[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Tim:"We would then have an endless source of hot air for power generation and bullshit for fertiliser, which could act as a demonstration of the possibility of free access in a socialist society."So, other than abuse, you dont have anything useful to add.If what I have to say is such b.s., then someone as knowledgeable as your good self should find it laughably easy to show where I go wrong, shouldn't you?The fact that you resort merely to abuse suggests to me that describing you as "ignorant" might be to praise you too highly.And I say that with all due disrespect.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

mcolomei:"We already had a long discussion about dialectic named: Do we need the  dialectic ? , post #439"Do you have a link?It's OK, I have just found it, and remember contributing to it.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Wez:"I've never really understood why intelligent people have any interest in the works of Lenin or Trotsky. The Bolsheviks were political opportunists who, when not persecuting workers, spent their time justifying their coup d'etat as some kind of socialist revolution. Their theoretical works offer nothing to the traditions of socialism and their actions have only served the purpose of alienating the working class from socialism. Unfortunately because of the anniversary this year of this non-event we'll have to endure endless coverage of this anti working class movement that ended in an historical dead-end – yawn."What is it with you lot? Do you have a problem understanding the phrase "off-topic", or the word "relevant"?What has this got to do with Marx and Philosophy, Wez?

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

What is your proof that Wittgenstein was at any point in his life a Logical Positivist?And is it clear that Marx abandoned philosophy root-and-branch by the late 1840s:http://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/was_wittgenstein_a_leftist.htm

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Tim:"Why do you end your posts with 'The emancipation of the working class will be the act of the workers themselves'?"When you also state on your website 'I count myself as a Marxist, a Leninist and a Trotskyist'?"Will it be the workers who emancipate themselves or a Leninist/Trotskyist vanguard?"If they so choose. It's up to them, not me, to decide. But I fail to see what this has to do with the topic in hand. Or have you 'emancipated' yourself from the meaning of the phrase "relavent comment"?I see you have:"How about replaceing Max Eastman's statement on the banner on the top of your site with this statement:"Leninsm is like a mental disease; you can't know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you have got it — Tim Kilgallon."No thanks, I think Eastman's original words were far better.But thanks for drifting off topic.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Wez:"compartmentalising intellectual endeavor."And what is so heinous about that?"As for Mr. Ollman's 'opinion' (you, in contrast, do not admit that your ideas are also 'your opinion') I can say that his work gave me a better understanding of Marx."Oh dear! Then you have my sincerest sympathy."By the way, why do you end your posts with 'The emancipation of the working class will be the act of the workers themselves'? Does this imply you have an elitist belief that 'workers' can never achieve the intellectual level of philosophy?"Not at all. Philosophy is little more than self-important hot air; workers are well shut of it.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Wez, but you can't expect me simply to accept Ollman's opinion, here, especially when he made such a mess of trying to explain what 'abstraction' is, can you? But, what about Marx's own use of the phrase 'the dialectic method' (for example, in the Postface to the second edition of Das Kapital)? However, what did he mean by this? Well, we needn't speculate. Marx told us what he meant by it in the same Afterword. There, he quotes a reviewer in the following terms: "After a quotation from the preface to my 'Criticism of Political Economy,' Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on: 'The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. … If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own…. As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. … With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has.' "Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?" [Marx (1976), pp.101-02. Bold emphases added. I have used the version published in the collected works, on-line, i.e., MECW, but have quoted the page numbers from the Penguin edition.]In the above passage, not one single Hegelian concept is to be found (upside down or 'the right way up') — no "contradictions", no change of "quantity into quality", no "negation of the negation", no "unity and identity of opposites", no "interconnected Totality", no "universal change" –, and yet Marx still calls this the "dialectic method", and says of it that it is "my method". So, Marx's "dialectic method" has had Hegel completely excised –, except for the odd phrase or two, "here and there", with which he merely "coquetted": "…[E]ven, here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Ibid., p.103. Bold emphasis added. Once more, I have used the punctuation found in MECW.] In that case, Marx's "dialectic method" more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (of Ferguson, Millar, Robertson, Smith, Hume and Steuart). Marx's 'dialectic method' is what we would now call 'Historical Materialism', which is a scientific theory, not a philosophy. It is also worth adding that this is the only summary of "the dialectic method" Marx published and endorsed in his entire life.My original comment still stands, therefore.More details here:http://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2009_01.htm#Marx-And-DM–11%5BIf you are using Internet Explorer 10 (or later), the above link won't work properly unless you switch to 'Compatibility View' (in the Tools Menu); for IE11 select 'Compatibility View Settings' and then add my site (anti-dialectics.co.uk). I have as yet no idea how Microsoft's new browser, Edge, will handle these links.]

