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LBird’s methodology for “developing class consciousnes”

LBird wrote:

So much for socialists helping to develop the class consciousness of workers, and bringing the class up to the abilities of the bourgeois elites.

“I tell workers to vote for the Labour Party”  Voting for Labour = Labour is True  Labour is True = Capitalism is True∴ LBird tells workers:       Socialism is False.LBird tells workers what to think  Elitists tell workers what to think  Manipulating thought = Falsifying the Vote  Falsifying the vote = Untruth  Voting is the basis of LBird’s Utopia∴ LBird’s Utopia condones:       falsification of Truth by elitist manipulators.LBird’s voting practice in light of Marx’s 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.” — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.The mystery of LBird’s wacky theory is unmasked by LBird’s practice of how he actually votes for the Truth.   Thanks Karl Marx.

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Anti-socialist illusion of political power in socialism

LBird wrote:

the class conscious democratic proletariat is going to have political power in socialism

The Socialist case (Object and Declaration of Principles [1904] originating from Marx) has always been:Political power is a necessary attribute of a class-divided society.Common ownership and democratic control of the social means of production removes class division, and hence removes classes and class politics.LBird seeks political power over non-existent class enemies in a classless society — chief among whom are political power hungry bourgeois scientists, intent on taking over the socialist world and experimenting, à la Dr Mengele, on unsuspecting class-conscious proletarians in socialism!

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Et tu, Alan!

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Meel wrote:

So, who is currently taking the course in Acology in the SP?  I would like to enrol.

Meel, you happen to be in luck.  Student LBird hastily pulled out in a huff.Student LBird proved constitutionally incapable of advancing beyond Acarology (mites) — things mite happen if you think them into existence, like Yahweh.  External necessity is a myth!Student LBird failed for not advancing beyond a philosophical mindset.This explains why failed student LBird must repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, …

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From Science to UtopiaPoor uncomprehending Robbo, let me explain LBird’s democratic Communist Utopia for us, the equally uncomprehending.LBird’s Utopia can:abolish, by fiat, the division of labour.abolish, by fiat, inequality of talent, aptitude and inclination.abolish, by fiat, diversity of thought.LBird’s Utopia can:force, by fiat, everyone to level everyone else.force, by fiat, everyone to police his/her neighbour’s thought.force, by fiat, everyone to vote jointly and severally, and perpetually, on any and every socially created conceptual object from widgets to W-bosons — i.e. on anything and everything.LBird’s Utopia can educate everyone to be simultaneously:   “Very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,   Understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,   About binomial theorem be teeming with a lot o’ news,   With many cheerful facts/     about the square of the hypotenuse.   Be very good at integral and differential calculus;   And know the scientific names of beings animalculous.”     [Pirates of Penzance — G&S]Auch, in Fremdsprachen, …   »Bin Akademiker   Doktor und Chemiker,   Bin Mathematiker   Und Arithmetiker,   Bin auch Grammatiker,   Sowie Ästhetiker,   Ferner Rhetoriker,   Grosser Historiker,   Astrolog, Philolog,   Physiker, Geolog.«     [Der Barbier von Bagdad — Peter Cornelius]And, also in aesthetics, where LBird’s Utopia demands, by fiat, that each must censor the social art of all, whether…   “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral,   pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,   tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,   scene individable, or poem unlimited.”     [Hamlet — Shakespeare]And, least of all not forgetting the multifarious branches of science, in which LBird’s Utopia confers upon us all, by idealist fiat, frontier expertise in for starters only listing sciences whose names begin with the letter ‘A’…Acarology – study of mitesAccidence – grammar book; science of inflections in grammarAceology – science of remedies, or of therapeutics; iamatology.Acology – study of medical remediesAcoustics – science of soundAdenology – study of glandsAedoeology – science of generative organsAerobiology – study of airborne organismsAerodonetics – science or study of glidingAerodynamics – dynamics of gases; science of movement in a flow of air or gasAerolithology – study of aerolites; meteoritesAerology – study of the atmosphereAeronautics – study of navigation through air or spaceAerophilately – collecting of air-mail stampsAerostatics – science of air pressure; art of ballooningAgonistics – art and theory of prize-fightingAgriology – comparative study of primitive peoplesAgrobiology – study of plant nutrition; soil yieldsAgrology – study of agricultural soilsAgronomics – study of productivity of landAgrostology – science or study of grassesAlethiology – study of truthAlgedonics – science of pleasure and painAlgology – study of algae or the study of painAnaesthesiology – study of anaestheticsAnaglyptics – art of carving in bas-reliefAnagraphy – art of constructing cataloguesAnatomy – study of the structure of the bodyAndragogy – theory and practice of education of adultsAnemology – study of windAngiology – study of blood flow and lymphatic systemAnthropobiology – study of human biologyAnthropology – study of human culturesAphnology – science of wealthApiology – study of beesArachnology – study of spidersArchaeology – study of human material remainsArchelogy – study of first principlesArchology – science of the origins of governmentArctophily – study of teddy bearsAreology – study of MarsAretaics – science of virtueAristology – science or art of diningArthrology – study of jointsAstacology – science of crayfishAstheniology – study of diseases of weakening and agingAstrogeology – study of extraterrestrial geologyAstrometeorology – study of effect of stars on climateAstronomy – study of celestial bodiesAstrophysics – study of behaviour of interstellar matterAstroseismology – study of star oscillationsAtmology – science of aqueous vapourAudiology – study of hearingAutecology – study of ecology of one speciesAutology – scientific study of oneselfAuxology – science of growthAvionics – science of electronic devices for aircraftAxiology – science of the ultimate nature of value.This is all possible in the idealist fantasy Utopia of LBird’s mind.I trust this clarifies everything and anything.

