LBird
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John Oswald wrote: “So, L. Bird, if humans created nature, they created the Earth and the stars, and all other living beings. They created the dinosaurs, the wild grasses, the mountains, the sun and the moon. Anthropos, supreme deity.”
Thanks again, John, for a model ‘explanation’ of what Marx argues, from a materialist’s perspective.
All materialists separate ‘mind’ from ‘matter’, ‘consciousness’ from ‘being’, ‘humanity’ from ‘nature’ – even though they claim to be ‘monists’.
Marxists do not do this – their account always includes both.
So, for example, we don’t separate ‘dinosaurs’ from ‘knowledge of dinosaurs’, and pretend that some special ‘scientist’ has access to ‘dinosaurs’ that doesn’t involve our active participation. Any ‘dinosaur’ that we know has been create by us – that’s why we can give a socio-historical account of ‘dinosaur construction’, and, for example, see how different our view of ‘dinosaur’ differs from the Victorian view of ‘dinosaur’. There isn’t (and never will be) a ‘final’ account of ‘dinosaur-for-us’ which is ‘dinosaur-in-itself’.
But, to be clear, this is not just a ‘historical’ problem about ‘dinosaurs’. Exactly the same point applies to ‘nature’, ‘Earth’, ‘stars’, ‘beings’… and indeed ‘rocks’, ‘bricks’, ‘matter’, etc., etc.
And yes, for Marx, humanity was the ‘supreme deity’.
And he also pointed out that, since a ‘supreme deity’ is always need for organised, conscious production to take place, the materialists, having falsely claimed that they deal only with ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘rocks’ in-themselves’, will proceed to produce ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘matter’ for their own, elite, undemocratic purposes. They’ll claim ‘objectivity’, of course! But we know, this elite will play the part of the ‘supreme deity’. They’ll retain power.
This is the whole point of Marx’s view of socialism: it’s a creation of the mass of humanity, by democratic means.
Materialists, as did Lenin, dispute this, and wish to retain the power of production for an elite. They call it ‘Science’. And they won’t have democratic control of physics. Or of ‘dinosaurs-in-themselves’. đ
John Oswald wrote: “L. Bird: Thanks for putting me in a neat little box.”
No offence meant, John. Just labelling the ‘box’, so that others can situate your ideological beliefs within the rough schema that I’ve outlined, as stage 2 materialism.
Once again, your reduction of ‘human active consciousness’ to ‘brain’ is bog-standard materialism/physicalism. If you want to believe that, and propagate that belief as suitable for building democratic socialism, it’s open to you to do so. It’s just that Marxists will disagree with your belief, and so will challenge it. That’s what political and philosophical debate is all about.
John Oswald wrote: “Do not confuse natural philosophy with social philosophy.”
Once again, this ‘splitting’ of the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’ was a act by the bourgeoisie, to ideologically separate off their ‘hard science’ from the democratic and revolutionary concerns of ‘soft humanity’. This is the ideological root of the current ‘academic’ division between ‘art/science’, ‘matter/mind’, ‘reality/ideology’, etc. On the contrary, Marx’s aim was to unify all human social production, and regard poetry and physics as part of the same human effort to produce our knowledge. We can’t separate ‘nature’ from ‘society’.
John Oswald wrote: “…as though our speciesâ concerns had relevance beyond us“.
It’d be nice for any materialist to outline any ‘non-relevant concerns’ which shouldn’t concern us. If any materialist knows the ‘Beyond Us’, they should tell us just how they themselves got ‘beyond us’, when it apparently isn’t open to the mass, from whom it is supposed to be ‘beyond’. Marx pointed out this elite trickery of the materialists, in his Theses on Feuerbach. It requires a ‘Knowing Elite’ who are separate from ‘Society’.
Wez wrote: “…the more we understand nature (the universe)…“.
The philosophical problem, Wez, is ‘Is ‘nature’ to be considered prior to us, or to be our product?’
For materialists, as we’ve seen from John’s contributions, regard ‘nature’ as prior to ‘humanity’. So, ‘matter’ precedes our ‘consciousness’.
Marx, however, regarded any ‘nature’ that we know as our social product, so ‘nature-for-us’ comes after us. So, ‘our production’ precedes our product, ‘matter’. And we can change it.
It’s a bog-standard ideological belief, produced by the bourgeoisie, that ‘Nature’ is sitting ‘out there’, merely waiting to be ‘Discovered’, and that that is the task of their ‘science’. It doesn’t require democratic participation, of course.
