LBird
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
robbo203 wrote “Strange that he wants to consider himself some sort of Marxist while rejecting this basic Marxian insight“.
Oh, I don’t know, robbo…
I think you’d be very surprised at just who consider themselves some sort of Marxist, while rejecting basic Marxian insights!
You could do worse than starting with a consideration of some of Engels’ writings!
robbo’s link wrote: “Podolinsky… set out to reconcile socialist thought with the second law of thermodynamics by synthesising the approaches of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin… In his essay “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces”, Podolinsky theorized a labor theory of value based on embodied energy.”
Yeah, this is a bog-standard attempt by a ‘materialist’ to ‘reconcile’ or ‘synthesise’ what they regard as the ‘mind and matter’ problem. Of course, Marx had already achieved this. Marx had no time for the bourgeois separation of ‘being’ from ‘consciousness’ (object from subject, matter from mind, nature from humanity, natural from social, science from art, etc.). There are numerous ways of expressing this conscious separation taken for class reasons, at a particular socio-historical juncture.
The bourgeois academics have been striving ever since to ‘reconcile’ the irreconcilable, under the pressure of their own developments, especially since Einstein’s works. They’ve had over a hundred years since then, and bourgeois physics hasn’t found (and I’d argue, can’t ever find) a solution, although our planet is dying for both aspects, the social and the natural.
The only political solution is democratic socialism, which embodies both ‘Green’ and ‘Red’ aspects of our social production. Marx provided the basis for this, with his unifying of philosophy into ‘idealism-materialism’.
Unfortunately, the ‘materialists’ will continue to supposedly try ‘to reconcile… by synthesising’, by actually reducing ideas to the physical. As for Podolinsky, ‘value’ must be ’embodied’. But ‘value’ is a social product, not a form of ‘matter’.
Marx didn’t reduce ‘mind’ to ‘matter’. He unified the two, into ‘social production’, and this was done by 1845.
Another way of illustrating this problem, is to regard the phrase “Scientific Socialism” as contradictory, because one or the other aspect must predominate.
It’s a bit like ‘National Socialism’ – and we all know, not only what came to predominate in that, but that the very purpose initially was to ensure that only one of the two aspects predominated, and to fool those with a bent towards the losing aspect.
The political question is “Is ‘socialism’ to be made ‘scientific’ or is ‘science’ to be made ‘socialist’ ?“.
The former is Pena’s position, and indeed the position of all materialists.
Of course, the latter is my political position, and I would argue it was also Marx’s position.
I hope this helps to clarify the problem with any political ‘rebuttal’ of Pena’s article.
alan, the problem is, I’m a Democratic Communist, and I’ve long realised that most supposed ‘Marxists’, like Pena, know nothing whatsoever about Marx’s political, philosophical and ideological views. It’s pointless me writing a full rebuttal, based on my ideology, of an ideology that does not recognise my ideology.
That has become ever clearer to me, given the years and hundreds of posts I’ve made here, in the forlorn hope that the key building block of ‘democracy’ vaunted by the SPGB would triumph, but it has proved to play no part in most posters’ views about the social production of science. Whereas most ‘Marxists’ don’t even pay lip service to ‘democracy’ (think Lenin, Plekhanov or Kautsky – all ‘materialists’), at least the SPGB makes the right noises. That’s why I initially gave so much time and effort (followed up posters’ own views and reading recommendations, and dug out quotes ranging from Marx and Engels to Einstein and Rovelli), but nothing worked to convince other posters to question why ‘democracy’ played no part in their view of ‘science’.
Pena has won the battle, alan.
You personally would give more credence to his view of ‘science’ than to mine. But Pena’s ‘science’ has nothing to do with Marx’s democratic social production of knowledge. If it can’t be voted upon, it’s in the hands of an elite – whether ‘truth’, ‘science’, ‘matter’, even ‘rocks’, or ‘ideas’, like ‘value’.
Pena is a ‘specialist’, the ilk defended to the hilt by all the other posters here. A worker can’t rebut a specialist.
The core point is that, if one uses a non-Marxist definition of ‘science’, Marx’s views will be ‘non-scientific’; if one uses a Marxist definition of ‘science’, Marx’s views will be ‘scientific’.
The most unsatisfying course to choose, is to unwittingly employ Pena’s mainstream definition of ‘science’, and then be baffled as to how Marx’s Labour Theory of Value doesn’t fit as ‘scientific’, because in its own terms, Pena’s article is correct.
It’s better to examine Pena’s political and ideological assumptions, and indeed one’s own, before wrestling with the riddle of a ‘scientific’ LTV.
Dodgy thinker wrote: “By “scientific” I mean a theory that identifies an empirically detectable and measurable…”
alan, it’s the definition of ‘scientific’ that you need to question.
