twc
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Agreed!He has transgressed the boundary of forum communication by hijacking it to solicit socialist member participation in capitalist (i.e. charitably, benignly non-socialist but, in actuality, malignantly anti-socialist) external surveys and publications, ostensibly for his own, professedly for our, personal edification and satisfaction.A perfect specimen of ignorance parading as sagacity.He has flouted universally agreed forum rules. Ergo he has outstayed his welcome.Clear off!
Robbo, your sympathy is misplaced.In sympathy you are now signing up—sight unseen—to the terms and conditions of acceptable engagement stipulated by a domineering mentality that demands you write his text for him and demands that you trade your precious thoughts by time measurement.I assure you that my sole case against such domineering engagement has nothing to do with misplaced antipathy, but purely to caution that we are dealing with another “self-absorbed crank, sitting in his armchair at his keyboard, all day firing off quasi denial-of-service hijacks upon open discussion to filter it single-mindedly towards his sure-fire hobby-horse.”You have wasted 100 posts identically rebutting 10,000 such denial-of-service hijacks. And you are now willingly signing up to tying your hands and repeating, for our benefit, your famous act of failing to befriend or influence.Can’t you appreciate that this domineering guy is simply unflinching? We aim to win socialists; not friends nor influence people!
For once, alanjjohnstone, don’t muddy the waters by interposing your newsfeed newsworthy news journalistic copy atop these postings, and so deprive them of the oxygen, scarce enough, the issue needs.I, like mcolome1, totally independently of each other, take full responsibility for this our socialist stance.Let people ponder our considered position.
What sense of entitlement! • You write my text for me! • You correct my spelling for me! —Well, it’s ‘Holacracy’ not ‘Holocracy’. • You make your case for your socialism on my terms at my demand!What condescension! What arrogance! What modestly confessed superior intelligence!A self-absorbed crank, sitting in his armchair at his keyboard, all day firing off quasi denial-of-service hijacks upon open discussion to filter it single-mindedly towards his sure-fire hobby-horse.As mcolome1 says, we’ve met your type specimen before, and the encounter ends in ignominy, and tears.You’ve alerted us to Holacracy. Thank you.The Party membership makes up its own mind democratically, and not at the behest of unsolicited recommendation by a non-member whose febrile imagination merely asserts its beneficial socialist character.Marx and Engels, on separate occasions, adopted the analogous approach of the wily shopkeeper who lives by sizing up customers not by what they assert nor how they estimate themselves.Go seek your need elsewhere for personal satiety through duping others along the path to salvation by continual bullying into submission, but not the Socialist Party.
All of the advertised Holacracy sites I explored were designed to facilitate profit making businesses.Quite so. Profit making is the goal of all labour under capitalism. Labour’s sole productive function is to expand the capital that sets it in motion.No matter how effectively the labour process is organized it always remains subservient to the expansion of the capital invested in it.If Holacratic organization impedes profit taking, it destroys its rationale for existing. If Holacracy aids profit taking, it serves its essential capitalist purpose. In neither case is it remotely socialist.But Holacracy may lubricate the socially necessary willingness on the part of the laborer to submit to being daily exploited by capital’s need for continual valorization.How the laborer conceives or misconceives capital’s domination over his/her working life activity is quite another matter, for workers are easily misled by organizational process restructuring solutions, without asking “solutions to exactly capitalist what?”Holacracy comes across as another, perhaps worthy (in the capitalist sense) methodology, in the mix of organizational structuring tools. It is not socialist, it was never intended to be socialist, and its exemplar implementations are defiantly capitalist.
