SocialistPunk
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Vin, once more you paint it as an "either or" situation.When you see a picture of a child bloated from starvation on the verge of death, it evokes powerful empathic emotions within you, as it does me. I expect you would agree with me that to allow that child to die from such an easily preventable cause is wrong?As socialists we made that decision not solely from a position of logic, but a mix of both. The initial trigger is empathy, leading to a decision that, "It's wrong". Then our understanding of capitalism leads us to a realisation of the ultimate long term remedy, to reorganise society along socialist lines. The logical, economic interest bit.It's a mix. I'm not saying in what proportion. It's you and one or two others that insist on one position having dominance over the other.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/youssef-elgingihy/want-to-know-why-doctors-_b_7917074.html
Quote:Now if I told you that we have not even got to the most remarkable part of this story then you'd probably think I was lying. But you'd be wrong. Pretty much everything in this narrative was hatched in a series of think-tank documents from the 1980s–that something can be so faithfully executed over 25 years is a testament to Machiavellianism.Dr Lucy Reynolds and Professor Martin McKee have charted this journey:'[In the late 1980s]… a conference attended by Conservative politicians, NHS senior managers and think-tank advisors set out a seven-step plan to alter the NHS… In 1988, the pro- market Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) published a series of short studies exploring this agenda… One study was published as a pamphlet entitled "Britain's biggest enterprise" by Conservative MPs Oliver Letwin and John Redwood'.Here is an excerpt from 'Britain's biggest enterprise':'Might it not, rather, be possible to work slowly from the present system towards a national insurance scheme? One could begin for example, with the establishment of the NHS as an independent trust, with increased joint ventures between the NHS and the private sector; move on next to the use of "credits" to meet standard charges set by central NHS funding administration for independently managed hospitals or districts; and only at the last stage create a national health scheme separate from the tax system'.It is worth noting that, around this time, Letwin and Redwood headed NM Rothschild bank's international privatisation unit and that Letwin had published a book called Privatising the World with a foreword by Redwood.The NHS is being privatised and the British public just sit on their arse and let it happen. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/how-the-nhs-is-being-dismantled-in-10-easy-steps-10474075.htmlI would love to see all public sector workers in Britain walk out for a day in support of the doctors. The doctors are loathed to take full on industrial action themselves as it would hurt the public, the government know this. So it's up to the public to fight on behalf of the doctors and the NHS.
Vin, the discussion has broken down so much it is no longer a discussion, but a series of insults.I'm not defending LBird, simply suggesting a way to deal with someone who goes around telling everyone here that what we are and what we think, say etc is wrong, while claiming to have the only solution at the same time as claiming to be against elitism.Just a suggestion.
I suggest those who think LBird is an elitist and is out to deliberately troll the SPGB, take heed of the following bit of advice, specifically the last sentence.7. You are free to express your views candidly and forcefully provided you remain civil. Do not use the forums to send abuse, threats, personal insults or attacks, or purposely inflammatory remarks (trolling). Do not respond to such messages.
LBird,For me it is your ideological thinking regarding this issue that is painfully close to the historical view that humans were at the pinnacle of creation. It allowed a minority to dominate with their humancentric logical views and religions.Placing humanities experience or consciousness squarely in the driving seat of "reality"or "truth" leads us to class divided society. It separates us from nature by declaring our reality is the only reality that is important.Science and socialism for me tells me that we are but a part of nature and as such have no special privileges to dominate and destroy as we see fit. Your creationist communism on the other hand says the collective "reality" is the ultimate "truth" and so the collective mind can never be wrong. So if the collective mind can never be wrong, the collective mind can do no wrong. Scary stuff indeed.
