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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.
The Australian article from Socialist Comment of 1948 puts the only possible Socialist position on a capitalist referendum. Re-read it and re-consider your decision not to be bothered to register your affirmation of S O C I A L I S M
LBird’s descriptions of materialism, idealism and Marx are caricatures that support his assertion that epistemology generates political power, an idealist assertion.For LBird, consciousness is not consciousness of an external [that-sided] world, but is only consciousness of the inner [this-sided] world of our own making by thought.To that extent LBird adopts a neo-Berkeleian position on the relation between human consciousness and an ultimately unknowable world beyond it.Marx’s ViewWe know Marx’s contrary position from two familiar sources.Theses on Feuerbach — Thesis II“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”Theses on Feuerbach — Thesis VIII“All social life is essentially practical.All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”German Ideology — Carver and Blank, p. 79“…from the moment when a division of material and mental labour takes place… consciousness is able to conceive of itself as something other than the consciousness of existing practice…” in Engels’s hand.“…coincides with the first form of ideology. Priests.” Added in Marx's hand.Scientific ‘Truth’From the perspective of Marx in the 1840s, objective truth can be nothing other than the power of man’s consciousness-of-his-practice in the world put into practice in the world.Of course, the power of practice can never be absolute. So also for truth.But social life is essentially practical:Man—rationally—ever weighs up the risks of getting things wrong under the rational necessity of getting things done.That is an unavoidable condition of all human practice. So also for truth.Practicing scientists rarely claim to objective truth:Scientists are content to stand by the power of their theoretical consciousness-of-their-practice when they put it into practice.This power ranges from the microscopic sub-atomic world to the macroscopic universal, over deep time and deep space, through the inanimate to the biological—conscious practical efficacy in the extraordinarily wonderful [that-sided] world.No other profession than science comes within a bull’s roar for the efficacy of its consciousness-of-its-practice when it puts it into practice.On the contrary, non-scientific professions—like those tasked with running capital—have a track record for the abysmal failure of the efficacy of their non-consciousness-of-their-practice when they put it into practice.Yet ignorant non-scientist pontificator LBird pleases himself with the smug assertion that scientists haven’t a clue about what they are doing.Of course, they wouldn’t be conducting scientific research if they already knew everything they were actively investigating.But LBird doesn’t mean ignorance as benign as that. He viscerally detests scientists as ignoramuses, while accusing them of malicious plans against all mankind. Putting all scientists under political control is what matters to him.Scientific EfficacyPlease note that Marx is here discussing scientific power and not political power.He is discussing the efficacy of our consciousness-of-practice when we put it into practice. As such it is the common intellectual and practical heritage of us all!We all survive in the [that-sided] world by exercising such efficacy and refining such consciousness. The only difference is that scientists exercise that efficacy and refine that consciousness systematically.Bishop BerkeleyMarx makes no claim about objective truth being determined by subjective assessment.On the contrary: the objective truth of “this-side” is determined “that-side” — Marx the materialist.Marx is totally opposed to endorsing opinion on scientific matters [see Marx’s contempt for scientific dilettantism in his 1870s letter outlining his plan to set up a Journal of Scientific Socialism].Marx would have scorned the faintest hint of scientific adjudication by people who have not practiced in the [that-sided] world, whose accessibility they have been socially brow beaten into denying.Marx never ever in his wildest dreams endorsed Bishop George Berkeley when he spoke of objective truth.
So, they should be inducted into neo-Berkeleanism, and told beforehand to vote for capitalism until they attain enlightenment, and then swot up in acarology… in order to become, in your words, “elite” impractical dilettantes in every subject, object and reject as essential training to police and stifle every non-conformist thought so that bourgeois scientists don’t take over the socialist world and conduct Mengele experiments on them. Your words.
LBird wrote:Well, alan, if you can't tell the difference between power in the hands of the producers, and power in the hands of an elite, there's nothing further I can say that will convince you.Fancy, in all the merry dance you led us, in hectoring us over your miraculous undergraduate-level neo-Berkelean misreading of Marx, you never once comprehended that every able bodied person under socialism will be a producer.There can be no elite, in the political sense, if there are no political classes. And there are no political classes if there is no political [=power] struggle to control the means (or wherewithal) of social production.Political conflict over social production is the essential hallmark of class-divided society. It takes the form of a class struggle between the political class or classes that hold the political power to own and control the machinery of social production, whether land, resources or, in the ancient mode of production, humans as chattel, and the political class or classes that lack that ownership and control.Capitalism has simplified that class struggle into a political struggle between only two classes. But that is not how the phenomena of capitalism appear on the surface to the protagonists engaged in the practical daily necessity of reproducing the social system.Producing is an eternal practical necessity for mankind’s survival. That it is not humanly meaningful under capitalism is one of our many condemnations of the system. But dissatisfaction is not a permanent feature of social producing. Joy in producing becomes meaningful in classless society, where mankind has comprehended the practical necessity to produce cooperatively (and not divisively) in order to reproduce himself/herself as truly human.Your fear over political power reflects your erstwhile Leninist power framework that you still intellectually operate in.If now you plan to slink off from the forum, licking your dented Berkelean super-ego, perhaps lend a parting consideration to those normal folks who, at the expense of magnifying your brilliance, you maliciously humiliated and abused, and whether you owe them a decent apology.
Out of the mouth of the scientifically illiterate…
LBird wrote:And who told you that you are made of ‘matter’? And why not energy? Your ideology is 19th century, Tim.Nobody can be made of energy, whether in the 19th, 20th or 21st century!Energy, like mass, is an attribute of matter. It is borne by matter, not an alternative. Think of energy as an adjective that clings to the noun ‘matter’.What LBird is grasping for is the scientific principle of mass–energy equivalence (E = mc²) which doesn’t imply the magic he imagines.Consider particle–antiparticle annihilation… Quantum mechanics permit massive particle–antiparticle annihilation to create other massive particles, so long as overall energy and momentum are conserved.Mass is not condemned to vanish, as it always does in the popular magazine articles!Modern scientists are not the mindless idiots of your opprobrium.You may be thrilled to learn that Frederick Engels correctly understood the implications of the 19th century precursor to mass–energy equivalence—which you fail to understand—namely the First Law of Thermodynamics, particularly in its related form of transformation and conservation of energy.You might also be thrilled to learn that Karl Marx was simultaneously, but independently in the British Museum, single-handedly developing his analogous transformational and conservation circuit of capital.You might be delirious to learn that the French philosophes were their great precursors: Lavoisier with his conservation of mass; Quesnay with his Tableau économique.And definitely thrilled to learn that the scientific principle, which (21st century) you wield like a boat anchor, rests upon the Lucretian John Dalton and his reclamation of materialist Democritan/Epicurean atoms.A gentle admonition to a Berkelean denier of principles within nature: “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