If Marx is right, any understanding of nature that we develop, will place us at the productive heart of ‘it’, and that understanding will be necessarily socio-historical, containing an account of how and why humanity’s notions of ‘Nature’ have originated and changed.
Materialism does not do this, but merely returns to idealist notions of The Absolute, in the new garb of ‘matter’, an unchanging, universal, ahistoric, asocial, ‘star stuff’.
John Oswald wrote: “Matter is not created, and mind is a property of matter. Matter has no beginning and no end. Mind, as one of the properties of matter, is subject to the same physical laws of motion, cause and effect.”
Thanks, John, for a standard restatement of stage 2 ‘Materialism’.
Those workers who are interested in building a democratic socialism (and who will already thus be aware of the need for both ‘active humanity’ and that ‘humanity’ being defined as the ‘mass’, not an ‘elite’), and wanting to know more about Marx’s stage 3 ‘social productionism’, should note that John doesn’t mention humanity, democracy nor social production (all key elements in Marx’s philosophy), but argues that our active consciousness is merely a ‘property of matter’, and ‘subject to the same physical laws’. Thus, the ‘active side’, for John, as for all stage 2 materialists, is ‘matter’.
This is, of course, all bog-standard 18th century ‘materialism’, which Marx rejected. For Marx, the creator of both ‘physical laws’ and ‘matter’ is humanity (as also Pannekoek agreed). Thus we can change ‘it’. For John, ‘matter’ plays the role of an eternal, universal, god – his quote even has religious overtones “Matter has no beginning and no end“, which equates it to The Absolute.
Marx is a ‘productionist’, not a ‘physicalist’, John.
Wez wrote “…even after the revolution we will still ponder the questions raised by this thread in terms of mind, consciousness and reality…“.
In an attempt to give a very brief outline of the development of these questions, and to give those without any great understanding of philosophy a chance to orientate themselves to the issues, I would reduce its stages to:
- consciousness creates being;
- being creates consciousness;
- consciousness creates being.
This could also be summarised as:
- mind creates matter;
- matter creates mind;
- mind creates matter.
or:
- subject creates object;
- object creates subject;
- subject creates object.
or:
- idealism;
- materialism;
- idealism-materialism.
The key difference between stages 1 and 3 is the concept of ‘consciousness/mind/subject’.
For stage 1 (idealism), the subject is believed to be ‘divine’, whereas for stage 3 (Marxism), the subject is regarded as ‘humanity’.
In stage 2 (materialism), which first placed ‘humanity’ as the subject, the subject was regarded as ‘passive’.
The key move by Marx was to take the ‘active subject’ from Idealism (ie. god), and replace the ‘passive subject’ of Materialism with the new conception of of the ‘active subject’ being humanity. Marx unified (as he wrote himself) idealism with materialism, which was a longstanding aim of German Idealism. But Marx achieved that aim.
So, we went from:
- active divine subject creating nature-for-god;
- active matter creating passive humans;
- active humanity creating nature-for-us.
Marx’s term for this ‘human creativity’ is ‘social production’. And because our world is our product, we can change it. And this change can be democratic.
I hope this very brief outline helps to orientate any workers interested in politics. If one remains at stage 2, the bourgeois stage, one remains under the control, as Marx wrote, of a minority, who claim that ‘humans are passive in the face of matter’, but then make themselves, the minority, the ‘active side’, whilst the majority has to remain passive. Lenin embraced Materialism for this very reason.
Wez wrote “Perhaps you should change your pub James â such conversations are âde rigueurâ in the pubs where I drink. Leaving it to others to figure it out can be very dodgy. The mind/reality duality is one of the oldest philosophical questions and deserves some consideration. We all have consciousness and it is not unreasonable to inquire as to its nature.”
This is one of the most important political/philosophical/ideological posts that an SPGB member has made for a long time. Any socialist that can’t explain their political position on the ‘mind/reality duality’ won’t be able to persuade any politically-curious worker of their view of the future.
James would be well-advised to, at the least, become conversant of the political outcome of holding any particular view of this ‘duality’, even if James feels unable to participate in a detailed discussion.
I’d go so far as to claim that this subject being a common and important ‘pub conversation’, would be an indicator of the nearness of socialism. Whilst most workers freely admit to being baffled by philosophy, we’ll never be able to build a democratic socialism. It’s our job as socialists to make these types of ‘conversations’ both understandable and relevant.