Alan is on the right track with his links to these philosophical questions."Albert Einstein is reported to have asked his fellow physicist and friend Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, whether he realistically believed that 'the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it.' To this Bohr replied that however hard he (Einstein) may try, he would not be able to prove that it does, thus giving the entire riddle the status of a kind of an infallible conjecture—one that cannot be either proved or disproved."Much the same as LBirds sun that does not exist without human knowledge of the sun.This to my mind takes us back to an old philosophical/religious view that humans are the pinnacle of creation, placing humans at the center of nature. That we have a special place, a consciousness that stresses human experience as the most important thing in nature. It was an idea that allowed ruling elites of days gone by to create a dominating social hierarchy based on their reason and religions.For me at least science removed that specialness of humans and puts us into context within an ever changing world of which we are but a tiny insignificant part. Call it bourgeois if it gets you off.I doubt LBird and myself will ever see eye to eye on this issue as I will never accept his creationist communism
LBird wrote:SocialistPunk wrote:LBird,An answer to this simple, you might say child like question, may help me and others get to grips with what you are saying.If we use the sun bombarding this planet with its radiation, as an example of phenomena. Do you accept that it existed or took place before human conciousness came into existence?SP, if 'phenomena' require an active relationship between 'consciousness and being', then 'phenomena' can't exist outside of either 'consciousness' or 'being'.If you wish to separate 'being and consciousness' (a socio-historical act which I've already located in time and ruling class context), then be aware that you doing this is not your individual choice, but an ideological acceptance of a ruling class idea.Marx argues that humans labour upon something that is outside of consciousness (which he calls 'inorganic nature' or a 'material substratum'), but that 'theory and practice' (by a society, not an 'individual') is required to create our phenomena (or 'organic nature', the nature we know, or 'nature-for-us').'Radiation' exists for us as part of 'nature-for-us', and we can locate the emergence of this 'nature-for-us' in a socio-historical context.In the past, a different society could have regarded burns received from what we know call 'radiation' as 'god's breath'. But clearly, it would not be what we call 'radiation' with all the accompanying baggage of how to avoid or treat it. 'God's breath' would have been produced by a different social theory and practice, and would have been very different in its social consequences.Of course, it's possible to agree with the bourgeoisie, who say that now humans have a method which allows them to finally know 'The Truth' of all phenomena, and so once we 'discover' 'radiation' it is known forever.But the last hundred years, since Einstein's theory of relativity, have taught us that what we once thought was 'eternal truth', like Newton's theories or Euclid's geometry, are nothing of the sort. They are both socio-historical, and we can now locate their start and end as 'truth', and show which social groups produced them.The bottom line, as an answer for your reasonable question, is that 'radiation' (as human knowledge) didn't exist before human consciousness, and that we now know when it emerged, and we also know, because of developments in science, that at some point a new theory will emerge and be tried in social practice, and that 'radiation' will disappear like just like other 'scientific truths', like the 'ether' or 'phlogiston' or 'Piltdown Man', to be replaced a different concept.I know that anyone brought up in bourgeois society, under the pressure of ruling class ideas about the wonderful geniuses we have guiding us to their promised land, finds this socio-historical account of 'science' difficult to accept. We're all told from birth that 'science is objective' and that we should trust 'scientists'. But the bourgeoisie are lying to us.'Radiation' is a concept produced by humans, not a reflection of a 'phenomenon'.Whilst 'radiation' is useful to society, we'll stick with it, and use the concept to guide our actions.But to talk of an asocial, ahistoric 'radiation' which is 'True' and always will be, outside of 'consciousness', is essentially meaningless, and contrary to Marx's notions of social theory and practice, in which humans are the 'active side'.To ignore Marx is to return to notions of passive humanity, which observes and describes 'reality' as it is.That is the ideology of 'materialism'.
I doubt if any member of this forum, or scientist, would question your statement "radiation (as human knowledge) didn't exist before human consciousness". After all how can human knowledge exist without humans. And I have no doubt that science will continue to update and change much scientific knowledge in the future.But it hasn't been lost on anyone watching this discussion that in "answering" my question you conveniently side step the gist of my enquiry, that the sun was doing its thing long before any consciousness came into being.