Nothing to do with socialism.Socialism takes its stand on the class struggle.Society as presently constituted is split into two social classes: one that has appropriated the means of subsistence from the other.All else in our social mode of life is subservient to this persistent social foundation of our society.All else in our society arises out of the necessity to reproduce life within the constraints of and upon the social foundation of ownership and control of social life by a part, and a part only, of society.That part of society, by virtue of its control over the life of all, cements itself as society’s ruling class—it owns society’s bat and ball and the playing field upon which its players must perform.All social life must conform to and is conditioned by its persistent class rule of the means of social life.This fundamental social relation of class ownership and class deprivation persists and reproduces itself, organically as Marx demonstrates in Capital. It persists as the one constant—the defining constant—throughout this dynamic contingent chaotic crisis-prone social mode of production.Upon this universally persistent foundation of class ownership and control necessarily arises a state whose primary function is to maintain the persistence of class rule by ironing out the social issues it perpetually creates.Concomitantly, class politics arise out of the conceptions and misconceptions of the players who are condemned to accept the necessity of this persistent foundation as essential to their own day-to-day survival.And this fundamental class relation persists precisely in the scientific sense of an invariant of the social mode of production we call the capitalist mode of production.All else socially under the capitalist mode of production, no matter how objectively it confronts us in our daily lives, is merely a necessary form (phenomenal, or contingent, “form of appearance” in Marx’s terminology) of this essential persistent self-reproducing (with the aid of a necessarily coercive state) social class relation of private mis-appropriation of the means of production from the majority of human kind.And mis-appropriation is the correct term. The working class was violently robbed—read the last chapters of Capital Volume 1 on “primitive accumulation”.If you seek further proof of the forced removal of the means of production from the working class in order to form a working class, look at recent history.You see the social creation of a dependent working class, in the teeth of denying official dogma and apologetics, that had necessarily to be implemented by brutal terror in the Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else in the world that capitalism established its private ownership of the social means (as it never has any choice but to do so) out of the foundation of former pre-capitalist modes of production in the modern world.“Capitalism comes into the world dripping with [working class] blood”—Marx.In the explicit terminology of capitalist political economy/economics: the ruling class objectively robbed the working class of its means of production in the necessary process of creating it as a working class.Unlike the white-collar crime that arises after its foundation, the foundational robbing of the working class was brutal and protracted until submission was ultimately enforced by the efficacy of the absolutely necessary class-society state.World socialists aim to end the persistence of this capitalist mode of production-by-deprivation by permanently preventing the means of life from being used as capital, i.e. by implementing a higher transcendent social principle of persistence — the conversion of the social means of life into the common possession of all mankind with their use democratically controlled by all, under which society produces and reproduces a cooperative mode of social existence.Until you comprehend the centrality and significance for us of the foundational social condition of our Object that necessarily generates and maintains socialism as a global system of social reproduction, your consultant-style capitalist business organisational pop sociology is bound to strike us as irrelevant vapid trivial pontification, scarcely worth our consideration in the scheme of social things that matter to us about humanity and its future.Only once humanity has gained common ownership and control over its means of reproducing its social life do schemes like your organisational model float up to be placed as one among other items of possible importance on humanity’s social agenda.World socialists have a more pressing goal to pursue.
LBird wrote:If matter is ‘social’ then ‘material’ includes consciousness.Here is a copy of my response…“Yes, the relations are social, and they necessarily involve consciousness. Otherwise they could never explain consciousness.”“That is the whole point of a materialist explanation of consciousness—which explanation you despite yourself frequently slip into unconsciously. I’ll enumerate occasions if you wish.”“It is a pity that your constricting Berkeleanism prevents you from comprehending the Marxian distinction between appearance and essence—something you assert to be impossible, and so your insular philosophy justifies its insularity by denying the Marxian distinction as myth.”“So long as your Berkelean mindset prevents you from making the essential Marxian distinction between appearance and essence you have no hope of comprehending a materialist explanation like Marx’s. Marx must forever remain totally unfathomable to you, as you confess his Capital does remain so for you.”