Philosophy, like all social production, must become under our democratic control.
James Moir wrote “Subjective, in my dictionary, is defined as adj based on personal feelings.”
But in regard to philosophy, the ‘subject’ is the conscious part of the ‘subject-object’ relationship.
So, for those who choose ‘object-in-itself’ (ie. physicalists, materialists, most bourgeois physicists), the ‘subject’ is essentially passive, and the ‘object’ dominates by the sense impressions it makes upon the ‘subject’.
But, for those who regard the subject as active, as the creator of its own ‘object’ (as did Marx and the US Pragmatists), there is the further choice of this ‘subject’ either being a ‘biological-individual’ (as for Pragmatism) or being a ‘social-individual’ (as for Marx).
Regarding the Labour Theory of Value, both one’s choice of ‘object-in-itself’ or ‘object-for-subject’, and ‘biological-subject’ or ‘social-subject’, will determine one’s view of ‘value’.
For Marx, ‘value’ was a social product (ie. it wasn’t an ‘object-in-itself’ nor a product of an individual ‘biological-subject’), and so it was an historical product which we can collectively change.
Materialists regard ‘value’ as ‘matter’ (an ‘object-in-itself’, which is the whole point of ‘materialism’, a world of ‘objects’ which we don’t create), whereas Marxists regard all our objects as products of social relations, which we can thus change. That’s why Capital is scientific, and produces an objectively true account. Which we can change, of course, if we are so minded. We workers have no gods but ourselves. We certainly don’t bow down to ‘matter’, an 18th century ideology which Marx scorned.
The real issue here is a philosophical one.
By ‘objective’, what is meant?
Either ‘object-in-itself’ or ‘object-for-subject’.
If one (like the vast majority of contemporary physicists) wants there to be ‘something-out-there’, a ‘something’ which we didn’t create, then one will choose ‘object-in-itself”. Of course, for this choice, is the downside of then having to come up with a ‘creator’, which is not humanity. This choice always leads to ‘god’.
If one follows Marx, though, one wants us to be able to change our world, and so must choose (as did Marx) the ‘object-for-subject’. We create our own objects, as an ‘object-for-us’. The plus of this choice, of course, is the end of religion, because we are the creators of our universe.
Those who’ve read their philosophy will see the role of German Idealism in producing this way of thinking – Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc., ending in Marx’s unifying of the two opposed strands of philosophy in his ‘Idealism-Materialism’, his ‘social productionism’.
Thus, there is an ‘objective world’ (don’t listen to the ‘individual-biological subjectivists’, who adhere to an ideology of bourgeois physics), and this ‘objective world’ is our creation, produced by our social activity, our theory and practice.
Since it is our product, our objects can be democratically produced. ‘The World’ or ‘The Universe’ is a bourgeois construct, which the ruling class claim we can’t change. But ‘Our World’ or ‘Our Universe’ is our product and we can, as Marx claimed, change it.
[edit] The concept of ‘object-in-itself’ implies human passivity, whereas ‘object-for-subject’ implies human activity.
Since the truth, as any worker knows, is human activity, social production, those who argue for ‘object-in-itself’ are lying to workers, and plan for the elite themselves to be the ‘active side’, the ‘specialists’ (as Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach), who will then go on to create a world to their liking, based upon their elite interests and purposes. ‘Object-in-itself’ is an inherently undemocratic concept.
Wez wrote: “L Bird really does live in his own delusional world…”
Yet more personal insults, and yet more refusal to give political answers to political questions.
You’re determining ‘the future of the SPGB’, Wez. Well done.
marcos wrote: “…I am talking about the low participation in this forum. Case closed”
Well, I’ve given you plenty of suggestions, but perhaps it is simply your refusal to discuss politics, the ‘always-open case’.
marcos wrote: “L Bird,
I donât think that the low participation in this forum is due to your commentaries, the problem is the low participation of the members of the Socialist Party and the companion parties.”
If I were to venture an opinion on this ‘low participation’, marcos, I’d say that there doesn’t seem to be any appetite amongst the membership of the SPGB to actually argue their political case. I don’t know why this should be the case, however, because most people who claim to be interested in politics can’t shut up! (and I plead guilty to this).
marcos wrote: “The participation in the discussion forum of  the leftists and Leninist parties is very high”
But they, and the ‘anarchists’, are also unable to argue their political case. In my experience, the claim that they are engaged in ‘Science’ (as in ‘Scientific Socialism’, and Lenin’s claim to ‘Know Reality’ as it is, in itself), and so they are all unable to engage in critical thought (whether about ‘Science’, or Marx, or social production). They censor critical thought.