LBird #18 wrote:Either a 'phenomenon' 'always existed' (ie, 'exists' outside of any consciousness)…or a 'phenomenon' is 'only a mental abstraction' (ie. requires a consciousness to 'exist').You really don't seem to understand what these epistemological debates are about, ALB.The former belief is Engels (objective 'existence' outside of any relation to consciousness) and follows the bourgeois ideological separation of 'being from consciousness'.The latter belief is Marx (and, at least partially, Pannekoek) and requires the relationship between 'being and consciousness' to produce the 'phenomenon'.LBird #24 wrote:No-one is arguing that is 'nothing out there independently of consciousness'.There is, according to Marx, 'inorganic nature', from which we actively create 'organic nature'.Since materialists see any talk of 'consciousness' as 'idealism', they are forced to pretend that Marx denied the active role of critical and creative human consciousness, and they follow Engels in claiming that 'matter' is the 'active side'.LBird #25 wrote:Humans do not 'perceive reality' – that is 'passive observation' or 'contemplation', which Marx opposes.Humans create their reality by actively creating it by theory and practice upon 'inorganic nature', which produces our objective 'organic nature'.That is, humans create 'matter'.LBird,An answer to this simple, you might say child like question, may help me and others get to grips with what you are saying.If we use the sun bombarding this planet with its radiation, as an example of phenomena. Do you accept that it existed or took place before human conciousness came into existence?The idea that conciousness is needed to create phenomena, suggests that events such as the fusion reactions within the sun that send heat and light towards our planet don't happen unless some form of conciousness exists to create it or interact with it.
ALB wrote:I don't think he put the word "reality" in inverted commas to emphasise it but, rather, to say that it wasn't really "reality". Pannekoek was not arguing that there was nothing out there independently of consciousness. For him, there was and this was "the continuing, ever-changing world of phenomena" as a whole. That was all that "existed", the only reality if you like. A "phenomenon" was a part of this. What was a mental abstraction was not the phenomenon but the namings and descriptions of it by humans. This is well explained in easy-to-follow terms in that chapter 3 of his book (here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch03.htm ).So the "gravitational waves" that have now been detected rather than just predicted will be a mental construct, but not the phenomena this term and the theory behind it are attempting to describe/explain. They will long have existed as part of reality, for more than a billion years according to the estimates.Hi ALB,Probably my fault with my clumsy wording. I agree with what you say. That's what I meant by his emphasising the word "reality", while not emphasising the word phenomena. We create our "reality", or description, from phenomena that actually takes place. Whether we experience it or not makes no difference to the phenomena, as far as I can tell.It might sound obvious to us today, but I guess back when he was writing about this stuff, most non-physicists probably thought gravity was a "real thing".
Pannekoek wrote:Now again physicists came to consider this warped space as a “reality” behind the phenomena. And again it must be stated that, like Newton’s gravitation, it is only a mental abstraction, a set of formulas, better than the former, hence more true, because it represents more phenomena which the old law could not explain.From the way this bit is worded, with emphasis on the word "reality", I get that Pannekoek recognises the phenomena we know as gravity to demonstrate a consequence, but that it does not itself exist in "reality". That the descriptions given to such phenomena are best efforts to describe something that is perhaps beyond description.
Vin, I don't recall mentioning the idea of "justice".I simply suggest what we call morality is based upon social rules of conduct, ideas of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Or in very simple terms, right and wrong.As Robbo put across rather well in his argument, if humans didn't have ideas of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, prior to the division of society introduced by private property, then the ruling class would have been unable to introduce such an alien concept into society.
Vin wrote:SocialistPunk wrote:The case for socialism is yet to be proved, but socialists insist there is valid justification for the concept, based on reasoned, logical argument.And my argument against the 'moral' case for socialism is not?
I was commenting on the following quote and suggesting it was not a strong argument against Robbo's points.
Vin wrote:I don't need to be religious to be caring and compasionate; nor do I need an imposed 'morality'The whole argument on morality assumes that which needs to be proven. We will have to agree to disagree, it is an endless debate.I must once again point out that no one is arguing that the case for socialism is a moral one. Only that there is a moral element to it.
