twc
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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.
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
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.
Perhaps watch Edvard Moser’s 2010 talk in Israel.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pATzOJLptGo
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.
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”!
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.
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.
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].
The accounting profession serves no humanly necessary purpose.The accounting profession produces no humanly necessary use values in the sense of socially produced goods that service society in general—as distinct from socially produced goods that ensure the capitalist class amasses surplus value.The accounting profession’s social function is to compromise all human plans in the service of capital; to kill off human aspiration; to stand between human need and its realisation.All this, before we address the intellectual stupefaction that must arise from the moribund humdrum monotonous automatic mind-deadening unsatisfying life activity of accounting. But I intend nothing personal. Your profession, like many we are forced into, shares its attributes with the myriad anti-human professions that are absolutely necessary to amassing surplus value: e.g., banking, advertising, retail trade, social coercion,…A world, implemented according to our Object and Declaration of Principles, will reveal your apprehensions about socialism as misconceptions necessarily clouded by our capitalist-limited anti-human view of the world.Join us. We have a far better human world to win.
robbo wrote:So I take it you think socialism is inevitable then. Perhaps as a..er… "scientific socialist" you might care to furnish scientific proof of this that goes a little further than what appears to be a matter of pure opinion on your part. Marx repudiated Hegelian teleological thinking as just speculation. You seem to have embraced it with a kind of religious fervour.Apologies for the philosophical terminology, but I haven’t time to simplify and still do justice to the important issues you raise.No, Robbo, why should I?All explanatory science is deterministic. If science lacks determinism it can’t explain anything.Determinism is how we grasp in our minds the necessity of processes in the external world—it’s our comprehension of how processes unfold in the external world.Now the world’s processes are themselves necessarily contingent—they are constrained by the circumstances they find themselves in. This is the common condition of daily life.It is thus impossible for a purely theoretical grasping of a necessary process to reveal, in and of itself, the inevitability of the process. In other words determinism is not inevitability.That’s why Marx, following Hegel, develops his science synthetically from abstraction increasingly towards concreteness, e.g., moving from abstract value to the concrete credit system and the world market; see e.g., Clause 9 of http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx's-scientific-method.Sorry, Robbo, but if science is only opinion we are talking past each other, with no meaningful contact.Perhaps read Plekhanov’s wonderful marxian account of the remarkable 18th century French materialists and their mantra “opinion governs the world”.True, but what an amazingly fertile teleology Hegel’s ideal subject, the unfolding Spirit (consciousness)—a blend Spinoza’s substance and Fiche’s ego—turned out to be for materialist Marx.Marx turned Hegel’s teleology on its feet, recognising Spirit’s apparent autonomy as the superstructural appearance of an unfolding social base.Idealist Hegel’s universal ideal subject (Spirit) cannot avoid being a teleological subject that dominates mankind because, for idealists, consciousness governs mankind. On the other hand, Marx’s actual subject (mankind) is merely contingently determined like all actual subjects.However, Hegel’s teleology helped Marx clarify how mankind’s own social creations—within the divisive social system of capitalism—create autonomous ideal subjects value and capital that, like Hegel’s ideal Spirit, come to dominate him.So, the answer is both yes and no. Deeper discussion of this central aspect is for another time.Ditto. There’s no absolute teleology outside of idealist speculative philosophy.
No, I made only the minimal modernising changes I outlined.The two words "opposed" and "hostile" remain excatly as adopted in 1904 (see italics). §7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the capitalist class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party. I have not forgotten your different request for a modern narrative.
Alan, as requested, I have made a minimal change to the D of P to modernise it without altering its untouchable content.Here is a summary of my changes:I have changed the archaic term “master class” to the modern term “capitalist class” in §1, §2 and §7.I have updated the social production categories in §1.I have deleted outdated social categories in §6.All changes are shown in italics. Declaration of Principles The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement holdThat society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (production, transportation, communications and power, both natural and social, together with their supporting infrastructure, etc.) by the capitalist class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the capitalist class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of social privilege.That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the capitalist class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement, therefore, enter the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, and call upon the members of the working class of each country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labor, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.This falls way short of your request, and is merely for comment.
