[LBird]

Pannekoek wrote:

In such a process of unceasing transformation, human consciousness adapts itself to society, to the real world.Hence Marx's thesis that the real world determines consciousness does not mean that contemporary ideas are determined solely by contemporary society. Our ideas and concepts are the crystallization, the comprehensive essence of the whole of our experience, present and past. What was already fixed in the past in abstract mental forms must be included with such adaptations of the present as are necessary.

Science as change.http://libcom.org/library/society-mind-marxian-philosophy-anton-pannekoekSelective quoting is no answer, twc. We can all find parts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dietzgen, Untermann or Pannekoek to support our case. I can even find parts of all of those thinkers that I disagree with.Can't you try some of your own thinking? Why not discuss, rather than merely reiterate? What are your views of the process of cognition of science, in the light of the 20th century advances in human thinking and knowledge?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Harvey wrote:

But if you had a money form that dissolved, that is oxidisable, we would end up with a very different kind of society. You would have a money form that would aid circulation but that would not facilitate accumulation.

But surely 'money' represents an 'exploitative relationship', not an 'aid to circulation'?To maintain an 'oxidisable' exploitative relationship would be to just get rid of a fixed ('not oxidisable') exploitative relationship, and replace it with… errr… a constantly regenerating exploitative relationship.Money is for individual exchange. Surely we'll have a social economy, production for free use by all, with no need to exchange money?If we need to estimate the worth of, or time taken to make, or materials required for, any social production, surely we'll just ask the direct producers for an estimate of worth, time or materials, and make decisions collectively as to how to expend resources, if there are differences of priorities?Is Harvey a Communist, or just a "neutral" [sic] academic and commentator?

[LBird]

twc wrote:

Our needs and the impressions of the surrounding world are the impulses, the stimuli, to which our actions are the responses. Needs, as directly felt, and the surrounding world, as observed through the senses…

This conception regards the subject as passive, and suggests that the object, as the active entity, imposes itself upon the passive subject as a copy, or reflection, by its ‘impulses’ to which the subject merely ‘responds’. It is also ahistoric and asocial, because it relates to an individual (biological needs and fixed senses), and doesn’t relate to a dynamic society. Marx disagrees with this formulation, as I have already shown:

Marx, EPM, wrote:

… for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense.> For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

Marx stresses the ‘social’, ‘unfolding’, ‘cultivated’, ‘coming to be’.He disparages ‘crude practical need’ as a biological impulse, and suggests that both our ‘needs’ and our ‘senses’ grow in society.Your views, twc, seem to me to have been formed by Engels’ and Lenin’s views of nature and consciousness, rather than Marx’s. I might be wrong with this guess, but you can correct me if my speculation is incorrect.

[LBird]

twc wrote:

This pre-War article, written before Schaff and Lakatos, explains the social content of cognition.

I can't find any link within your post, twc.

twc wrote:

Its author takes the view that social practice determines social thought in direct opposition to the view you express here that social thought determines social practice.

This is an incorrect assertion. I haven't 'expressed the view' that 'social thought determines social practice'.I've expressed the view that the active subject interacts with the really-existing object to produce knowledge.If you don't agree, you should outline the theory of cognition that you think that 'science' employs.If you don't agree that there are three separate entities to this process of cognition, how many are there?If you don't agree that the subject is an active social entity, what is it?If you don't agree that the object pre-exists the cognitive process, what creates it?If you don't agree that knowledge is created by the subject, is it just a passive reflection of the object, as for Lenin?You've had the chance to participate in this thread from the start, twc, but have not engaged in discussion, and have merely stated your beliefs and used attacks to 'personalise' the issue of cognition.If you now wish to participate, I welcome that. But… you must engage, and engage without personal attacks, or I will go back to ignoring you. The ball's in your court.

