Morgenstern
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No, you won't be able to 'buy' a packet of fags. Ken MacLeod in one of his books gave an instance of where capitalist sympathisers were allowed to have a flea market where they could pretend still to have capitalism. You could do that if it was firmly contained, suppressed, and emphasised the brokenness of capitalism. That's what dictatorship of the proletariat means. In short, if you asked to buy a packet of fags we should demand all the money that you have. We should then burn that money and give you a packet of fags for nothing. Simon W.
It has to be remembered, of course, that the capitalist ideas to be suppressed are in ourselves. After all, once out of sword thrust or gunshot, their only power is that which we give them. The first step is, of course, to wrest state power to ourselves. That means removing the physical force imposing capitalist relations, and dissolving the capitalist relations of production. You can't break a thing until you're holding it. The second is to produce in a way that reinforces the new society that we wish to build. This does not have to be conducted centrally – but it will need, in the first instance, to be regulated fairly centrally. The first steps will be awkward and will seem counterintuitive to the capitalist part of ourselves. It's this combination, especially the second part, that I think is meant by the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. When I'm studying for exams I have the 'Dictatorship of the Student' which is having the self-discipline to get on and study when I'd far rather be slacking – directed change involves discipline and control, and we're fools if we think otherwise. Self- imposed is far preferable. (I'm actually really crap at studying). We also need to change the perception not only of how production is done but of what is produced. This may be generational, depending on the level of shock to the system – a broken society like postwar Japan is much easier to turn to a new direction. The hippies were right – acid in the water supply is the quick answer
The worry will be conservationism. The old, no matter how nice, is riddled with the old relations. Support your local hunt and you support tugging your forelock and the monarchy. Keep the capitalist factories and the need for their products and you keep capitalism. We need to invest in the latest technologies simply because they are the most fluid – remember how once no one knew how to sell the internet? That was a lost opportunity, now it's thoroughly subordinated to capitalism. The next generation of technologies – biotechnology including lifespan extension, even nanotechnology in terms of machinery, are around the corner, and it is these emerging technologies that we need to seize upon. Maybe an indefinite lifespan becomes symbolic of socialism, and we tolerate a more instrumentalist approach to producing goods further down the chain. The point is that changing from capitalism to post-capitalist production will require positive direction and the suppression of capitalism – for example, a factory is a machine for telling the producers that the things they produce are *not theirs*, so to use the existing equipment to produce will require conscious political control. Simple example – relaxation of capitalist discipline. Put in the work you're happy with, don't force yourself, no speed up on conveyor belts, etc. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat over the factory in which we were previously enslaved. Professional psychological help for workaholics – not the driven, of course, a drive to excel will now be something that all can express, but using the numbness of work to avoid the numbness of existence outside of work. The factory system must be overthrown, consciously, and anyone doubting this, thinking that the productive forces of capitalism can just be laid hand to, is someone who needs the dictatorship of the proletariat in their own life's In short, shut up and smoke that … It's the law. In short, anyone who doesn't think that we will have to impose ourselves consciously and forcefully on capitalism is deluding themselves, and in fact is part of the problem. Retaining our socialist character during the revolutionary process will be the ticklish bit. Simon W.Dear all esp Marcos, I think the dictatorship of the proletariat has been misunderstood so many times … But we're doing it one more disservice. Marx is recognising that there are no ideas without people to think them. New ideas do not emerge from the there : they are worked up in the brains of humans, according to their life experience. Ideas battle through the medium of groups of people, classes. For an idea to succeed, those who hold that idea must succeed; for previous ideas to be suppressed, the people that hold those ideas must be suppressed. Hence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the bourgeois dictated to their former feudal masters. It will last as long as the revolution is in doubt; as long as capitalist ideas are strong enough to need suppressing. Otherwise the dictatorship of capital – expressed through living capitalists, and the policeman in every one of our heads – will be re asserted. It doesn't mean jackboots. It does mean class war, rather than mutual compromise. Whichever side is most ruthless, will win. Simon W.