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Oh dear!  “To crown it all, to be mocked, ridiculed, derided”!Not to crown it all, “exploited” hides among the slings and arrows.

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Well then, show us the courtesy of sharing with us Mackay’s argument that convinced you.I ask two questions.  Is Mackay referring to Marx’sPoverty of Philosophy (1847). — Marx’s early polemic?Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63.  — Marx’s mature economic writings, collected in Theories of Surplus Value?As to MacKay’s convincing arguments, see ALB’s assessment of his Proudhon book:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1283-july-2011/book-reviews-property-theft-marxism-and-world-politi

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How Karl Marx QuotesThe expert on “How Karl Marx Quotes” (in the absence of Karl Marx himself, who innocently assumed that his practice of quoting sources was obvious) is Frederick Engels — the one man who was more familiar than anyone else with Karl Marx’s quotation practice, having himself edited and checked Karl Marx’s quotations, ultimately in all three volumes of Capital.Engels explains “How Karl Marx Quotes” in the ‘Preface to the Third German Edition’ of Capital Vol. 1 (1883)

Engels wrote:

In conclusion, a few words on Marx’s art of quotation, which is so little understood.When Marx’s quotations are pure statements of fact, or are merely descriptions — such as his quotations from the English Blue Books — they serve as documentary proof pure and simple.When Marx cites the theoretical views of other economists, he intends merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated.

And, for the benefit of the crank calumniators,who deliberately misrepresent Engels’s conception of knowledge as absurdly staticwho deliberately misrepresent Marx’s quotes as tendentiously partisan…In the wash up, Engels trashes their deliberate misrepresentations by immediately following on with what should strike Marx’s serious readers as the scientifically bleeding obvious — that Marx intended his quoted citations of economists to behistorical (i.e. not static) documentationthat is scrupulously (i.e. trustworthy) non-partisan.

Engels, continuing, wrote:

When Marx cites the theoretical views of other economists, his only consideration is that the economic conception in question must be of some significance to the history of the science of political economy, that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the economic situation of its time.But whether this economic conceptionstill possesses any absolute or relative validity from the standpoint of the authorwhether it already has become wholly past historyis quite immaterial.Hence these quoted citations are onlya running commentary to the text,a commentary borrowed from the history of economic science,establish the dates and originators of certain of the more important advances in economic theory.And that was a very necessary thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished themselves only by the tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists.