[LBird]

On the issue of the nature of the ‘subject’, unless anyone disagrees, I’ll proceed on the assumption that the ‘subject’ (which interacts with the ‘object’ to produce ‘knowledge’) is a social entity, not an isolated individual (‘well, I have my opinion and I don’t need to back it up with evidence: I’m entitled to my personal opinion, irrespective of my comrades reasoned arguments’) nor a social elite of self-selecting ‘scientists’ (‘well, we scientists are the ones to tell you thickoes just what is the ‘truth’ about nature and society: we have both an intelligence and  training that you are not capable of having, and we employ a special socially-neutral method’).I’m making this assumption because I’m also assuming that most people reading this will already be Communists and Marxists (of some stripe), and I don’t need to make a case for opposing the widespread bourgeois ideological myth of ‘the individual’ or a case for democratic control by all over any social power. If I prove to be wrong on these assumptions, or if any non-Marxists are still reading, we can go back and discuss those assumptions of mine.Since Schaff looms large in my thinking, I’ll provide his view, for those who wish to follow up this discussion with some further reading. I should apologise to any women comrades reading, because Schaff was writing before feminist struggles of the ’60s (he was born in 1913), and always uses the term ‘man’ when he could have used ‘humanity’ (Marx is also open to the same criticism: he too was a social individual of his times).

Schaff, pp. 51, 55, wrote:

…the third model…emphasizes the active role of the subject who is conditioned in many ways, but always socially, thus bringing into cognition his [sic] socially transmitted mode of perceiving reality….Man [sic] is, in his [sic] reality, an ensemble of social relations; if one disregards this social content of the human individual, then only the ties of nature will remain as a link between people…in addition to biological determinates, social determinates also exert a moulding influence on him [sic], and this is why he [sic] is a social individual. Marx emphasizes this vividly stating that man [sic] is “the ensemble of social relations”.

From this, I think we have to assume that our ‘perception’ of the ‘object’ is inescapably ‘social’: as Einstein said, ‘theory determines what we observe’, and our ‘perception’ is shaped by the social theories to which we are exposed prior to the act of perception by an individual employing their ‘own senses’. We have seen with DJP’s video just how strongly our perception is affected by prior ‘conditioning’. The notion of the five ‘senses’ alone, doing the perceiving passively through an isolated biological individual, as for ‘induction’, just cannot stand any longer. At this point, I should say that both Dietzgen and Untermann make the mistake of emphasising ‘induction’ as the ‘scientific method’. This is understandable given the times when they wrote, under the heavy influence of 19th century positivistic science. Engels, too, made the mistake of allowing positivism to misdirect him, when he contributed to ‘Marxist’ science thinking, which has proved to be so deleterious upon following ‘Marxist’ thinkers, including Lenin.But, on the contrary, Marx’s early works on epistemology weren’t even published until well into the 20th century, and he doesn’t seem to have fallen into the ‘inductivist’ trap. For example, when Marx talks of ‘the senses’, it’s clear that he isn’t simply referring to them as biological mechanisms, or arguing that, if one keeps social ideology at bay, then one can simply passively experience reality, as the empiricists argue, through one’s senses, without troubling to include the mind. For Marx, our senses are fundamentally historical and social, not mere individual and biological, senses, and which develop in society:

Marx, EPM, wrote:

… for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense.> For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

[my bold]http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htmNot only is the ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ a social creation, but so too are our senses themselves.Thus, the ‘subject’ (in our tripartite schema of cognition) develops and changes throughout history, constantly influenced by, and in turn influencing, social factors. We have to always situate any ‘scientific understanding’ within a historical, social and developmental context. The bourgeois alternative, what Pannekoek labels ‘discovery science’, which allegedly produces ‘eternal truths’, supposedly employing an ahistorical and asocial ‘neutral method’, is a myth. Science is a source of social power, and scientists currently wield this power outside of our democratic control, most often to the tune of the bourgeoisie. Under Communism, the social activity of science in all its facets must be subject to our democratic control.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

If science does not produce 'certain' knowledge (and science already tells us that it doesn't), this lets in the social aspect.Once this is done, it's as 'scientifically valid' to start from the Koran, which will 'explain and predict' from a 'Muslim science' perspective.That's our problem, in a nutshell. We have to find a social basis for 'Communist science'.There are no bald 'scientifically arrived at ones'. That is to posit a socially-neutral method of science. You (and ALB) seem to agree that this doesn't exist, without realising its implications.

But where are you getting your certainty from?How do you know that what you are claiming above is true?

