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For the record…The same volume 45 of Marx Engels Collected Works, that was referenced in Post #30 (above), contains the following give-and-take between Marx and Engels, and others, regarding their shared commitment to a commonly agreed scientific socialism.Marx to Maurice Lachâtre — 23 July 1874My dear Fellow Citizen …The need for a scientific basis for socialism is making itself increasingly felt in France, as everywhere else…. Yours ever, Karl MarxMarx to Engels — 18 July 1877 Dear Fred …It would certainly be very nice if a really scientific socialist periodical were to appear.This would provide an opportunity for criticism and counter-criticism in which theoretical points could be discussed by us and the total ignorance of professors and university lecturers exposed, thereby simultaneously disabusing the minds of the general public—workers and bourgeois alike…. Your MoorEngels to Marx — 24 July 1877Dear Moor …I think my reply will be as follows: firstly, it's impossible to agree to contribute to a scientific periodical with editors that are anonymous and contributors likewise unnamed.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.A socialist scientific periodical without a quite definite scientific line is an absurdity and, given the present epidemic in Germany of diverse and indefinite lines, there has so far been no guarantee whatsoever that the line to be adopted will suit us.Secondly, however, after finishing the Dühring, I shall have to confine myself to my own independent work and shan't therefore have the time.  What do you think of it?  There’s no hurry.Your F. E.Marx to Carlo Cafiero — 29 July 1879 Dear Citizen …As to the concept of the thing, I believe I am not mistaken when I find an apparent gap in the views set out in your preface, which is that it lacks a proof that the material conditions indispensable to the emancipation of the proletariat are engendered in spontaneous fashion by the progress of capitalist production.[In the original, the following passage is deleted: ‘and the class struggle which finally leads to a social revolution.  What distinguishes critical and revolutionary socialism from its predecessors is, in my opinion, precisely this materialist basis.  It shows that at a certain stage of historical development the animal inevitably transforms into a man’. ]Moreover, I share your opinion—if I have interpreted your preface aright—that one ought not to overload the minds of the people one is proposing to educate.  There is nothing to prevent your making, at the right moment, a further attempt aimed at placing greater emphasis on this materialist basis of Capital…. Yours very sincerely, Karl Marx

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LBird wrote:

I ask you why should a text authored by Engels, which has on the cover Engels’s name alone, be simply assumed to be in concert with Marx’s ideas?