And that, dear reader, is “How Karl Marx Quotes”.

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Out of the mouths of babes.The author of the blog selectively fails to highlight the sole contentious point, namely that Chancellor Gladstone actually admitted 

The Press, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.

 Here is Marx on the only contentious issue that so delighted Bretano and his acolyte Mr Sedley Taylor of Cambridge 

Marx, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible …. this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power …. entirely confined to classes of property …. must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any-rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say.’ How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained ‘poor,’ only ‘less poor’ in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class ‘an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,’ then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have

 Here is what Gladstone falsified — in his extended trickle-down apologetics — for the Hansard record 

Marx, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

I must say that I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances. The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax; or, in other words, sufficiently accurate for general truth, they do not take cognizance of the property of the labouring population, or of the increase of its income. Indirectly, indeed, the mere augmentation of capital is of the utmost advantage to the labouring class, because that augmentation cheapens the commodity which in the whole business of production comes into direct competition with labour. 

 Gladstone’s piffle is no more than contentious apologetics that the rich getting richer is the means by which the poor do.The only rational conclusion is that the beneficent rich should keep on getting richer.  Anyone here prepared to defend Gladstone’s pro-exploitation argument?  If you are comfortable with it, then you’ll swallow any capitalist apologetics.The truth is that there is no truth in the charge against Marx and no truth in Gladstone’s apology for capitalist accumulation — that it benefits the working class.The case should have ended in 1890.  It has no legs in the 21st century.  Don’t propagate it!

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No, Marx misquoted no-one!Read Engels’s rebuttal — actually performed by Marx’s daughter Eleanor looking through the Times and Hansard — in the fascinating “Preface to the Fourth German Edition” of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (Engels 1890).In the process Eleanor exposed the shonky practice of “silently correcting” compromising speeches in the printer’s proofs to British Hansard.  That is, she exposes the parliamentary practice that permits politicians a chance to falsify the parliamentary record to save their political skins.You can find Engels’s account of this shonky practice of parliamentary falsification that trapped Marx’s gullible accusers, on both sides of the English Channel: Mr Sedley Taylor in Cambridge, who was confidently parroting his exultant European informant, Professor Brentano. The famous rebuttal is available, for all the world to see — here at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdfThese modern accusatory “scholars” might first have read Capital.  But no these modern “scholars” didn’t bother.  They thought they had landed upon anti-Marx dynamite, and their shonky scholarship blew up in their bare faces a century.  Mere adventurers in a serious realm — the shonky lot of them!Ah, he who laughs last…Do you really think that Karl Marx was a mere adventurer, like these shallow shonks, in the science of political economy?  Something he sacrificed his life over.  Do you really think so?If you really can think so, then you might read his book, Capital Vol 1, and then see if you, or anyone else, can seriously maintain the thought that Karl Marx would stoop as low as his accusers expect people to behave, just like their own shonky selves, because it is their own miserable shonky practice, and then to express with crowing hypocracy the fraud’s jubilation in finding self-confirmation in detecting someone else’s fraud.Marx inhabited a different world when it comes to integrity!No, a thousand times no, Marx didn’t misquote anyone. In his inaugural address to the First International, Marx quoted the Times, whose reporter, along with those of the other London dailies, quoted exactly what Chancellor Gladstone had said on the floor of the house — i.e. before Chancellor Gladstone had second thoughts about the compromising words he had just uttered to parliament, and had surreptitiously changed the Hansard record of his speech.All of a sudden.  There is fraud, all right.  Fraud too right!  But it now transpires that it is the bourgeois apologist who is caught out lying.  Hansard, has been “corrected” and so contradicts the verbatim reports in the London dailies.  Therein lies the blatant Parliamentary fraudulence.  Or do you trust everything politicians say they said?Now, who who would you have us believe?  Marx and the London dailies, or shonky falsifying whitewashed Hansard?Answer me that one please, because I am not standing idly by the unretracted propagation of innuendo against Marx’s scientific practice, by you, or by anyone else, when it comes to the integrity of socialism.  Retract the charge, or substantiate it!No, Marx was absolutely right about the Chancellor’s speech, as reported hot off the press next morning.As Gladstone actually did say, before he had second thoughts about putting into print ecactly what he had just uttered in parliament — The wealth divide in Britain had escalated since 1851.Do you, like Chancellor Gladstone, wish to deny that proposition?  Because denying that proposition is a large part of the motivation behind these long-running smeers upon Marx’s credibility.And no, and it wasn’t in the Blue Books.  It was the Chancellor’s Budget speech.  Do you believe everything the Chancellor says?No. A thousand times no.  Marx didn’t falsify anything.  Marx wouldn’t, and Marx didn’t.Y’ know something — the terrible truth is that he didn’t need to!Parliamentary reports truthfully condemn capitalism.

