LBird
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Almamater wrote: “If Lenin was a follower of them, why Plekhanov and Kautsky opposed Lenin and Lenin tried to discredited them and wrote against them ?”
I’ll leave you to think about which issues Lenin followed Plekhanov, Kauksky (and Engels), and about which issues Plekhanov and Kautsky opposed Lenin, and about which issues Lenin opposed Plekhanov and Kautsky.
The world of politics and philosophy is a bit more complicated than you seem to think, and it’s a shame that you’re not willing to discuss these complications.
FWIW, I’d look more to Bogdanov and Lunacharsky as ‘followers of Marx’. Mainly, unlike Plekhanov, Kautsky and Lenin, they looked to the masses and democracy as solutions to our political and philosophical problems.
Hiya BD, annoyingly to some, I’m still about, all’s well, and Klopp’s leaving behind a great legacy, which might even be improved by Alonso!
To keep my derail short (since it’s attracted complaints already), the problems with ‘Marx’ pre-date all the thinkers/groups you’ve mentioned, and includes the SPGB. The die was cast well before 1903. But… heads-in-sand, and all that…
Thanks for your kind comment.
Almamater wrote: “And the debate on this thread is about Lenin, it is not about Engels or Kautsky”
Yes, but if Lenin was a follower of Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov, rather than Marx, wouldn’t that be relevant to the argument that Lenin and the Bolsheviks (and Trotskyists and Stalinists) can teach us nothing about Marx’s democratic social productionism?
But… if you want to close that line of inquiry, that’s OK by me. I’ll leave the thread to you, unless you ask me to continue.
Almamater wrote: “The Marxists Humanist have spent years attacking Engels and Kaustky and they have never published the real conceptions of Marx and they continue supporting Lenin and the bolsheviks coup”
Some points:
1. The ‘Marxist Humanist‘ seem to be irrelevant to our debates today, then, if you are correct that they support Lenin in any way whatsoever;
2. Asking critical questions about the Marx/Engels relationship is not ‘attacking Engels’. I’ve praised Engels many times before – just not his understanding of Marx’s philosophy;
3. ‘the real conceptions of Marx’ is precisely the issue at point – what were they, and did they differ from Engels’?Almamater wrote: “What the world knew and has known is a distortion made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and their followers…”
Certainly, Lenin(ism) is a ‘distortion’, at the very least, but the ‘distorting’ began well before Lenin’s contribution.
Until serious and fundamental questions are asked about the differences between Marx and Engels (and then Kautsky and Plekhanov), the ‘real’ Marx will remain ‘by and large unknown’.
It’s a task that has only relatively recently even been started, and Marx has been dead nearly 142 years.
Perhaps it’s already too late.
chelmsford wrote: “Barltrop made the telling point that if it were not for the Bolshevik revolution, today Marx would be as well known as Lassalle or Duhring or Proudhon to name but three. He would be by and large unknown.”
On the contrary, I think that Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution have ensured that Marx has remained ‘by and large unknown’.
Lenin was the successor to Engels’ mistaken views, and Kautsky’s and Plekhanov’s mangling of Marx’s democratic social productionism.
Lenin almost exclusively quoted Engels, rather than Marx.
The ‘Marx’ we supposedly ‘know’ today is far removed from Marx’s democratic views.
DJP quoted Marx: “Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity.”
Yes, it’s a good argument against ‘idealists’, DJP. I subscribe to Marx’s view, too.
But what has it to do with Marx’s view, that we produce, and can thus change, our world?
For example, if humanity was both ‘possessed with the idea of’ scuba gear, and socially produced and used it, we wouldn’t ‘drown in water’.
I’m sure Marx would recognise that scuba gear is a socio-historical product, and that we could change it for some other more advanced technology in the future.
Until ‘materialists’ engage with what Marx was actually arguing, his views will remain a closed book to them. The 18th century was a long time ago, and it’s time for workers to take up Marx’s insights, about democratic social production.
DJP wrote: “As our experience of the world has to be mediated through the concepts we make of it … the question arises that when we are theorising are we just self-referentially referring to these concepts or is there a way that these concepts are influenced by the real world.”
The use of the term ‘experience’ begins from a ‘passive’ conception of our world, that the ‘real world’ actively impinges upon us.
Marx started from an ‘active’ conception, which followed the German Idealists, in that the ‘active subject’ CREATES its own ‘object’.
Thus, our concepts are created by us (not from ‘objective’ action upon us), and used to ‘create’ OUR world, a ‘world-for-us’. If our concepts prove to be useless for us in our conscious activity to produce our world, we discard them.
Therefore, as Marx famously argued, we can CHANGE ‘it’, ‘it’ being our creation.