For the record…The following excerpts from the letters of Marx and Engels published in the Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 45 (1874–79) revealMarx’s involvement with Engels’s anti-Dühring — being a division-of-labour role reversal in which it was Marx’s turn to encourage a reluctant Engels for a change.Marx’s stake in the outcome of Engels’s anti-Dühring — Marx’s reputation was on the line (as it had been when Marx spent/wasted a year attacking Karl Vogt to save his reputation), and so too was the perceived course of then-‘socialist’ politics.Marx’s recommendation of, and endorsement of, the contents of Engels’s anti-Dühring as “very important for a true appreciation of German Socialism”.Marx himself kept up with the sciences in the free time between his economic studies, but on certain scientific matters he deferred to Engels’s studies and judgement, and on organic chemistry to their mutual friend Karl Schorlemmer.Regarding the socialist content of Engels’s anti-Dühring Marx had ample opportunity, during those two horrible years that Engels was compelled to devote himself to that unenviable task, to critique and suggest modifications to a compliant Engels to change anything in anti-Dühring that he substantially disagreed with.Source DocumentsEngels to Marx — 24 May 1876Dear Moor …Obviously, these people [the Dühringians] imagine that Dühring, by his scurrilous onslaughts upon you [Marx], has rendered himself invulnerable vis-à-vis ourselves [Marx and Engels] for, if we make fun of Dühring’s theoretical nonsense, it will look as though we are doing it out of revenge…!… Your F. E.Marx to Engels — 25 May 1876Dear Fred …If we are obliged to adopt a ‘position vis-à-vis these gentlemen [the Dühringians]’ we can do so only by criticising Dühring without any compunction. …Dühring systematically flatters these louts [the Dühringians] — something they can’t complain of us doing…. Your K. MarxEngels to Marx — 28 May 1876Dear Moor …It’s all very well for you to talk.  You can lie in a warm bed — study Russian agrarian relations in particular and rent in general without anything to interrupt you—but I have to sit on a hard bench, drink cold wine, and all of a sudden drop everything else and break a lance with the tedious Dühring.  However, it can’t be helped, I suppose, even if it means letting myself in for a controversy to which there is no foreseeable end; ….[Dühring] has a whole chapter in which his future society, his so-called ‘free society’. … He has already laid down a syllabus for the primary and secondary schools of the future.  Here, then, one finds platitudinousness in an even simpler form than in the political economy …Liebknecht [editor of the party journal Volksstaat] has thus put me in the position of having to remind myself that, compared with the theoretical bunglers on the Volksstaat, Dühring is at least an educated man, and that his opera are better at any rate than the products of these subjectively and objectively obscure gentlemen. …For the rest, I console myself here with Dühring's philosophy — never before has anyone written such arrant rubbish.  Windy platitudes—nothing more, interspersed with utter drivel, but the whole thing dressed up, not without skill, for a public with which the author is thoroughly familiar—a public that wants by means of beggar’s soup and little effort to lay down the law about everything.  The man is as if cut out for the socialism and philosophy of the milliards era. …Your F. E.Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht — 7 October 1876Dear Library [onomatopoeic nickname for Liebknecht] …You have reported that Marx (something I, Marx, would never dream of doing) was going to take issue with Mr Dühring. …Engels is busy with his work on Dühring.  It entails a considerable sacrifice on his part, as he had to break off an incomparably more important piece of work [Dialectics of Nature] to that end….Your MoorEngels to Ludwig Kugelmann — 20 October 1876 Dear Kugelmann …Just now I’m writing a work on Mr Dühring for the Vorwärts in Leipzig.  For this purpose I need the review of Capital which you sent to Marx in March 1868 and which, if I’m not mistaken, was published by Dühring.  Marx simply can no longer find it.If you can’t find it, you should, under no circumstances, write to Dühring about it, for the slightest—even if indirect—contact with the man and, still more, the very slightest service rendered by him would impair my freedom of criticism in a matter in which I should preserve it to the utmost…. Your F. EngelsEngels to Johann Philipp Becker — 20 November 1876Dear Becker, …The Vorwärts will shortly be publishing a critique of Dühring by me.  They had pestered me dreadfully before I took on this disagreeable task—disagreeable because the man is blind so that the contest is unequal, and yet the chap’s colossal arrogance precludes my taking that into account…. Your F. EngelsEngels to Wilhelm Liebknecht — 9 January 1877Dear Liebknecht …And should they complain of my tone, I trust you will not forget to confront them with the tone adopted by Mr Dühring vis-à-vis Marx and his other precursors, and more particularly with the fact that I substantiate, and in detail at that, whereas Dühring merely calumniates and abuses his precursors…. Your F. E.Marx to Engels — 3 March 1877Dear Fred …Lavrov has praised your anti-Dühring articles, though one (i.e., he) ‘is unaccustomed to such gentleness in Engels’s polemics’…. Your K. MarxMarx to Engels — 5 March 1877Dear Fred …Dühringiana ¹  enclosed.  I found it impossible to read the fellow without belabouring him constantly and at some length.  Now, having thus familiarised myself with him (and the section from Ricardo onwards, which I’ve not yet read, must contain many exquisite pearls), a task that required patience and a club ready to hand, I shall in future be capable of enjoying him in tranquillity.Once one sees how the laddie’s mind works, so that one really gets the hang of his method, he proves to be a fairly entertaining SCRIBBLER.  Meanwhile, what with my catarrh and consequent irritability, he has done me yeoman service by providing a secondary ‘occupation’…. Your Moor⁽¹⁾  Enclosed in Marx’s letter to Engels of 5 March 1877 were Marx’s Randnoten zu Dührings Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie.  Engels used this as the basis for Chapter X, ‘From Kritische Geschichte’, of Part II of his Anti-Dühring.Marx to Engels — 7 March 1877Dear Fred …[Here follows a long letter discussing Hume, the Physiocrats, productive labour and the superficial ‘economist’ Herr Dühring.]… Your K. M.Marx to Wilhelm Bracke — 11 April 1877Dear Bracke …Engels is very dissatisfied with the way in which the Vorwärts is printing his anti-Dühring piece.First they forced him into doing it, and now they pay not the slightest heed to the terms of the contract.  At election time, when no one did any reading, his articles were simply used to fill up space; next, they print short, disjointed fragments, one fragment one week, another a fortnight or three weeks later, which means that readers (working men in particular) lose the thread.Engels wrote, admonishing Liebknecht.  He believes that this way of going about things is deliberate, that there’s been intimidation by Mr Dühring’s handful of supporters.It’s all very well for [Dühringian] Mr Most to complain about the undue length of Engels’s articles.  Mr Most’s own apology for Dühring (luckily for him never published) was very long indeed.If Mr Most has failed to note that there’s much to be learnt from Engels’s positive exposés, not only by ordinary workers and even ex-workers (who, like himself, suppose themselves capable of getting to know everything and pronounce on everything within the shortest possible time) but even by scientifically educated people, then I can only pity him for his lack of judgment…. Yours, K. M.Marx to Engels — 18 July 1877Dear Fred …And apart from all that, the way in which those [Dühringians] … conducted themselves in the Dühring affair calls for the précaution of maintaining as much distance from these gentlemen as political party relations permit.  Their motto seems to be: Anyone who criticises his adversary by abusing him is a man of sensibility; but he who abuses an adversary by genuinely criticising him is an unworthy individual…. Your MoorMarx to Engels — 23 July 1877Dear Fred …Hirsch is furious with the Vorwärts over the Dühring business.  He, too, now realises that fusion [with the Lassellians] has degraded the Party, both in theory and in practice…. Your MoorMarx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge — 27 September 1877Dear Friend …Mr Dühring; a conceited laddie who, when he reads something, no matter what, instantly converts it into material for publication… Your Karl MarxMarx to Moritz Kaufmann [Draft] — 3 October 1878Dear Sir …I shall also send you—if you do not already possess a copy—by post a recent publication of my friend Engels: Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft which is very important for a true appreciation of German Socialism…. Karl Marx