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In fact, Marx abandoned Philosophy root-and-branch by the late 1840s.Proof suppiled on request.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

LB:

Quote:

This point of YMS, mcolome1 and me is not about 'unpublished material', so your response is incorrect, Rosa.Our point is about 'the necessity of holding apriori theories'.We hold the apriori theory that it 'might/might not'.You hold the apriori theory that it 'must'.

Well, as I explained, it's an interpretative rule, which, because it is incapable of being true or false, can't be a priori. [Unless, of course, you have forgotten the meaning of "a priori".]

Quote:

The 'it' is not the point being argued; what's being argued about is your assertion, based upon apriori theory, that it 'must'. Any defence that you make of 'must' has to rely on theory.

The 'must' here represents an inference from a rule, not an a priori theory.So, nice try, only it wasn't.[Recall that when I criticise a priori theories here, I am only targetting metaphysical/philosophical theories, not the rules scientists use to understand the world.]

Quote:

Personally, I blame 'Leninism', but I know you don't wish to discuss that particular theory that you also hold

Er…, I fail to see what Leninism has got to do with your inability to distinguish rules from a priori theories.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

YMS:

Quote:

I'm afraid I haven't (and nor am i going to) read  every post in this long running discussion.  however, the post you link to does not, I'm afraid, definitively deal with the matter.  You simply state that you disagree with Marx' asserveration "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner" Marx could simply have been wrong, or, as you suggest may be being Ironic.  But that sentence is equally capable of being read with the stress being on 'comprehensive' Many thinkers had a crack at steam engines before Boulton and Watt, but they produced the definitive design that make the buggers workable.  The point remains, though, that Chucky-bum's dialectic cannot be that distinct from hegels, since they share elementary form, per my football anaology.

Sure, you can read this passage any way you like, but, and once again, if you start, as I do, from the position of accepting as a primary source the only summary of 'the dialectic method' that Marx published and endorsed in his entire life, and interpet everything else he says in the light of that (which seems eminently reasonable to me), then there is only one way to read it.Now this summary has absolutely no Hegel in it, but Marx, not me, Marx still calls it  'the dialectic method' — not 'a dialectic method', or even 'part of, or one aspect of, the dialectic method', but 'the dialectic method' –, so, and once more, there seems to me to be only one way to read this passage, especially since the reading I suggest absolves Marx of making a crass error.Take your pick: Marx was either an ignoramus or my reading is correct.I know which alternative I prefer.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

YMS:

Quote:

Like the punchline of the joke, Frayed Knot.  Where the two contradict, we need to look at why they conradict, and why the author chose to make their public view different, we cannot take the public as read, though.

Sure we can speculate all day long for all the difference it will make, but the hard fact you lot seem not to want to come to terms with is that Marx added a summary of 'the dialectic method' to the Postface to the second edition to his masterpiece — the only one he endorsed and published in his entire life. And that summary contains absolutely no trace of Hegel.If you start with that fact, the rest is pretty straight-forward.But, you lot don't.However, you can be sure that if that summary had have contained some Hegel, you'd be ramming it down my throat.Odd that…

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

LB and mcolome1:

Quote:

Yeah, this is the apriori position I would take, too, YMS, ie. 'that published might or might not take precedence'.It's a different apriori position to the one that Rosa takes, ie. 'that published must take precedence'.

As we can now see, not even this unpublished material supports your view of the relation between Marx and Hegel.

Quote:

Why Rosa keeps pretending not to have apriori positions/ideas/theories/philosophies baffles me, and undermines the rest of what Rosa is arguing (other than, for me, the arguments against DiaMat, which I'm convinced by, as they support my own conclusions).

As I have already said: If you can show, as opposed to merely assert, I hold certain a priori views, I will immediately disown and renounce them, and apologise profusely.But, assertion isn't proof. If it were, and I were to assert one or both of you are CIA agents, that would be proof that one or both of you are indeed CIA agents. But, thankfully, it isn't.So, sunshines, let's see your proof.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

mcolome1:

Quote:

You left out on the above commentary  this very important source, and it is from the MEGA edition, the same one that is working in the 132 volumes of Marx and Engels

But, I didn't leave it out. It is right there in the passage of mine you quoted!But you add:

Quote:

This source clearly indicates that the manuscripts was written in 1875, therefore, it shows that Marx did not reject Hegel dialectic completely, unless you want to violate the law of Intelectual Property.