You’ll lose any argument where a bourgeois definition of a socio-historical activity is simply accepted.
By ’empirical’, they actually mean ‘accessible to a biological individual‘ (by ‘senses’, like ‘touch’, which are not regarded as socio-historical products, as Marx argued) and by ‘measurable’ they mean ‘only quantitative and not qualitative values are acceptable‘ (whereas Marx regarded ‘value’ as ‘qualitative’).
Marx’s labour theory of value can’t survive such ‘scientific’ analyses. If we employ their definitions, we’re lost from the start.
Of course, this definition of ‘science’ is widely accepted by many…
Bijou Drains wrote: “So by that logic, if I give you a good hard kick up the arse…“.
No, you’re misunderstanding Marx’s logic, BD.
As I explained earlier, Marx’s logic revolves around an ‘active socio-historical producer’, not, as for example, Fichte, an ‘active I’, or, as for example, bourgeois science, a ‘passive I’, but a ‘social producer’.
Further, for Marx, he defines classes as ‘social producers’, so whereas it’s possible to define a ‘mode of production’ as a ‘social producer’ (which might be the case in a non-exploitative mode of production), Marx further divides exploitative modes of production into classes, exploited and exploiting.
So, your question, to make sense to Marxists, would have to begin:
“So by that logic, if the proletariat give the bourgeoisie a good hard kick up the arse…“.
I know that you don’t use Marx’s logic, though – which is ‘your’ choice, and has nothing to do with ‘ruling ideas’…
I can only presume you believe that ‘logic’ is asocial and ahistoric, and was created by a universal being, not humans.
Perhaps you and Stephen Murphy share this wonderment, at a non-human creator.
I obviously don’t.
Stephen Murphy wrote: “I know enough about quantum physics to know that the physical world is far weirder than normal ‘reality’ suggests. I know enough about the debate on consciousness to know that the majority of scientists would say that the relationship between thought and matter remains as much a mystery as ever. And I am aware of the fact that whether light is observed as wave or mass appears, oddly, to depend to some extent on the observer. Bizarre indeed! None of this, of course, proves there is an underlying non-material entity to creation any more than it disproves it. But the whole thing really is too odd to suggest, as Rear View does, that everything can be ‘adequately explained…!’ A bold and rather premature statement indeed!”
Stephen, I think that Marx gave the most relevant answer: humans produce any ‘world’ that we know.
Get rid of ‘social production’, and ‘quantum physics’, ‘the physical world’, ‘normal’, ‘reality’, ‘consciousness’, ‘scientists’, ‘thought’, ‘matter’ and ‘mystery’ all disappear.
It’s been clear since Kant that the ‘subject’ is at the very centre of all this (indeed, this was clear to some ancient Greeks, but the insight had been lost from ‘mainstream science’, ie. bourgeois science). The German Idealists that followed Kant made this ‘subject’ an ‘active’ one, and Hegel made this ‘active subject’ an ‘historical’ one. Finally, Marx made this ‘active historical subject’ a ‘socio-historical’ one (ie. not an ‘individual subject’, as for Fichte and others).
For Marx, humanity is an active, socio-historical creator of its own ‘reality’, a ‘reality-for-us’.
As you say, ‘observation’ can’t be removed from any ‘reality’. The main issue, though, is to see this ‘observer’ as a creator of what it ‘observes’, by its own activity (rather than a passive ‘observer’ of what already supposedly ‘exists’ outside of any active production by the ‘observer’).
Marx was ahead of his time, and Einstein showed that the bourgeoisie was only following in his footsteps, but is still lagging behind, even now.
ALB wrote: “Of course you could argue that Marx was wrong to have said that capitalism had to have developed before socialism became possible, but was he?”
But don’t forget, regarding the potential development of Russia in the late 1870s, Marx himself had argued precisely that – ie. that the then Russia didn’t have to have developed capitalism before socialism.
So, in your terms, Marx did ‘argue that Marx was wrong’.
Marx didn’t believe in ‘necessity’, ‘material’ or otherwise, because he was a social productionist who believed that humans could change their products.
When he came to study Russia, he seems to have realised that he’d been far too ‘deterministic’ in some of his middle-period works.
He realised (again) that ‘necessity’ and ‘determination’ prevent conscious change. By the 1870s, Marx was thinking much more like he had in the 1840s.
John Oswald wrote: “Sounds like a reiteration of the conquest of nature syndrome!”
One can only hold to this ideology, if one believes in a ‘Nature’ which is nothing to do with human production, which ‘pre-exists’ our production, which we then proceed to conquer.
It’s a standard ‘green’ ideology, John, but it’s nothing to do with Marx.
That doesn’t mean Marx was correct, of course, but it’s best to be open about one’s ideological choices.