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Introduction to the French Edition of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and ScientificKarl Marx ¹ Written:  May 5 1880;First published:  in a pamphlet: F. Engels, Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique, Paris, 1880;Source:  Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 24, the first English translation;“The pages which form the subject of the present pamphlet, first published as three articles in the Revue socialiste, have been translated from the latest book by Engels Revolution in Science [i.e., Anti-Dühring]”.[Here is the CV that Marx wrote for Engels’s publication of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.]

Karl Marx wrote:

“Frederick Engels, one of the foremost representatives of contemporary socialism, distinguished himself in 1844 with his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which first appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, published in Paris by Marx and Ruge.”“The Outlines already formulates certain general principles of scientific socialism.”…“In 1870, after leaving Manchester for London, Engels joined the General Council of the International, where he was entrusted with the correspondence with Spain, Portugal and Italy.”

[Here is Marx’s endorsement of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.]

Karl Marx wrote:

“The series of final articles which he contributed to the Vorwärts under the ironic title of Herr Dühring’s Revolution in Science (in response to the allegedly new theories of Mr. E. Dühring on science in general and socialism in particular) were assembled in one volume and were a great success among German socialists.”“In the present pamphlet we reproduce the most topical excerpt from the theoretical section of the book, which constitutes what might be termed an introduction to scientific socialism.”

⁽¹⁾  The last page of the manuscript contains a postscript in Marx’s handwriting: “Dear Lafargue, here is the fruit of my consultation (of yesterday evening) with Engels.  Polish the phrases, leaving the gist intact.”  The introduction was initialled “P.L.” in the pamphlet.The editors of the Marx Engels Collected Works used Marx’s original manuscript and checked it against the text in the pamphlet.

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LBird’s Dictatorship of the ProletariatSocialist-society allocates all careers in the sciences to disciplined non-elitist proletarian scientists—instead of to undisciplined elitist bourgeois ones—under a participatory democratic counterpart to Maoist-style cultural-revolution rules.Socialist-society, by participatory democracy, dictates to scientific workers the political framework and research methodology under which they conduct democratic-socialist science.Socialist-society surveils and enforces all aspects of democratic-socialist scientific thought, as decided by universal continuous participatory democratic-truth determination.Socialist-society allocates all careers in the creative-arts to disciplined non-elitist proletarian artists—instead of to undisciplined elitist bourgeois ones—under a participatory democratic counterpart to Maoist-style cultural-revolution rules.Creative artists will have their creative-works vetted by universal continuous participatory democratic-truth determination. 