“It’s a pity, because Marx’s materialist explanation of capitalist and working class consciousness totally permeates his work. I’ll enumerate instance upon instance if you wish. You might start with his sublime “Trinity” chapter I referred to earlier in the thread.”“The key point is…”“Materialism, Marx’s historical materialism included, is a simply an explanation of thought as being essentially determined, despite overwhelming appearance to the contrary, despite the centuries old class dominant illusion that thought determines everything—the grand illusion of the class epochs.”If that failed to answer your question, I take the opportunity to explain further:The slaveholder, in palpable appearance, owns the material body of his slave and the product of the slave’s labour over and above his slave’s upkeep.The feudal lord, in palpable appearance, appropriates the material land on which his serf lives and that portion of the serf’s [corvée] labour on the land that exceeds his serf’s upkeep.The capitalist, in palpable appearance, owns the machinery, raw materials and capacity-to-labour of the worker while he labours, and the product of his working day that exceeds his worker’s upkeep.These appearances are expressions of fundamental class relations between ruling and ruled classes.Above all, these appearances can be adequately expressed and comprehended in non-ideal terms, i.e. as pure material relationships—which simply means that we, in our minds, can abstract out the consciousness that clings to both parties in the social relation without doing damage to the essential relation, just as we can abstract out country, nationality, creed, etc. without doing damage to the essential relation of ownership and control of the means of life.When dealing with essentials, one abstracts from contingency, while simultaneously acknowledging that essence is only expressed through contingency.And yes, consciousness actually does adhere to the relation. But the issue at hand, the essential question, is not that consciousness is present in the relation but “how do we comprehend the consciousness of the relation scientifically?"This is the issue on which materialism and idealism offer opposing accounts. Both agree that their task is to explain consciousness.And materialism doesn’t need to resort to atoms and molecules to explain this, contrary to your repeated assertions ad nauseam, just as idealism doesn’t need to invoke god, contrary to your repeated assertions ad nauseam.What Engels materialistically implies, because his rapid notes abstract generalities from history, and are not explicit, is:Slaves, despite appearances to the contrary, do not essentially stand in an intellectual inferiority (= consciousness) relation to their masters.Serfs, despite appearances to the contrary, do not essentially stand in an ecclesiastical spiritual (= consciousness) relation to the lord of their domain?The working class, despite appearances to the contrary, does not essentially stand in a transactional market (= consciousness) relation to the capitalist class.In each of these social relations, the consciousness adhering to both parties in the relation begs deeper explanation than their mere consciousness of it.Engels says elsewhere in these German Ideology scraps that he and Marx adopt the skepticism of the shopkeeper who refuses to take customers at their own estimation of themselves:“While in ordinary life every shopkeeper knows very well how to distinguish between what someone pretends to be, & what he actually is, yet our writing of history has still not arrived at this trivial insight. It takes every epoch at its word, what it says & imagines about itself”That brief note adequately encapsulates the attitude of Marx and Engels to the veracity, accuracy and quality of the consciousness of social classes about themselves. Marx and Engels were social scientists, not suckers.For your part, LBird, your sustained and concerted attacks upon the capitalist market and upon capitalist apologetics falls for capitalism’s own esteemed estimation of itself, and runs totally counter to Marx’s materialist comprehension of the essential capitalist relation.You esteem the phenomenal “forms of appearance” of market and apologetics—that arise out of (or alternatively arise as a consequence of) politically privileged exclusive class control of the means of life—as if they were essential to the class relation. You even tell us in an attempt to convince us of the veracity, accuracy and quality of your estimation of capitalism that the shopkeeping “capitalists even consciously tell us so”. Oh well, a sucker is born…Don’t feel embarrassed about this, your conscious tilt at forms of appearance parallels the equally sustained and concerted—and equally misdirected—attacks by anarchists upon the state, which is just another such phenomenal form of appearance that arises out of the same essential material social relation as does the market, even though this fantastic estimation rises paramount in the anarchist’s idealist consciousness.So, in summary…My answer to you, as yesterday, remains yes.I hereby assert that the materiality of a slaveholder owning a slave is an essential social relation of production, independent of the consciousness of each.I also assert that this social relation does incorporate consciousness.The consciousness of one party to the ruling–ruled class social relation is relatively liberated.The consciousness of the other party to the ruling–ruled class social relation is relatively crippled.The consciousness of each party to the ruling–ruled class social relation deludes itself about its essential determining role in the social relation itself.The consciousness of both parties to the ruling–ruled class social relation is not determinate of the social relation itself, but is determined by it.