Any ‘real world’ that WE know, is OUR ‘real world’. ‘It’ is our socio-historical product.
Marx solved this problem in the 1840s.
He followed the German Idealists in realising that ‘activity’ was the key unifier of ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ (the link between subject and object).
Where Marx differed with the GIs was in his philosophical (and political) views regarding the ‘active subject’ (the producer of its own object).
The GIs regarded ‘God’ as the producer, whereas Marx regarded ‘Humanity’ as the producer. That’s why all of Marx’s concepts relate to ‘production’.
Engels inadvertently re-opened the can of worms with his ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, and returned to a pre-Marx position.
Thus, Marx’s insights, into the ability of humans to change their own world, were lost.
We’re still suffering from this huge mistake of Engels’ making.
From DJP’s article:
“When the German poet and polymath Goethe, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the Romanticists revived Spinoza’s philosophy in the 19th century, it inspired scientists working on phenomena such as heat, steam, electricity, complex systems, and the origin of life such as Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who discovered UV radiation and the rechargeable battery, Hans Christian Ørsted who discovered the principle of electromagnetism, Michael Faraday, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin or Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel who followed Spinoza in conceiving the universe as “a single substance that is God and Nature at the same time” even got himself announced as a monistic “antipope”. On the other hand, the credo of the Romanticists who stressed the priority of the creative subject over objective facts favored a development fostering alternative facts and pseudo-science that brought about an association of monism with esotericism.”
This is probably the key to further discussion: which supposed ‘version’ of the Romantics did Marx follow?
Or is the article written by a dualist, who separates ‘objective facts’ from ‘creative subject’?
DJP wrote: “Thought this article on monism which was published today might be of interest…
https://iai.tv/articles/quantum-physics-reveals-the-unity-of-the-universe-heinrich-pas-auid-2584
”
“ “Manichaeism,” named after its Persian prophet Mani, advocates a worldview quite opposed to monism and claims that the world is caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. Through Manichaeism and similar philosophies, “dualistic” concepts such as angels and demons, God and devil, and heaven and hell received their prominent role among Christian beliefs.”This is precisely the worldview of ‘materialists’, who insist on a separation of ‘mind’ and ’matter’, with the latter being prior to the former. It’s a ‘dualistic’ viewpoint, and its root amongst some communists is from Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, and not from anything Marx wrote.
Marx’s ‘monism’ followed the German Idealists and their belief in ‘activity’ being the unifier of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’.
But whereas the Idealists regarded ‘god’ as the ‘active producer’, as the creator of reality, Marx insisted that Humanity was the socio-historic producer of its own ‘reality’.
Thus, humans can change their ‘reality’.I think that anyone interested in this debate about Marx’s epistemological views, will find the article at this link very informative:
“Marx’s epistemology and the problem of conflated idealisms”
Thomas More wrote: “…what the heck is happening to your avowed materialism?”
I’ve been trying to get the SPGB to discuss this problem/issue for about a decade now, but to no avail.
The simple answer is that Marx was not a ‘materialist’, and condemned this 18th century ideology of bourgeois science, and predicted that ‘materialists’ would always deny democratic control to the revolutionary proletariat (the vast majority of humanity), and would always retain the power to produce our world for an elite (of scientists, priests, party).
Marx was, to use the phraseology of the 19th century, an ‘idealist-materialist’, who argued that ‘theory and practice’ was required for the socio-historical production of our world, which we could collectively therefore change.
Physics, just like any other human productive activity, would have to be collectively and democratically determined, within any future communist society.
‘Materialists’ deny that this will be a political characteristic of socialism.
DJP quotes Pannekoek:
“Atoms of course are not observed phenomena themselves: they are inferences of our thinking. As such they share the nature of all products of our thinking their sharp limitation and distinction, their precise equality belongs to their abstract character.”If ‘atoms’ are ‘not observed…themselves’ and are ‘inferences of our thinking’… how are they ‘material’?
Of course, I agree with Pannekoek’s position, which follows Marx’s.
Our world (which is both ‘ideal’ and ‘material’) is our socio-historical product, and thus we can change it.
MovimientoSocialista wrote: “Lenin knew that it was impossible to establish socialism in an economical backward society, and that capitalism must be developed first… ”
Marx disagreed. Marx argued for human creativity, not economic determinism (in philosophical terms, for ‘freedom’, not ‘necessity’). Marx supported those who regarded it as possible to build socialism upon the Russian Mir (peasant commune). That is, Marx agreed with the so-called ‘idealists’ (the term Plekhanov the materialist used to condemn his political enemies, the ‘Narodniks’), against the so-called ‘materialists’.
See:
‘Marx and Russia: The fate of a doctrine’, by James D. White
‘Late Marx and the Russian Road’ by Teodor Shanin.