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Methinks we flushed out a crank!

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Thank you. Everyone please note that LBird’s authorised opinion is:

LBird, emphatically, wrote:

 LBird warns us that bourgeois scientists harbour ambitions to rule the world, even to construct Fourth Reich Mengele chambers of horror. 

Whew, am I pleased that that’s been settled to everyone’s satisfaction!I’d hate to be responsible for anyone getting the wrong impression of him.

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LBird, wrote:

No need for workers to be interested…move along…nothing to see, here…place your trust in science…be assured…the elite academics know what they’re doing…

The discovery and publication of the neuronal “grammar” of an animal’s movement deserves better.Anyone, who is willing to learn the neuronal “language”, can decipher the animal’s neuronal map, decode its “firing” patterns in real-time (or in playback after the event) as if reading a music score, and “visualise” (or reconstruct after the event) the animal’s movements in the external world, in high-resolution.No need for workers to be interestedTo the implied charge of withholding scientific work from the public:Edvard Moser’s hour-long seminar is in the public domain on YouTube, along with numerous popular videos.A popular, and historical, jointly-written article appears in the current issue of Scientific American.The couple’s Nobel Prize presentations are on the web, as is an interview conducted by Nature.Scientific research papers are hard for the public to track down but, in principle, they may be accessed through university libraries.  In practice research papers are heavy going for anyone outside the scientific field.But it is not the scientists who block communication of primary research.  The blockage is entirely commercial.  Publishing companies, like Springer and Elsevier, typically hold copyright over scientific papers.  Social prestige may accrue to scientists but their products accrue to their commercial owners, who sell them for profit.Social power of scientistsAs to wielding social power, working scientists have a strictly limited amount of it and, like other workers, are as easily thwarted when they engage in strike action, and are just as quickly dismissed when they are deemed redundant to commercial needs.LBird warns us that scientists harbour ambitions to rule the world, even to construct Fourth Reich Mengele chambers of horror.  This is where his idealism—that the power of thought governs the social world—comes to the fore.He proposes co-opting non-elite scientists à la Maoist cultural-revolution rules, enforcing adherence to a Lysenko-style political credo of class struggle (in a socialist society), and monitoring/controlling scientific thinking through global thought policing.  [This fate awaits creative artists, and all who live by thinking.]Scientific method

LBird wrote:

If anyone suggested this method for economics, perhaps comrades could imagine the problem.  It’s simply ‘private property in the means of scientific production’.

No!  Marx explains his open scientific method, discursively in the Grundrissehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx%E2%80%98s-scientific-method,and succinctly in his “Notes on Wagner”.No!  Marx does not stack the scientific deck in his favour, as LBird advises, even though Marx has a fair idea of where his investigation will take him, but nevertheless, like all scientists, he is prepared to follow his scientific logic, fearlessly, wherever it takes him.  How else could he hope to discover anything new, and unforeseen, in the course of his investigation?Marx’s approach allows him in Capital to reveal the distorting superstructure (i.e. capitalist society’s shared false consciousness) that its social base of class ownership and control inexorably raises.  Had he deliberately stacked the deck in his favour, as LBird asserts, nobody could take Marx’s suspect superstructural investigation seriously.As to private propertyWe have already seen that scientists have relinquished control of their scientific papers.Scientists rarely own their their physical means of production—laboratories, field stations, accelerators, telescopes, super-computers, i.e. the necessary infrastructure and equipment for the scientific production they perform—in the same way as workers in factories, hospitals, etc. rarely own their physical means of production.In this regard there is nothing unique about scientists, as workers.  Capitalism depends for its survival on the dispossession of the working class (whether scientist or shearer).  Lack of ownership of the means of production is the reality for the working class.Actual scienceLet us turn to rational human science.

Moser and Moser wrote:

Sadly, the entorhinal cortex [where the grid-cell neurons are found] is among the first areas to fail in people with Alzheimer’s disease.…When these neural tracts malfunction they can produce the severe disorientation experienced by patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Such research is a desired short-term goal.  “Materialist ontology” is a long, long way off

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Edvard and May-Britt Moser are Norwegians.On YouTube, Edvard addresses fellow Israeli scientists.They communicate with each other humanly, respectfully and amicably.Please explain your profound knowledge of their political agenda.