I think I would agree with ALB that the scientific *method*, rather than a particular science, is a product of class society. However, that method includes the segregation of fields of study. There is the broader matter as well however that science, while claiming political neutrality, in reifying the world and making the content of our lives not the thoughts that we share but the things that we possess, supports private property society. Properties are just concepts, our thoughts about the world that we live in. Reifying these properties allows them to be privately appropriated. A world of gears and machines, of computers and smartphones, is alienating in a political as well as an anthropological sense. To be direct, ALB, I would disagree with Locke who thought that there were subjective properties such as colour and objective properties such as height and weight. I think that all properties are contingent. To paraphrase, the cosmological is political. Simon W.
The normal, 'naive' view of reality is that it is out there and we apprehend it with our minds. In other words, that we have an eagle eye view of the cosmos. Our brains are like a camera obscura that reflects the cosmos through the pinhole of the senses to form an image of it in the brain. I/we (arguably always we
) argue that the mind is it's own system which has only a contingent relationship to the world beyond the senses. Look at it this way. There is a time lag in acquiring sense data, making sense of it, and our being aware of it. By the time we 'see' a thing, consciously, it is long gone. We are just experiencing echoes. This of course a materialist position -that the mind is a material thing, not set over the rest of what would have to be – Creation. Simon W.I agree with ALB. The modern version is the "Holographic universe" theory. – that the world is like a computer program, Matrix-like. It's Idealism in space. What I'm saying is that the world we are talking about is an internal system. What's in here is not what's out there. Language is simply not *about* what's out there. The only connection with the world beyond the senses is the Darwinian one – hold a stupid thought for long enough and it will kill you, or at least put you at a serious disadvantage compared to someone with ideas that cause them to blunder less. We have nothing meaningful to say about the world beyond the senses. That at does mean, happily enough, that when pop scientists like Dawkins and Cox revel in the beauty of the universe, they are actually revelling in the beauty of us. Simon W.
Regarding Susan Blackmore's book, I read that too, probably when it came out or near enough. it suffered from the same problem of false perspective that most of these things have – trying to stand outside of ones own thoughts and look in. From my recollection. She describes the sense of losing one's sense of self. But this is only because the exercise is false. We are everything that we think that we are – or rather, we do not cease to be these things simply because we cannot describe them with our current mental furniture. We are not doomed to vanish in a puff of logic. In this case, recognising that the processes of thought are finite leads to a positive and life-affirming conclusion. Simon W.
Talking and writing are no more magical than bricklaying. An architect can draw the finest symmetrical buildings and think, like the masons of old, that he or she has connected with some world soul, or at least that the symmetry of their plans is congruent with the laws of the universe. But in fact they are living in a dream world. The reality is bricklaying, practical, messy, and empirical. Architecture is an abstraction from this, not to some more meaningful plane, but to *less* meaning, like a child's toy car next to a real one, or more aptly a child with a toy steering wheel pretending to drive when their parent drives the real car next to them. Architecture is the sum total of abstracting from the real task of building, through discovery of the 3,4,5 triangle for square corners, and the like. So showing and disproving and philosophising sound very well and good but they are only using words out of place to win arguments, like children's playground games where they shout 'you're dead! No, you are, I shot you first! But my toy gun's bigger!' etc. each trying to persuade the other that their words, and not the other's carry more meaning. Thjere is no external structure of logic to compare our thoughts to, only the structure of brain, communicative environment, and past thought which structures the present. (Mornington Crescent really starts to seem like a fundamental critique of all language use). So, while we pretend to be grey-bearded philosophers thinking the sublime and divine the ways of the world's thought, we are in fact no more than monkeys throwing our own shit at each other through the bars of our cages. We've just moved on from shit to vocal utterances. Sometimes not too far at that. Simon W.
