”
Engels also held that it didn’t – I’ve already given his quote about ‘matter’ being a human product. Engels contradicted himself often, and Engels isn’t Marx. We’ve had long discussions about the invalidity of quoting Engels to represent (as did Lenin) Marx. There is not a unified being called ‘Marx-Engels’.
ALB wrote: “Actually, the view that scientists are describing rather than discovering the external world is fairly mainstream. ”
Yes, ALB, it’s a ruling class idea, so it would be ‘mainstream’.
According to Marx, ‘scientists’ (being human social producers) are, not ‘discovering’, not ‘describing’, but creating a ‘world-for-them’. ‘Them’ being the ruling class, the bourgeoisie.
As socialists, we have to help build a ‘world-for-humanity’, our social product, a ‘world’ which suits our needs and interests (expressed democratically), and not those of any ruling class. This is a unified world, not bifurcated into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, or ‘material’ and ‘ideal’, or ‘nature’ and ‘society’, which is a creation of the bourgeoisie. Our ‘nature’ is a socio-historical ‘nature for us’. Which we can change.
Please address the points that Marx and I make, ALB, rather than suggest that he is, or I am, a follower of Divine Creation, like Berkeley.
Perhaps a little more explanation…
It’s best to see Marx’s ‘ontology’ as an ontology of production.
In class-based ontologies, ‘Being’ has an independent ‘existence’ outside of any producer. But in a humanity-based ontology, based upon Marx’s ideas, ‘being’ is always ‘being-for’, where the producer of that ‘being’ must be given.
This unites the subject-object into a necessary relationship, so we have ‘object-for’, ‘exists-for’, ‘matter-for’, ‘real-for’, ‘nature-for’, ‘universe-for’, etc. None of these concepts can be adopted without the ‘-for’ suffix, because that would be to pretend that someone has a position outside of these concepts, but yet can know them. This would be a ‘god-like’ reference point.
This then makes sense of Marx’s concept of ‘Entausserung’ (‘externalisation’), whereby the subject produces its own object, thereby knowing it. Any ‘nature’ that we know, is a ‘nature-for-us’, which we’ve produced, and can thus, as Marx argued for, change. We externalise our nature to produce ‘nature-for-us’.
This also allows us to have a ‘unified science’, where the concepts, theories, practices, results, etc., are socially produced in the same way. That is, there would be no separation (introduced by bourgeois science) between ‘hard’ and ‘soft science’, science and art, ideas and reality, truth and opinion, politics and physics, etc.
Of course, a key feature of this ‘unified science’ would be that it would be democratic, because there wouldn’t be an academic elite who could pretend to know ‘being’ by passive observation and merely ‘describe’. Their conscious, active role in socially producing their ‘being-for-them’ would be exposed to all. Thus, Marx’s ‘revolutionary science’ would be established.
The interests and needs of all humanity, democratically determined, would be the basis of this ‘new science’.