I’m making the same claim as a certain DJP:

DJP, post 352, wrote:

OK, we might be getting somewhere now.All you are saying here is that knowledge is that knowledge is uncertain, that's fine….We need to have a critior to enable us to evaluate competing claims. This criteria will never give us 100% certainty. So whilst appreciating that we can (probably) never know the absolute truth when faced with two competing claims we should choose the one that offers the most explanatory and predictive power.

You seem to be able to logically follow and accept the argument thus far, DJP, but then, when you realise just what this acceptance of yours entails, you recoil in horror and try to revert to ‘discovery science’, a ‘neutral scientific method’, that ‘certainty’ and ‘truth’ are absolutes, and thus ask me about ‘my certainty’ and ‘my truths’.I’d like to move on to discussing the ‘subject’, not ‘my truth about the subject’, but a discussion in which we all participate, and try to improve our ‘knowledge’ of the scientific method. That is, to define what we Communists consider to be the ‘scientific method’ and then, as you say, ‘when faced with two competing claims we should choose the one that offers the most explanatory and predictive power.’But… our ‘choice’ surely has to be a ‘democratic choice'?It’s possible to argue that the ‘choice’ should be made by each ‘individual’, or by a small ‘elite’ of ‘scientists’, or by a ‘society’ as a whole. I favour the latter, and I also think that a discussion of the nature of the ‘subject’ will help to clarify this question, and provide some potential answers, including the three that I’ve suggested. But, perhaps other posters can suggest other candidates for the ‘subject’ – god/allah/the party/rainman/your invisible gorilla/etc.

[LBird]

rodshaw wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by ideals.We want…

They're 'ideals'.

rodshaw wrote:

But whatever 'ideals' they hold, won't they be their ideals, not ours?

Well, since we'll have set up the society, that implies that we'll have set up the socialisation processes: as you say, class, private owndership, oppression, etc., will be taught to them as harmful for humanity.Personally, I think that 'democratic control' will be another 'ideal' that we will carry forward in our socialisation of our children.To pretend that Communism will be a 'year zero' or a blank slate, and that future generations will start from nothing, seems to me to be disingenuous: we, like every generation, will pass on our beliefs about what we consider to be moral, decent, etc.We should be open about this, and discuss it first, I think.

[LBird]

rodshaw wrote:

…spring naturally…

Given that we usually claim that Communism will involve a 'coming-to-consciousness' of the proletariat, so that we humans consciously start to take control of our lives, I'm not sure how this 'natural springing' will happen.Surely the 'first generation to be born into a socialist society' will be inculcated with our Communist ideals?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

I'm not too sure what the "democratic control of ideology" means. On the face of it, this could be interpreted as meaning that in a socialist/communist society people's ideas should also be subject to democratic control, but surely, in a future socialist society, the field of democratic decision-making will have its limits (matters of collective interest).

[my bold]To be a bit provocative, surely "in a socialist/communist society people's ideas would be subject to democratic control"?To be a bit more specific, every society that has ever existed has socialised its young into acceptable forms of behaviour. If that's not 'controlling people's ideas', from the very outset of a person's existence, what is?I think that we should be open about this inescapable 'brainwashing' social process, and discuss its contents.The bottom line here is, I think, that if society's basic ideas (including respect for democratic methods and minorities) aren't under our collective control, whose control will they be under?This is a long way from 'thought-control' in the the sense that it's usually used (state control of the individual), but it's worth getting to grips with just what would be our enforced basic social ideas.All societies enforce 'ideology', and personally I think that the contents of this 'ideology' should be discussed and voted upon by all of humanity. Someone or something has to set limits – if it isn't us, it'll be 'god'.In that case, I wonder who'll interpret his/her/its thoughts?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Actually, it's not so much religion that I want to discuss as what are the limits to the field of democratic decision-making in a socialist/communist society, i.e what decisions can be left to individual choice and what to be made collectively.

If there's one issue that's more important for Communists than 'science', it's 'democracy'! In fact, many of my positions on science are predicated upon democratic control, and in that sense, at least, democracy is more fundamental than science.Anyway, I'll get back to the issue of the 'subject' in our tripartite schema, later, unless there are any objections, from any other readers as well as from you. I think 'knowledge' has been done to death for now, at least until we have a bit more discussion on subject and object, which might help clarify their relationship and thus their product, knowledge.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

LBird wrote:

I simply meant that 'religion' would be got rid of by democratic methods.