I find it hard to see the real problem in this. Materialism means that the mind is material. We don't have an eagle eye view. Thoughts are things, just as trees and rocks are things. So thoughts aren't about anything else – they are their own system. Any attempt to make this thought in the head here congruent with that thing over there, is invalid. Which means, of course, that all philosophy is invalid. What we do have is our own finite system of thoughts which we use to blunder around the universe. It is only contingently related to the world beyond the senses; for example, if you think that hydrochloric acid tastes like ice cream you'll probably die of it, and hopefully won't pass on the dangerous notion. But, to repeat, ice cream in the head isn't an inward picture of a real Ice Cream out there. It is this system of thoughts that is interrelated, both within our own heads and shared between ourselves in our communicative environment. There is a dialectical relationship within our own thoughts, and between ourselves via this shared communicative world. Dialectical here meaning really only that they are in flux and subject to change. Change in two main ways: quantity: a thought can be associated with more or less etc. : and quality, in that our thoughts become unsuitable when stretched beyond their reasonable bounds and have to be replaced by others. Water turns to steam – quantitative change leading to qualitative change – just becausewe stop using one concept and start using anythere. *The world beyond our senses does not care*. The reason we dive into this as revolutionaries is because it explains the development hitherto of our social world and thus how it can evolve further. These are not hard and fast laws but empirical observations – once they are shorn of their mysticism. Hegel's fault was that he took this system seriously, at face value, the law of the heavens, just as Berkeley, in phenomenology, thought that everything must exist because God was watching it, because otherwise as a system his thoughts would collapse. But it doesn't just have to be Hegel. There have been other systems of thought in the past, such as the Kabbalah, which may be interesting and self-revealing, as empirical studies of how we think, once they are shorn of their mystical halo, i.e. the notion that these products of the mind are also somehow out there as real things. Plato's ideal forms would come under the same rubric. So, when we talk about 'quality into quantity' or negating this or that, one could simply use the analogy of operations in a computer program – which in effect they are. We are trying to describe how we collectively understand the world that we have created and continue to create. That's all. The rest of it is fighting battles with the ignorance of the past – those who take this shit *seriously*. If you start trying to hold any part rigid, saying "This part is right, that part is not" or even just asking the question "Is this right?" you are falling into the trap of thinking that mental priducts have existence outside of the mind. It's formalism. The most idiotic and abstract of formalism, of course, is to take a text from a past century in an era of state and publisher censorship and relative ignorance amongst the best of one's peers and to say that only the thoughts that ta revolutionary thinker felt capable of *publishing* are the only valid indicators of what they *thought*. Even for me, living out here, for my poor example: my published statements are extremely rarely evidence of what I actually *think* and much more likely to be chewed over and watered down platitudes that won't get me deported or ruffle the feathers of my merely liberal colleages. But then, hopefully Ross has moved on. If not, could we please box him, as his comrades had to do in the end? We spend so much time entertaining the world's internet tramps and nutters on our various forums. Simon W.
Could I suggest that all here google "Rosa Lichtenstein" in order to inform their future debate? Or, as seems increasingly likely, Ross Lichtenstein. The Steve Wallis exchange was quite illuminating. Of course, it's a little humiliating for our forum that (s)he has come here when their fortunes had sunk so low. It's all quite a page turner on the Internet. Thanks Ross. Simon W.
First … Sorry, LBird, misread your last post entirely, and drew the wrong conclusions. I think you're quite possibly potty, but I reserve myself the same right, and that's entirely within the spirit of enquiry. Shine on you crazy diamond, and all that. Secondly, to Rosa. As Wogan once said to David Ickes, they're not laughing with you, they're laughing *at* you. When you list all of the Stalinists and Maoists that haven't appreciated your greatness, haven't you thought that maybe they are just the people you shared your ideas with? In other words, the set of people that disagree with you is not just {Maoists and Stalinists}, but, in fact, {everyone}? I'm happy to be in the latter category. But there's a simple way to test this. Don't just listen to us. Find any open group of people who actually bother to think this through, and present your ideas. They will also tell you, if the presentation us anything like the above, that it is a known error called "naive realism". They can't all be Stalinists and Maoists. Can they? Simon W.