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Tell us where their results are wrong.

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Perhaps watch Edvard Moser’s 2010 talk in Israel.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pATzOJLptGo

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LBird sneering from the safety of his desk.Please tell us what political axe you know for certain—not something conjured out your nasty imagination—that this dedicated scientific couple is wielding, and how it warps their science.

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Where is “impossible” materialist ontology today?In simplified terms, here’s a glimpse of where neuroscience is at…A place-cell is a neuron that “fires” when a moving animal traverses a specific place in its external world (called the neuron’s place-field) but not when it traverses other places in its external world.  This binary behaviour of cell “firing” is crucial to localisation.Conversely, the firing of a place-cell neuron indicates to researchers, and so presumably to the animal, the animal’s current place-field, i.e. where in the external world the animal happens to be.The ensemble of place-cell neurons is therefore recognised as the “neural correlate” of the animal’s internal “cognitive map” of its external spatial environment. [Discovered 40 years ago by John O’Keefe, Nobel Laureate, 2014]A grid-cell is an even more-astonishing neuron that “fires” at spatial “coordinate points”, i.e. place-fields that fall neatly onto a regular array (geometrical matrix) of GPS coordinates [a simple geometric transform of latitude and longitude] as the moving animal traverses its external region of experience.This, on first encounter, is staggering (or “mind blowing” to use vernacular appropriate to “firing” neurons).What is more “mind blowing”, for the hikers among us, is that there is a hierarchy of grid-cell mapping neurons that encode whole maps at different scales, or map resolutions!It is hard to remain unstirred by images/videos of the equilateral triangular coordinate array of place-fields that efficiently mesh together (by maximal packing density) to form regular hexagons that externally map the animal’s grid-cell neurons “firing” internally deep inside its brain (in its entorhinal cortex).If you were to lay out, over the ground the animal traverses, its array of place-fields—the “neural correlates” of its “firing” grid-cells—they would appear like a transparent overlay of map coordinates covering the external world the animal “cognises” as it traverses. [Discovered a decade ago by Edvard and May-Britt Moser, Nobel Laureates, 2014]There are other specialist neurons that record the animal’s dynamics:  speed-cells, boundary-cells and head-direction-cells, which as their names imply internally encode the animal’s external speed, edge-detection and motion-direction as it moves.How these extraordinary ensembles of specialised “firing” neurons cooperate to form a coherent neural system that “tells” their possessor—a hunting cheetah—how to run down a fleeing gazelle bent on escape (“directed” by its own cooperating ensembles of specialised “firing” neurons) awaits scientific investigation.  But, oh how rapidly “materialist ontology” has matured.One thing is certain:  “materialist ontology” is definitely not letting nay-saying academic philosophers pontificate its absurd impossibility e.g., Kline, who academically dismisses “materialist ontology” by the purely scholastic game of word frequency counts and who, until recently, could mock from the safety of his academic desk, so long as neuronal action-potentials remained inaccessible in the laboratory.  Oh my, how the times, they are a-changing…The following statement by the relatively youthful Nobel Prize winning couple, who have no political axe to grind, appears in the current issue of Scientific American (January 2016):

Moser and Moser wrote:

The ability to figure out where we are and where we need to go is key to survival.  Without it, we, like other animals, would be unable to find food or reproduce.  Individuals—and, in fact, the entire species—would perish.Recent work has shown that the mammalian brain uses an incredibly sophisticated GPS-like tracking system of its own to guide us from one location to the next.

The opening sentence could have been written by dear old Engels, who was never afraid to stick his neck out on rational scientific speculation.  The closing sentence would have burst his merry sides for, whenever he saw his bold ideas confirmed, exploded deliriously in boisterous “jollyment”!

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 My original sentence:  “Marx characterises any attempt to build a practical science upon a foundational abstraction—and not upon a concrete object—for what it really is, unadulterated scholasticism”.I revised the dashes to commas, incautiously allowing you to misread the posted sentence to your heart’s desire.Conjuring the “that-sidedness”, without mediation of practice, out of the “this-sidedness” can never be foundational science.  It is pure magic.Here is Marx’s characterisation of Wagner’s attempt to derive the phenomenal from the abstract, for what it really is: scholasticism.Marx:  It is from the value-concept, that use-value and exchange-value are supposed to be derived d’abord by Mr Wagner, not as with me from a concretum, the commodity, and it is interesting to follow this scholasticism in its latest “Foundation”.I culled the bold clause, when posting it, because nobody now cares that the title of Part One of Wagner’s book happens to be “Foundation”, the substance of Marx’s private pun.