‘Science’ seems to trump ‘politics’.
They all pay lip service to Marx and Capital (including many ‘anarchists’, like LibCom), but actually ignore what Marx wrote, and his democratic politics, which, for Marx, also applied to the socio-historical activity of ‘Science’.
The upshot of all this seems to be sites comfortable with ’18th century materialism’, but unable to engage with the 21st century, and so have no wider influence amongst any educated workers, who now have the tools to debate and argue with their ‘betters’, unlike when Lenin was claiming to know better than the benighted masses.
Our class might have been ignorant in the 19th century, which allowed Lenin’s elitism to take hold amongst our class, but times have changed.
‘Change’, eh? Who was the thinker quite keen on discussing that?
Unless we can come up with a political solution to the problem of democratising ‘science’, then we’ll always be in thrall to ‘The Experts’.
‘Matter’ has to be regarded as a social product, that we can change, to suit our purposes when engaged in social production.
‘Matter’ is the biological/physical counterpart to ‘private property’, according to bourgeois ideology.
As you say, ‘socialist democracy is essential to ensure that every person becomes involved in decision making‘. That includes the ‘material’.
This view is Marx’s view: democratic social production by us, not by a self-selecting body of ‘experts’.
Nansir1111 wrote: “How aware are we of the limitations of the Monetary System ?”
First, we must be aware of the advantages of the Monetary System – it gives isolated individuals the belief that they, as individuals, have access to an ‘objective’ measure of ‘the value of things’.
So, even if we are all aware of its limitations, we have to come up with a new system which determines ‘the value of things’.
I’d argue that this new system would have to be both social and democratic. That is, ‘individuals’ wouldn’t have the belief that they could determine ‘the value of things’ on their own, but that we’d all recognise that any valuation that we make of ‘things’ would be made collectively and democratically.
Nansir1111 wrote: “How well do we understand how such a world would work in practice ?”
I don’t think that this is well understood at all. I think it would imply social participation by all, and so the whole bourgeois idea of ‘individuals’ making ‘their own’ decisions about ‘their personal consumption’ would have to be superseded.
I’m inclined to think that many ‘socialists’ regard ‘socialism’ as a system which would merely satisfy the bourgeois myth of ‘individual freedom’, to decide the priorities of social production by individuals.
I think that this underestimates the massive changes in both ideas and production that would have to take place amongst the vast majority of humans, to build a socialist system.
I’d put the stress on ‘social’ and ‘democratic’ production, rather than on ‘individual’ and ‘isolated’ consumption.
Well, I’m glad that my interventions don’t seem to be detrimental (but that doesn’t, of course, mean that they are regarded as useful by anyone else), but the discussion seems to have been completely one-sided, as far as any political/philosophical development goes.
By that, I mean that I’m clearer about, and more confident in arguing in favour of, democratic control within all areas of social production, which is what I’m clearer than ever in thinking that that was what Marx was arguing for, and was what he meant by Communism/Socialism.
However, the SPGB doesn’t seem to have developed its arguments in the light of what I’ve argued, but simply reiterates a position that has been dismantled by political developments since Marx’s death (which indeed have shown Marx to have been correct – no democratic control of social production, no communist mode of production).
I’m inclined to argue that the blind alley of ‘materialism’ has come to an end, and that any ‘socialist’ parties continuing to adhere to ‘materialism’ will die out.
It’s a shame that the SPGB doesn’t seem to be able recognise this, because, at least theoretically, a commitment to ‘democracy’ within a party, should allow for the replacement of an obviously deadly ‘theory’ with a better one. But, as I’ve found out on a few sites, the commitment to ‘matter’ (and the erroneously belief that this is Marx’s basic concept of analysis) is far stronger than the commitment to ‘democracy’. Further, the defence of ‘Science’ also seems to play a deeper role, than the defence of ‘democracy’.
Still, at least those having read my arguments on a number of political sites, can’t say that they haven’t been warned, that they’re not heading for any ‘democratic socialism’ worth that name. If the aim is ‘Scientific Socialism’, then a look at Lenin’s progress would be instructive.