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Re Post #142.Substituting ‘social production’ for ‘materialism’

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

the class which is the ruling socially productive [original = material] force of society

For Marx, the ruling class is not a “socially productive force of society” at all.  The ruling class is quite correctly described as the “ruling material force of society” by virtue of its ownership and control of society’s material means of production.  But the ruling class itself doesn’t socially produce anything with them.In all modes of production that are dominated by a ruling class, it is always the ruled class, and not the ruling class, that is socially productive.Consider the capitalist mode of production.  Only the working class is socially productive in any economic sense.  That is because the working class alone is productive of capital, i.e. it produces surplus value.The working class’s social production of surplus value—and not its production of commodities, which are mere transient material repositories of capital—is the social productivity that the ruling class seeks and lusts after.  Production of surplus value is the only form of social productivity that is meaningful to the capitalist class and recognised by it.Social appearance in a capitalist world is not what our alienated consciousness makes it out to be:For society, the social productivity of capital appears to be the productive activity of the socially unproductive capitalist class.  [You have just fallen for this surface appearance.]For the worker, the social productivity of capital appears to be the enforcer of the worker’s own productive activity.For the capitalist, the social productivity of capital conceals (masks or cloaks) the capitalist’s exploitation of the worker.Contrary to the illusory social consciousness that we manufacture out of our social experience in an exploitative capitalist world, the process of working-class exploitation really does take place in the objective world, of which the conceptions we hold are socially necessary alienated appearances.

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

The class which has the means of social [original = material] production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production

Marx’s original text is a clear application of his divide-and-conquer, ‘social-being – consciousness dichotomy’.Here Marx is saying [or was saying before your change] that ownership and control of the material means of production effectively confers control over social thought production, i.e. the material social base determines the social superstructure, or social consciousness.Materialist Marx here acknowledges that it is physically impossible for anybody to actually own and control that insubstantial “substance” thought.  But, he also recognises that nobody has to.  All they need to do is own and control the material means of social production—as in the SPGB’s Object—and the social superstructure (or social consciousness) will follow materialistically in its wake.That’s what happens under capitalism, and it’s what the SPGB proclaims will also hold under socialism, based upon our Object.  This is a direct consequence of the materialist conception of history taken dichotomously, as Marx intends it to be taken.So we are witnessing here the materialist foundation of the socialist party’s case being expressed for the first time by Marx and Engels, way back in 1845.Of course, it need hardly be said that Marx’s materialist explanation is not possible for an idealist, who thinks that people’s social behaviour is the product of their will and thought, and for whom material production follows in the wake of thought production.Because it is impossible to own someone’s thinking, the idealist in you forces you to impose a Jacobin reign-of-terror that mandates universal thought control over us all.As in my first post against you, I record my opposition to your policy of social thought policing, and I express contempt for your idealist philosophical advocacy of it.  A socialism that requires thought surveillance and censorship is not worth fighting for, but is rather necessary to oppose!Yet here is you, the extoller of precious human thought—that essential expression of our active inner selves—advocating its social shackling, and justifying its curtailment in the name of Marx, in part to satiate your wacky conspiracy theory about bourgeois scientists conspiring to control the socialist world and to conduct Mengele horror experiments upon its members.The only possible way open to you to directly appropriate thought is to physically appropriate the conscious thinker, as in chattel slavery.  But the history of slavery reveals that imposed thought control backfires on the mind enforcer, as the modern legacy in the old Confederate States amply testifies.If Hegel comes anywhere near close to discovering the laws of motion of abstract thinking, then we can rest assured that our active brains will involuntarily resist imposed thought channelling.  We will think the very opposite of what we are compelled to, and then re-think the synthesis of these moments into a single sublated thought, and so on, outrunning the defensive thought police.  Try controlling thought and expect revolt!So to return to Marx’s original materialist version, this quote only makes sense if Marx held, dichotomously, that social production excludes mental production!  Your imposition of entanglement, that social production includes mental production, simply turns Marx’s profoundly novel conception into a mere senseless tautology, that entanglement generates entanglement.