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LBird wrote:

twc … is simply reflecting the 'concrete object' as 'it really is'.

No, not twc, but Marx, who assertsI do not proceed from “concepts”.I analyse a concretum, the commodity.I proceed from the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears.Why would Marx, or anyone else, analyse something he already knew as “it really was”?But logic does not prevent you from seeing the antithesis of your ideology in everything that fails to conform to it, just as with the crank and the bigot, and so now you accordingly slam Marx for seeing objects in their immediacy “exactly as they are”.Even an opponent of Marx might have stopped to analyse what Marx is actually doing; but analysis as we know is your professed weak point.I’ll give you three hints to reassure you that Marx is under no illusion about what he is undertaking, and why he is proceeding cautiously from uncontroversial familiarly-recognised observed phenomena, from which he will tease out his foundational concepts by analysis.In the above bullet list we see Marx laying down his starting point for a materialist science of the object domain—capitalist society— that he wants to comprehend as a historical, or dynamic, process.He will employ the appearance–essence methodology described in http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx‘s-scientific-method.He will prove his theory in practice [Thesis VIII], by comprehending scientifically our false consciousness or perverted conception of the capitalist world—the ultimate reductio ad absurdism.

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Toward the end of his life, Marx found his theory of value attacked along the lines of then-emerging marginalist theory.A new breed of economists saw Marx’s materialism as the Achilles heel of his political economy, and confidently chided Marx for deluding himself that value could be anything other than our subjective estimation of utility, one thing for you and another thing for me,In 1881, the ailing Marx penned a private response to the first direct attack upon the materialism of his Capital.  His antagonist was the belligerent economist Adolph Wagner who precipitated the dismissal from the University of Berlin of Capital’s first academic critic, Eugen Dühring.As it turned out, Marx’s “Notes on Adolph Wagner” became an economic testament to his life’s work.  Marx in his sixties calls upon the materialist Theses II and VIII that he penned in his twenties.Marx’s Defence of Capital’s MaterialismAdolph Wagner’s “general theory of value” [„allgemeine Werttheorie“] proclaimed “exchange-value” to be determined by “use-value” or, in vulgar terminology, price determined by utility.Marx tooth-combed his way through Wagner’s book, in the manner of his working life, simultaneously excerpting and critiquing it.In this post I consider a characteristic thread in his argument that exposes its predication upon Marx’s “materialist ontology”.I interpret “materialist ontology” to mean no more than what Marx says about it, in highly abstract form, in the Afterword to Capital Volume 1.

Marx wrote:

the ideal is nothing other than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