On the face of it, this is a bit worrying, especially as you also said that in future socialist/communist society "ideology" would also be under democratic control.I think we are all agreed that religion will have virtually died out by the time socialism is established, but I'can imagine that a small minority of people might continue to entertain religious views and customs. The way you've put it above could suggest that they will be banned as a result of a democratic vote.  Would that not be "thought control" as would telling (even by a democratic vote) people what "ideology" they should hold?Tell me that this isn't what you meant.

I'm not interested in this sidetrack, ALB, following a throwaway, poorly-judged, inconsequential to the main theme, remark of mine. I see this line of questioning as a diversion from the real issue of science, method and cognition.If you want to discuss religion, rather than science, it requires a new thread.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

I meant to pick you upon this earlier but got distracted. What do you mean by "the democratic control of … religion" in future socialist/communist society? Depending on your reply might even be the subject for a separate thread.

I wish you'd 'pick me up' on the central issue of this thread, rather than looking for more things to sidetrack us!I simply meant that 'religion' would be got rid of by democratic methods.Let's face it, if anyone thinks that 'religious authority' is going to continue within a Communist society, they've got seriously different ideas to most Communists, I think. But we've got more important things to resolve, now.Like, 'a unified scientific method' and the issue of 'scientific authority'.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

You've gone unnecessarily out on a limb here, but it's not too late to climb back.

No climbing back, I'm afraid. Time to replant the tree.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

So "Science doesn't produce absolute truth therefore the Koran is equally valid" can be argued against because religious arguments do not hold the same predictive and explanatory power as scientifically arrived at ones.

[my bold]This is what I'm trying to explain.If science does not produce 'certain' knowledge (and science already tells us that it doesn't), this lets in the social aspect.Once this is done, it's as 'scientifically valid' to start from the Koran, which will 'explain and predict' from a 'Muslim science' perspective.That's our problem, in a nutshell. We have to find a social basis for 'Communist science'.There are no bald 'scientifically arrived at ones'. That is to posit a socially-neutral method of science. You (and ALB) seem to agree that this doesn't exist, without realising its implications.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

OK apologies….  It's an honest question I mean no harm by it.

Right. I accept your apology, and I apologise for flying off the handle. I'm afraid I'm fed up going round in circles, and was starting to assume that you were being entirely destructive of the discussion.

DJP wrote:

Let me rephrase. Seeing as you've said that "science is ideology" and "science does not produce truth" on what basis do you hold your acceptance off communism as a possible practicle reality? I.e on what grounds do you justify your ideology.

The answers to this can only follow an established cognitive method, in my opinion. You're correct to raise this question, and others that you've raised before, but my answers will be based upon my (and your) understanding of the scientific method. Thus, that has to be addressed first.

DJP wrote:

Oh dear. Myself and others have repeated stated we do not hold this position yet you keep claiming we do….

The litmus test of this, though, is my question about the 17th century sun/earth realtionship. To argue that it was 'untrue', because we now know the 'truth', is not possible.The only answer we can give is that "it was 'true' then', but it's 'untrue' now, and in the future we recognise the possibility that it could be 'true', yet again".This argument only makes sense if 'truth' is related to 'knowledge', and thus 'scientific truth' can change – it might be very, very, very, very (ad infinitum) unlikely, but we can't be 'certain'.If 'truth' is related to the 'object' alone, we have 'discovery science', which is produces 'Truths', which are thus eternal.And remember, for the method I have outlined, 'true knowledge' is related in some way to the 'object', it's not simply whatever anyone wants it to be.For the sake of my sanity, if not yours, comrade, if you don't agree with my characterisation of 'knowledge' as a social, and thus fallible, product, please, please, please (ad infinitum) explain how you can be certain that the sun didn't go round the earth, as was thought, in the 17th century.By 'certain', I mean 'scientifically, 100%, copper-bottomed, certain', not just the common sense use of that word.In my opinion, it's not possible to be scientifically certain. And the developments of 20th century science support my position, as the bloody religious authorities are also aware.But this doesn't have to lead to us all facing east, or not eating fish or pork, or any of that religious nonsense. We have to address those issues, because if we don't, the religions will.

[Author]

Posts