LBird, improving Marx, wrote:

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant social production [original = material] relationships, the dominant social production [original = material] relationships grasped as ideas

As for the first quote, this is another application of Marx’s divide-and-conquer, social-being – consciousness dichotomy.Here your substitution naively clings to the alienated appearance of capitalist experience, and merely states the uncritically comfortable dualism that social-being — consciousness entanglement generates social-being — consciousness entanglement, which is what everybody thoughtlessly thinks when he blindly mistakes the immediate appearance of our alienated social existence under capitalism for capitalist reality itself.You have not yet reached first base in recognising that the problem of social being and consciousness involves first-of-all how to untangle the tangled mess we find it in.  You might then have greater respect for Engels’s rational insistence on untangling it one way or t’other, rather than leaving it mixed up like a crazy bowl of tangled spaghetti.  Otherwise rational science is impossible.For once set aside your New Left prejudice, and make a conscious effort to think freely about what the writer is actually saying.

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Marx Good — Engels BadThe Left chose the perfect scapegoat in Frederick Engels to assuage its misplaced hope in the failed USSR.  Seventy years before the USSR was born (i.e. longer than it actually lasted), Engels predicted the Left’s duplicitous rationalisation of the regime.Here is his determination of Lenin’s political consciousness [“The Peasant War in Germany” (1850)]:“The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to assume power at a time when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures this domination implies.”“What he can do depends not on his will but on the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and on the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which the degree of intensity of the class contradictions always reposes.”“What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not on him, but also not on the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions.”“He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not follow from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but [merely] from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement.”“Thus, he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma.”“What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done.”“In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe.”“In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are their own interests.”“He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.”Upon this prescient pre-materialist conception of history analysis (above), Engels demonstrates that the Left really had no choice but to consciously repudiate Marx’s materialist conception of history once it engaged in justifying the USSR as marxian socialist.The Left’s ancient duplicity persists in veiled form today, though now transformed academically into a sophisticated relativist idealism that necessarily permits Leninist voluntarism.Such casuistry has no choice but to spurn “crude materialism”.  And what better materialist progenitor to suffer for the Left’s shattered ideals than Frederick Engels.Naturally, in the spirit of unscrupulous duplicity, the Left deliberately chooses to forget that Karl Marx—in almost identical words to those of Frederick Engels—deterministically warned:“One cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”“No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present, or at least in the course of formation.”