I point out that no-one yet comprehends the biochemical–physiological processes involved in thinking.  Materialists, unlike idealists, merely commit to considering these processes to be natural processes, subject to continued scientific investigation.  No-one seriously considers that our current state of comprehension of these processes constitutes a “materialist ontology”.And now, to Marx…Notes on WagnerMarx:  Mr. Wagner forgets that, at the outset, neither “value” nor “exchange-value” are subjects for me, but the commodity.Marx:  It is from the value-concept, that “use-value” and “exchange-value” are supposed to be derived by Mr Wagner;  not as with me from a concretum, the commodity. Marx characterises any attempt to build a practical science upon a foundational abstraction, and not upon a concrete object, for what it really is, unadulterated scholasticism.  This necessarily characterises LBird’s anti-practical plan to constrain all human science to ideology, which LBird falsely dogmatises to be approved Marxian practice.Wagner:  At the outset, man finds himself in relation to the things of the outside world as means of satisfying his needs.Marx:  But men do not by any means begin by “finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the outside world”.  Of course, for a professorial schoolmaster, the relations between men and nature are, a priori, not practical, that is, they are not relations rooted in action, but are theoretical {relations rooted in human thought}.Here Marx asserts that man forms practical social relations because he must, not because he theorises them.  He is refuting LBird’s dogma of the diametrically opposite practice–theory relation.Marx:  Men begin, just like animals, by eating, drinking, etc.  Men begin by actively behaving, by availing themselves of certain things of the outside world through their action, and thus satisfying their needs.Marx grounds social practice in necessity.  Without the necessity of social practice, deterministic theory is impossible—which is why LBird’s anti-practical necessity-denying “science” is stillborn.Contrary to LBird’s dogma, Marx never hallucinated that theory was active and practice was passive.  Never.  Only a blinkered dogmatist could assert that practice was passive, i.e. that activity was inactive.  Marx made his great discovery by merely recognising that materialists up to Feuerbach had failed to comprehend the creative role of practice in determining theory [which is the essence of Marx’s materialism].Marx:  Men start, then, with production.Marx now embarks on the most materialistically abrasive part of his argument…Marx:  Through the repeated process of social production, the capacity of things to “satisfy men’s needs” becomes imprinted upon their brains;  men, like animals, learn “theoretically” to distinguish the outer things which serve to satisfy their needs.At a certain stage of social development, men linguistically christen entire classes of such things, because in their production process—i.e. the process of appropriating these things—men are continually engaging in active contact with their fellows and with these things, over which they and their fellows will soon have to struggle against other humans for possession.Social practice is the necessary ground of abstract thought, and is therefore the independent variable, while theory is the dependent.  Theory can only be the rational comprehension of practice.  This is the practical reason, and the sole reason, why theory is capable of serving as a guide to successful practice.  [Thesis VIII].Marx:  But [a] linguistic label purely and simply expresses, as a concept, what repeated activity has turned into an experience, namely that certain outer things serve to satisfy the needs of human beings already living in definite social context {this being an essential prerequisite because they have language}.Humans endow these things with the attribute of utility, as if the things actually possessed it, although it would hardly occur to a sheep that one of its “useful” qualities is that it can be eaten by human beings.Marx has lost patience with muddle-headed Wagner’s “linguistic drivel”, and finally points out—contrary to ideological dogmatists like LBird—that “the content is not altered by this change of linguistic expression.  It is still only the distinguishing or fixing in the mind of the things of the outside world which are means of satisfying human needs”.Marx:  From the outset, I do not proceed from “concepts”.This is devastating news for LBird, who lives and breathes in order to dragoon every last one of us into marching lockstep in ideological subservience to LBird’s “democratic communist” dogma, in parody of his mythologised Marx.Marx:  What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”.To proceed, non-conceptually, from the way a social form “presents itself in contemporary society” [appearance] rubs against the grain of everything LBird confidently attributes to his fantasy Marx.  For LBird, the way social forms appear to us is irredeemably “conceptual” and ideologically relative.Here Marx is scathingly contemptuous of the skeptical anti-objective relativist that LBird wants to be, and of the illusory Marx he emotionally hankers after.Marx:  I analyse the commodity, initially in the form in which it appears. We remind LBird that the dogmatism of his supposedly active “ideology” has the unintended effect of immobilising himself—practically and theoretically—to the extent that he takes comatose refuge in abject passivity, beyond normal human comprehension, when asked how in practice he goes about determining whether his shoelaces in the form in which they appear to us are tied or loose.LBird’s paralytic impotence when confronted by practice (in the world as it presents itself to us in contemporary society) is explained by LBird modestly priding himself as being an exemplary “impractical communist” unlike us “practical socialists” of the SPGB.  He might reread Thesis VIII to learn what coruscating opinion his mythical Marx has of him.To proceed further is to venture into Marx’s defence of the first three chapters of Capital, which contains his materialist analysis of the concretum, the commodity.I halt here at a lost cause because the ideological LBird has pontificated that Marx’s materialist analysis is not to his taste and is, in any case, utter nonsense, and likewise incomprehensible to everyone else.However, I couldn’t close without letting the materialists savour the idealist absurdity of the following Wagnerian excerpt, presented just as it left Marx’s pen…Wagner:  “This acquisition” {of goods through commerce} “necessarily presupposes a definite legal system, on whose basis” (!) “commerce takes place,” etc.Finally, I ask LBird why, it was not a dereliction of soi disant “democratic communist” duty when Marx—who allegedly asserts the dogma that theory precedes practice—scoffed at Wagner, “I have never established a socialist system, this is a fantasy foisted upon me by Wagner” [or, as in most idealist fantasies, by LBird].

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