(1) Where have I denied it was written in 1875?(2) You still refuse to tell us exactly when it was written, and to whom it was addressed. Why is that?(3) How can unpublished material countermand a published source?(4) But, even if it could, this letter still fails to support your case, as I demonstrated in that passage of mine you quoted.What you need to do is respond to my arguments there, as opposed to simply ignoring them.Oh dear, I have already covered this:

Quote:

If Capital was published in 1867 and this document is dated  1875, the newer one indicates that Marx has not rejected Hegel completely. If you take your case to court you will not be able to prove your case because in contract law the newer date of a contract makes the other one invalid.

As I pointed out to you: the Postface was published in, or was dated January 1873. Now, the letter to which you refer was written, if we are to believe you, in 1875. But, and once more, no unpublished material can countermand the views expressed in a published source.So, the summary Marx added to the Postface to the second edition of Das Kapital — in which there is not one atom of Hegel to be found, but which Marx still calls 'the dialectic method' — takes precedence, and shows Marx had indeed waved 'goodbye' to that mystical bumbler, Hegel, when he came to write his masterpiece.For some odd reason best known to yourself you still prefer to ignore this published expression of Marx's opinions.And, as I have also shown, not even this letter supports the case you want to make, even if we were to grant it takes precedence over this published material.So, I think you should stop flogging this particular dead horse.

Quote:

The Mega edition is going to publish many documents of Marx that has not been published yet,  and probably many acceptable ideas of today can re-assured and others might be rejected. The same thing happened with the 1844 Manuscripts ( or Paris Notebook ) which were hidden in the vault of the Second International .The same case is applicable to the letter written by Marx against Simon Bolivar, many peoples denied the allegations that he considered Bolivar as a dictator, and then, the letter showed up and everybody lost the case

Fine, we'll return to this when that material becomes available. Until then, the evidence we have at present supports my contention that Das Kapital was a Hegel-free zone.What you need to do in the meantime is try to locate a summary of 'the dialectic method' written and published by Marx after January 1873 that supports your contention — i.e., the traditional idea that 'his method' still owed anything to Hegel.Oh wait, there isn't one…I have no doubt you'll simply ignore this significant fact, too.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DJP:

Quote:

Or rather than attempting mind reading or spirit channeling isn't it simpler to assume he uses the past tense because he is talking about a period of time in the past when he was working on Capital Vol 1?

Sure, that is possible, but if you start, as I do, from the position of accepting as a primary source the only summary of 'the dialectic method' that Marx published and endorsed in his entire life, and interpet everything else he says in the light of that (which seems eminently reasonable to me), then you have to ask yourself why Marx would call a summary that has absolutely no Hegel in it 'the dialectic method' — not 'a dialectic method', or even 'part of, or one aspect of, the dialectic method', but 'the dialectic method' –, if he was still quite as enomoured of Hegel as some would have us believe?And why is it that the very best he could do in the body of Das Kapital was merely to 'coquette' with Hegelian jargon, if he were still of the same opinion about this 'mighty thinker'? A non-serious use of some of his terminology? This is hardly a way to show that you still view Hegel in the way you once did. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

---

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

ALB:

Quote:

Another concession to the facts. They certainly do "seem" to contradict your argument (that Marx completely abandoned and contradicted Hegel), but they don't contradict what he wrote in the 1873 Postface. They help explain it: that Marx wasn't a full-blooded Hegelian but that he took something from him and was prepared to recognise this. A bit like you with regard to Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy.

As I havs said several times, and it looks I migth have to repeat it several more: I begin with the only summary of 'the dialectic method' Marx published and endorsed in his entire life, and interpret the rest of what he said in the light of this.So, yes, Marx did take 'something' from Hegel: a few jargonised expressions with which he merely wished to 'coquette'. That is the sum total of what Marx himself admits he took from Hegel — a non-serious use of some of his jargon. Hardly a ringing endorsement.Now, if you can find a passage, written and published by Marx after January 1873, that tells us that Marx owed this or that to Hegel, you might have a point. But, since you can't — as there isn't one — you don't. 

Quote:

A bit like you with regard to Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy

It's nothing like me  and Wittgenstein's method. I am happy to go on record and declare the massive debt I owe to Wittgenstein, and publish this openly, as I have done. Marx didn't do this with respect to Hegel.

Quote:

They certainly do "seem" to contradict your argument

In fact, they contradict what Marx told us about the 'dialectic method' in his most important work!So, it's not what I say, or what I argue, it's what Marx himself says!You seem to want to ignore this highly significant fact.

---

[Author]

Posts