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EntanglementTerrell Carver (Marx and Engels — The Intellectual Relationship, 1983) charges Frederick Engels with many anti-Marx crimes, not least of which is a suggestion [yes, Carver calls it only a ‘suggestion’ in his mind] that Engels foists upon Marx:“the matter–consciousness dichotomy generally employed by natural scientists”whereas for Marx “social-being and consciousness were never defined dichotomously” since“social-being did not exclude ideas (used in practice)”“consciousness (i.e. mere ideas) did not exclude a connection sooner or later with practical activities.”Cutting the Gordian KnotMarx explicitly states, in perhaps the two most prominent places in his economic output, that the scientific way to disentangle the entanglement of social-being and consciousness was to divide and conquer.Only a New Left agenda could blind its adherents to what Marx unmistakably says, in the two most prominent sources they all have read, and reread, and in which they have merely discerned their own polemical agenda, never once registering that Marx is hereby cutting, before their polemically blinded eyes, the social-being–consciousness entanglement, they so fetishise, with his—to them philosophically crude—dichotomous sword of analytical abstraction.Marx had every right to believe that he had made it abundantly clear that his social-being–consciousness dichotomy was the indispensable core of his scientific principle.Marx presumably thought he had every right assume that:his 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy adequately explained the scientific role of his dichotomy—especially since he instantiates its scientific function in the book.his 1873 ‘Afterword’ to Capital Vol. 1 would put his dichotomous cutting of the Gordian Knot beyond possible doubt.  You may not agree with his social-being–consciousness dichotomy as a scientific tool, but it is impossible to deny that he used it.Divide and ConquerHere follow five assertions from the celebrated ‘Afterword’:“The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned…  This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life.”“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.”There is no room to doubt that Marx wielded the dichotomy as his cleaver to divide-and-conquer the otherwise hopelessly entangled knot of social-being and consciousness.Marx’s Endorsement of the DichotomyThe above extracts, taken from the celebrated ‘Afterword’, were written by Russian economist I. I. Kaufmann. Here follows Marx’s famous ringing endorsement of Kaufmann’s review:“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?  Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry.  The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection.  Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described.  If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.”ConclusionsAny account of the materialist conception of history that does not take Marx’s social-being–consciousness dichotomy to be Marx’s essential scientific tool for investigating social-being and consciousness—society and social consciousness—is scientifically worthless.This uncompromisingly fatal conclusion more or less destroys the voluminous accounts emanating from or influenced by the New Left.[Posters may recall that I promised the forum a rebuttal of such modern reassessments.  But on the present occasion I am delighted to let mid-19th century economic scientists Marx and Kaufmann preempt the philosophical moderns by 150 years.]As far as the criminality of Marx’s social-being–consciousness dichotomy is concerned, Terrell Carver is indicted for gross misrepresentation.Frederick Engels is absolutely correct.

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LBird wrote:

In fact, the title for this thread should read “Engels and the Materialist Conception of History”.