Let’s examine Engels’s ‘verbatim’ text, with his two deletions removed to represent his ‘final’ thoughts, as of 1845.“In every epoch the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas, i.e. the class which is the dominant material power over society is at the same time the dominant intellectual power.” — EngelsFundamentally a social class dominates other social classes, apparently by material force, coercion, punishment, etc., but essentially by materially depriving it of any power over ownership and control of its socially necessary means of life.The class that appropriates to itself social power over the material means of life comes to dominate society intellectually—for all social classes must cooperate, even if by coercion, in order that society reproduce itself, necessarily by means of the material means of life owned exclusively or dominantly by the dominating class.The materially dominant class’s thought eventually dominates that of the other classes, even if theirs was originally violently and bitterly opposed to its, and they still secretly persist in detesting its social dominance.Social reproduction eventually ensures that the thought of subservient social classes comes to adequately express their social subservience, which seen the other way round is but the expression of their master’s actual material dominance.The key social relation here is the materially dominant relation of ownership and control of material life. Its historical forms reflect the essential material dominance relation of slaveholder over slave, of lord over serf, of capitalist over worker.Thought dominance of the ruling class over the subservient classes is left to the menial panegyrics and apologetics of skilled petty hirelings in the aftermath of the absolutely indispensable essential material dominance.It is the material relation of dominance over material life that gives the slaveholder, the lord and the capitalist his intellectual dominance over the slave, the serf, the worker. Not the other way round, as formerly universally thought by the leisured privileged writers ever ready to justify class society at their master’s bidding.“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also deploys the means of intellectual production, so that the ideas of those lacking the means of intellectual production are on average subordinated.” — EngelsIn pre-capitalist class societies, several non-labouring classes competed for social dominance. But the materially dominant class was the single class that gained material control over the dominant material mode of production (used here in the narrow particular sense).This again has nothing to do with gaining thought control first and foremost. Of course, Engels is explicitly dealing with class society here, not socialism. [Engels, and Marx, elsewhere explain the reverse is the case in the socialist revolution brought about by a working class that has become conscious of its class position.]The situation in class society is that the ruling class makes certain that it secures material dominance first, before unleashing its sycophants and spin doctors to sing its praises once it has secured the essential material dominance.And it is this material dominance that permits it to materially impose its specious justificatory thought upon rival non-labouring and subservient social classes.As a consequence of material slaveholding, landholding, resource-holding, the material slave despite himself comes to imbibe class-subservient thought in accord with his material master’s desire, the material serf despite himself ‘intellectually’ falls for his material lord’s protective sermonizing, and the material worker seeks nothing so much as intellectual security in his material master’s favour of a material job—the very material social relation through which his master materially exploits him, while intellectually the material worker remains totally unaware that his material hide is being materially tanned. Oh, capital, thank your lucky stars for such compliance in the mind of your material worker!Engels’s sentence remains pregnant with human class history, and its material essence is crystal clear.“The dominant ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations put into ideas; hence of the relations which make one class the dominant one, therefore the ideas of their dominance.” — EngelsThe dominant social ideas reflect the overwhelming material dominance of the social class that materially rules over other social classes.The historically dominant social ideas throughout major modes of production (used here in the broad material sense of determinant relations of class ownership and control of material means of production) come to conform to those of the dominator class.Marx elsewhere explains that ownership and control of the essentials of life tend to force the working classes to identify their essential life activity with their own necessary coercion—man must live by the sweat of the brow, although the ruling class manages, by material power, to live by the material sweat of another’s brow.Thus, slaveholder thought permeates the ancient chattel-slave mode of production, etc. You’ll find slaveholder thought everywhere in the social and philosophical writings of the ancients, etc.This last sentence of Engels is, like the others, also pregnant with insight into human history, and begs elaboration.Yet these three sentences are mere jotted down first thoughts. And we are extremely lucky to gain admission into the fabulous workshop of young Marx and Engels in feverish intellectual ferment. Enjoy these sentences for what they are.Yes, the relations are social, and they necessarily involve consciousness. Otherwise they could never explain consciousness.That is the whole point of a materialist explanation of consciousness—which explanation you despite yourself frequently slip into unconsciously. I’ll enumerate occasions if you wish.It is a pity that your constricting Berkeleanism prevents you from comprehending the Marxian distinction between appearance and essence—something you assert to be impossible, and so your insular philosophy justifies its insularity by denying the Marxian distinction as myth.So long as your Berkelean mindset prevents you from making the essential Marxian distinction between appearance and essence you have no hope of comprehending a materialist explanation like Marx’s. Marx must forever remain totally unfathomable to you, as you confess his Capital does remain so for you.It’s a pity, because Marx’s materialist explanation of capitalist and working class consciousness totally permeates his work. I’ll enumerate instance upon instance if you wish. You might start with his sublime “Trinity” chapter I referred to earlier in the thread.The key point is…Materialism, Marx’s historical materialism included, is simply an explanation of thought as being essentially determined, despite overwhelming appearance to the contrary, despite the centuries old class dominant illusion that thought determines everything—the grand illusion of the class epochs.
Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank have extracted from the forthcoming Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) the individual scraps written, severally and jointly, by Marx, Engels and Wedermeyer in 1845 as they left them to the “gnawing criticism of the mice” and which David Rjazanov crafted into “The German Ideology”, Chapter 1. Feuerbach, in 1924.The forum may find interest in the original format of Engels’s oft-quoted passage, including his ↑insertions↑ and ↓deletions↓. It is not an easy read… “In every epoch the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas, i.e. the class which is the dominant ↑material↑ power over ↓history↓ society is at the same time the dominant intellectual power. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also deploys the means of intellectual production, so that the ideas of those lacking the means of intellectual production are ↑on average↑ subordinated. The dominant ideas are nothing more than the ↓ideological↓ ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations put into ideas; hence of the relations which make one class the dominant one, therefore the ideas of their dominance.” Engels’s handwriting is neat. Marx’s gothic script is near indecipherable. This extract gives only a vague idea of how difficult Engels’s task was to merely decipher Marx’s notebooks for Capital Voulmes 2 and 3.
rodmanlewis wrote:Is there something wrong with our theory of society which fails to explain why more [workers] don't cotton on?There is nothing wrong with our theory of society.The capitalist class owns and controls the means of production.The working class neither owns nor controls the means of production.As a result, the working class lives by producing wealth for the capitalist class.The working class accepts the necessity of its dependence upon the capitalist class for permission to work for it, to get wages from it, and to buy means of consumption from it in order to live.The working class rationally resigns itself to continuous exploitation under capitalism as a tamed dog rationally continues serving its master to survive off its master’s scraps.But such correctly conceived objective appearance is not the essence of the matter.Appearance is what must be analyzed. It is what must be explained. It is what demands comprehension.“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”—Marx Capital Vol. 3, Ch. 48 [this is the fabulous Trinity Formula chapter that reveals Marx’s materialism at its most sublime].Biological intelligence would be superfluous—a mere spandrel of half-a-billion years of misdirected multicellular evolution—if it did not serve fitness, if it did not endow organisms with the necessary rationality, no matter how crude, to analyse appearance and synthesise necessity in the world they must struggle in and against.Human consciousness—our socially accumulative intelligence—has helped us comprehend and solve, to our rational satisfaction, countless problems.But human consciousness fails to comprehend and solve, to the rational satisfaction of worker and capitalist alike, a single problem that arises out of class ownership of the essentials of social life.Comprehension of the social implications of class ownership and their solution are what Marx’s Capital achieved. The Marxian solution is inscribed in our Party’s Object and Declaration of Principles, dating from 1904.Our Party openly lays bare to the world its Object and Declaration of Principles for rational comprehension by all.Any other conception of how to solve the problems inherent in class ownership, or to achieve World Socialism other than by rational comprehension of the social implications of class ownership of the means of life, misconceives the systemic nature of capitalism’s fundamental social problem, and is neither comprehension of it nor solution to it, but an obstacle to its very solution.Unfortunately, scientific rationality, must be comprehended. It cannot be forced. It takes time, and it means continued socialist education…
What an excellent piece of materialist political analysis by Engels!Another uncompromising critique of Lenin and the bolsheviks, generations before the event!It follows on from Engels’s Peasant War critique, written in the immediate aftermath of the 1848–49 Revolutions, This article, written in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Commune and the collapse of the First International, correctly nails the anti-materialist rationalisation (Lenin’s State and Revolution) of the Bolsheviks, and their inevitable resort to dictatorship and terror.Despite its political brilliance, its finest line for me is the last sentence in your quote from Engels.“To such follies are people driven, when they give free rein to the desire to appear formidable, although they are at bottom quite goodnatured.”People should read and re-read that line, and consider…
ALB wrote:Also in Australia voting is compulsory. No need to risk having to make a donation to the state for abstaining (though I'm not sure that people there are actually prosecuted for not voting).Oh yes they are, as one defiant ex-SPGBer migrant to Australia discovered to his chagrin.
Young Master Smeet wrote:Isn't the point not what we write, but that we:a: Don't vote for non-socialist parties.b: All write the same thing to show we are a discplined distinctive movement.If 15,000 people wrote the same thing, the message would start getting through.The point isa: More positive than that — a Socialist is one who does vote for W O R L D S O C I A L I S Mb: See Post #6 (above) for what actually did happen in Tasmania when a third of the population (at a compulsory vote, which truly represented the political view of one third of the adult population) actually did write-in the same thing on their ballot paper.At the ballot box there is no other way to register yourself as a W O R L D S O C I A L I S T.There is N O C A P I T A L I S T I S S U E that is not an issue for capital.There is only one issue for socialists: C A P I T A L I S M is the only socialist issue.