If one holds to ‘Nature’ being ‘conquered’, one can’t hold to Capital.
But many try to do this.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Can’t say I fully understand…“.
As I’ve said many times before, alan, Marx is a social productionist.
This is nothing at all to do with the bourgeois view of a ‘Nature’ which is ‘out there’, a ‘nature-in-itself’. Any ‘nature’ that we know, is a ‘nature-for-us’, our social product, and we can change it. If we don’t know it, Marx says it is a ‘nothing for us’.
We are our own god.
‘Matter’ isn’t, because we create ‘matter’, a ‘matter-for-us’, a product of our social activity, of our labour.
The title of this thread is ‘Is reality all in the mind?’
There are three possible answers, which correspond to the three politico-philosophical positions that I outlined earlier.
- Idealism answers ‘reality is in the divine mind‘;
- Materialism answers ‘reality is in reality-itself‘.
- Marxism answers ‘reality is a reality-for-us, a social product, which we actively produce, and so we can change it’.
The elite social producers of ‘Quantum physics’ are trying to fool us that the ‘reality’ that they produce is ‘reality-itself’. Only we can democratically determine whether ‘quantum physics’ suits the interests, aims and purposes of ‘reality-for-us’. We can change this ‘reality’, it isn’t a ‘final’ account of ‘reality-itself’, or an ‘Ultimate Truth’.
Whatever the quantum physicists write today about ‘reality’, they wrote differently in the past, and they’ll write differently in the future.
Any ‘reality’ that we know, has a history, is a social product, and changes – it is a changing, socio-historical product, a ‘reality-for-us’.
And democratic socialism would mean that we politically control its production, for our benefit. ‘Science’ must mean the creation of a better world for all, not the supposed disinterested exposing of a ‘truth-out-there’ by an unelected elite of ‘experts’.
Physics is a political issue.
John Oswald wrote: “You can all keep your stinking Marxist human supremacism! And your non-materialist idealist anti-scientific drivel!”
Yeah, this is always the materialists’ response to reasoned argument, historical knowledge and philosophical expertise in workers. The replacement of political argument with personal abuse is the standard reply, and the archetypal example of this was the materialist Lenin, in texts like his Materialism and Empiriocriticism. There is never any attempt to analyse the opponent’s argument or outline the materialist’s own, but simply a resort to name-calling. This was how Lenin responded to Bogdanov’s arguments, which were far closer to Marx’s, than Lenin’s were.
The epithet ‘Idealist!’ plays the same role as does ‘Satanist!’ in a church’s reply to atheistic criticism. And materialists wouldn’t know ‘anti-scientific drivel’, because they refuse to give an account of ‘science’ to measure ‘drivel’ against, because any socio-historical account of ‘science’ shows that it’s nothing to do with materialism, has its modern origins in the bourgeois defeat of revolutionary, democratic science, and that ‘science’ changes constantly. Only Marx’s social productionism can deal with these issues about ‘science’, and attempt an answer to the question posed in the thread title.
Physics and mathematics are social products, and change, and any democratic socialism will have to explain how these, and all academic disciplines, can be democratised, so that we, the associated producers, can control these changes. Otherwise, ‘reality’ will be in the hands of an elite.
John Oswald wrote: “Socialists who say they are materialists but believe in non-material substances, including non-material mind, free will and human divinity should petition Rome for a mass baptism and a receiving into the Church.
… Oh, wait a minute … The Catholic Church has now accepted evolution as valid science. Oh drat!”LOL!
Yeah, it’s been said before, John, that ‘Socialism’ is a form of religion, and that socialists regard Marx as a prophet!
But… there’s no substitute for discussing just who the materialists have in mind for their god – ‘Science’ or ‘Matter’.
Whichever it is, it certainly isn’t the great mass of humanity.
That’s why your ideology of materialism/physicalism/realism isn’t suited to any democratic socialism. It contains no account of ‘social production’, no account of ‘democratic control’, no account of socio-historic change… in fact, it’s supposedly ‘objective’, so it doesn’t require any of these essentially human requirements.
Oh, and when the materialists find ‘mind’ in the wet brain, be sure to tell us.
We’re going to have a long wait, because ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is a social product, not wet matter. But try telling the current generation of researchers…
John Oswald wrote: “I am a Marxist only in the political sense.”
Unfortunately, you’re not even that, John.
Politics is about power, and Marx argued for democratic power.
I think that quite probably you’ve either read Engels or heard Engels’ views from other materialists, and had them labelled ‘Marxism’.
Whatever your ideology is, and to me it seems to be a pretty standard bourgeois materialism/physicalism/realism, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with Marx’s social productionism, the belief that humanity socially produces its world, a ‘universe-for-us’, a ‘nature-for-us’, and that that production should be democratic.