No, that is not in contention.  “Marx and the Materialist Conception of History” is in contention.Far from attempting the impossible—to collapse Marx and Engels into a single intellectual unity, in which they agree jointly on all theoretical matters with each other—I am attempting to throw open for general discussion a source document that must be confronted when assessing “Marx and the Materialist Conception of History”.Commentators, pro and con, do not dispute this document’s relevance for that purpose, mainly because there is no doubt that Engels—out of obligation and courtesy—sent the book review to Marx for his prior approval and free amendment in order to ensure it conformed to his ideas.Engels to Marx — 3 August 1859 Dear Moor, …Herewith the beginning of the article about your book.Take a good look at it and, if you don't like it in toto, tear it up and let me have your opinion.If you can knock it into shape, do so.A few convincing examples of the materialistic viewpoint would not come amiss, in place of my indifferent reference to the February revolution.  [Engels retained a reference to the February revolution in the published review—see Post #1 above.]Engels to Marx — 10 August 1859 Dear Moor, …Yesterday evening, when about to write the 2nd article on your book, I was interrupted in such a way as to preclude further work.I shan’t be able to make up for lost time today and so the article will have to be put off till next week, greatly to my annoyance.Marx to Engels — 13 August 1859 Dear Engels, …‘Das Volk’ [the socialist journal that printed Engels’s book review] already wields considerable influence in the United States.For instance the preface to my book [‘A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’] has been reprinted from ‘Das Volk’ and variously commented on by German language newspapers from New England to California.You couldn’t, I suppose, arrange to let me have your article by Wednesday, there being nothing ‘topical’ about it this time?The extant Marx–Engels correspondence (above) of August 1859 contains no evidence that Marx took any exception to the book review that Engels wrote.Now I can imagine rejoinders along the lines that on the occasion of the publication of ‘A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’ Marx was distracted by one or more of the following contingent circumstances:In actuality, Marx was physically ill and suffering desperately (e.g., “Dear Engels, as a result of an attack of vomiting that has now lasted for two whole days, I am as weak as a fly and hence cannot write more than a few lines.” [8 August]).In actuality, Marx was undergoing extreme financial stress.In actuality, as editor of ‘Das Volk’ Marx was concerned with the journal’s survival [and, by improbable implication, Marx effectively ignored its editorial content, i.e. “he fell asleep at the wheel”].In extreme low probability, Marx was temporarily befuddled, in conformity with becoming the expectant father obsessed with the successful delivery of his ten years labour.In true ignominy, Marx grovelled before his wealthy patron Engels as vile sycophant.Alternatively, all documentary evidence to the contrary has been destroyed, or lost, by one or more of Marx, Engels or their literary executors.In any case, the surviving Marx–Engels correspondence [which I necessarily excerpted to focus on the book review] leaves little doubt that Marx at least tolerated, and at most approved of, what Engels wrote. The full contents of the Marx–Engels correspondence during this interlude are published in Marx–Engels Collected Works Volume 40, pages  478–85.So the challenge remains:  why did Marx not savage Engels’s book review?Marx’s tolerance of the review’s content is what demands explanation, and hence this discussion thread on “Marx and the Materialist Conception of History”.What complicates any rejoinder is the significant, but little known, circumstance that none other than Karl Marx, himself, was at the time effectively editor of ‘Das Volk’—a responsibility many commentators remain blithely unaware of!Here is how the editors of MECW Volume 40 describe Karl Marx’s relationship to ‘Das Volk’:“Das Volk — a German language weekly published in London from May 7 to August 20, 1859 — was founded as the official organ of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London. …”“Beginning with issue No. 2 Marx took an active part in its publication: he gave it advice, edited articles, organised material support, …” “In issue No. 6 of June 11, the Editorial Board officially named Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Wilhelm Wolff and Heinrich Heise as its contributors.”  [i.e. as for the later International, Marx was inevitably assuming effective editorial control.]“From the beginning of July, Marx was its de facto editor, handling all administrative and business matters, whose management until then had left ‘a great deal to be desired’, as he had earlier expressed to Engels.”“Under Marx’s management, and thanks also to Engels’s cooperation, the paper became a real communist propaganda organ. …”“However, it proved impossible to regularise its finances, and, after the sixteenth issue on 20 August 1859 [the one with the final instalment of Engels’s review], the paper ceased publication.”Having got this scarcely-appreciated Marxian background out of the way, it may be time to concentrate on the content of Engels’s review in light of the journal’s editor and the documentary circumstances surrounding the review’s publication.

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The only occurrence I know of, in the 49-volume Marx–Engels Collected Works, to a reference about ‘the scientific value of voting on scientific truth’ is the Engels-to-Marx letter of Bastille Day 1877, excerpted in Post #42, Letter 3, Paragraph 2 (above)

wrote:

Congress resolutions, however unexceptionable they may be in the field of practical agitation, count for nothing in that of science, nor do they suffice to establish a periodical’s scientific nature — something that cannot be decreed.

This refers to the scientific nature of a periodical as “something that cannot be decreed”. That is the closest I’ve found to “voting on scientific truth”, and it’s all in the negative.Furthermore, Marx did not respond to Engels like an outraged crank:Marx does not thereby hurl abuse at Engels.Marx does not thereby label Engels a bourgeous anti-democrat.Marx does not thereby charge Engels with founding modern jacobinism [latterly known as Leninism].On the contrary Marx calmly agrees with Engels’s unexceptional point, without raising his ire or sweat.Thus, we all would be in your debt if you will kindly point us to the source in the 49-volume Marx–Engels Collected Works in which Marx states categorically that truth can only be decided by universal voting on it.

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