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I’ll get to the substantive issue in due course, since it was over this substantive issue, you might recall, that LBird lost his Idealist virginity and transformed himself into a lascivious Materialist–Idealist.For the moment, you two [robbo and bird] might ponder the following account by Marx of his scientific method, and then show me the courtesy of answering one really important question for socialists that arises out of your contrary view to Marx’s.Proximity is Not IdentityFirst consider this. Hegel and Marx are almost identical in their scientific method and their method of development, and especially in their joint recognition of the truism that “we are part of the very thing we study”.Though very close, they were actually diametrically opposite, and Marx upturned Hegel to set him right side up. You guys may think you’re close to Marx, but you are still standing on your heads. You mistake proximity for identity—the most embarrassing gaffe of them all.Marx’s Scientific MethodNow consider this. Marx explained his scientific method with absolute clarity in Capital Volume 1, and there is no room for misunderstanding him.I therefore quote Marx’s account of his scientific method in full, but break his single paragraph into numbered lines for easy reference. We can thus consider these lines separately, as necessary, at our leisure.“Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter.”“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.”“Every history (even the history of religion) that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical.”“It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations.”“The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one.”“The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.”Question: Is Capitalist Exploitation Actual?For your brand of Idealism, capitalist exploitation is mere working-class ideology. [Capitalists shouldn’t hold it, but in practice more capitalists seem cognizant of the source of their revenue—exploitation—than members of the working class.]Since capitalist exploitation is mere working-class ideology, capitalist exploitation needn’t actually be taking place in society!Please then explain to us:how you ideologists can ever know that capitalist exploitation is actually taking place in society?
“Explanation”. Robbo, your “explanation” boils down to: The working-class’s moral outlook is capitalist because it supports a system that works against its own class interest. That doesn’t explain why it does either thing.“Hegelian Jargon”. “In itself” and “for itself”.“Hysteria”. If you choose to play the voluntarist demagogue, what else can whipped-up indignation incite the mob to apart from hysteria or violence?Engels. I thought we had agreed that “his equation of working-class indignation with working-class morality holds precisely for us socialists [and is not universally applicable at all at present]. And that, I take it, is the moralist case being supported in this thread.”“Priceless”. I stand by “Marx gave his life to get beyond relying upon emotion”. On one desperate occasion, Marx was throwing in the towel to save his family from abject degradation. But he couldn’t forgive himself for leaving the working class in the lurch, and persisted in holding family, health and happiness tenuously together, while continuing to create an objective science for the emancipation of the working class. It brought on his untimely death. Yes, priceless, beyond measure.“Indignation”. Marx’s science survives precisely because it is objective and is not indignation. Indignation emerges naturally enough from it as a consequence.“Bloodless and Dry-as-Dust”. The whole of Marx’s scientific study of the circulation of capital [Capital Vol. 2] strikes David Harvey as “boring (and that may be an understatement)” precisely because it is, for him, bloodless and dry-as-dust.Harvey sympathizes with the Penguin-edition translator, David Fernbach, who seeks to distance his own literary efforts from those foisted upon his luckless self by Marx’s Volume 2 style: “The subject matter is to a far greater extent technical [than the technical parts of Volume 1], even dry … renowned for the arid deserts between the oases … it has caused many a non-specialist [= non-science] reader to turn back in defeat.”For others, Marx’s Volume 2 is the reverse of boring. It is pregnant with new science [e.g., Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital.] Had Volume 2 been overtly based on indignation, it would have been intellectually suspect, bereft of moral integrity, and scientifically sterile.“Revolutionary Socialists, not Academics”. That is a nonsense charge in the context of a discussion forum. Revolutionary socialists adhere to our DOP and Obj, which always strike our opponents as “bloodless and dry-as-dust”. You aren’t proposing to make them less bloodless, less dry-as-dust, less academic and more morally indignant for “revolutionary socialists”?
Robbo. While I await LBird to substantiate his accusations that #48 and #51 are 19th century materialist…Just reread what you wrote, stripping away the verbiage — the working class’s view is pro-capitalist because it supports capitalism. As explanation that is priceless!You fully agree with Engels’s view, which is ultimately a direct implication of the materialist conception of history, though you dressed it up in Hegelian jargon.As to moral indignation. There are more morally indignant know-alls out there than you can poke a stick at, and none of them is socialist. Marx gave his life to get beyond relying upon emotion. Socialism is not going to be achieved through hysteria, but chaos can.As to persuasion. Any leader can easily persuade a mob against its own deep conviction, but it’s a fickle unconvincing feat. Socialism is not going to be achieved by political persuasion, but its opposite can.Perhaps we might acknowledge what a weak lot we 21st century folks, even the best, have become!Socialism doesn’t rely on indignation. Indignation, like all emotion is impermanent. It must be feigned to be kept alive, and then it becomes a mere self-serving pose. Our opponents are expert poseurs at this. We despise their subterfuge.Before getting carried away with indignation, first ask the indignant person just exactly what he is indignant about and then, from his reply, judge his sincerity and his socialism. Typically he merely seeks to parade his sincerity in order to persuade you to accept his politics. Such indignation is insincere but persuasive, and that’s why the dishonest resort to it. Most indignation surrounding us both misses the true mark and is the reverse of “morality”.When Marx and Engels died they left us a science that could bring about world socialism by conviction through simple scientific comprehension of socialism and its implications. That’s the only surefire legacy we have.Our opponents are persuasive indignant voluntarists. They need to be. They lack science. They lack conviction.
Please explain, as clearly and precisely as you are able to, what’s 19th century materialist about anything in my post #51.
Indignation as Morality?Engels, as always, is dependably clear and theoretically correct.His equation of working-class indignation with working-class morality holds precisely for us socialists. And that I take it is the moralist case being supported in this thread.No doubt Engels was thinking of 18th century philosophe indignation prefiguring the French Revolution. He was also foreshadowing groups like us aiming to bring about common-ownership and democratic-control [world] socialism. [Perhaps by the 1870s Engels hadn’t explicitly claimed that socialism could only be world socialism.]However, for various reasons, many of which have to do with the anti-moral machinations of Communist parties in the name of the working class — especially those obnoxious Communist parties in the Western world — the working class is no longer receptive, i.e. is not yet at Engels’s intellectual or emotional receptive stage.Sure, indignation against oppression is everywhere in capitalism!Every group, and everybody, is indignant about “what’s patently obvious to them that we should do” but isn’t being done. Indignation about the current state of affairs is the common theme of politics. Indignation thrives in the capitalist air.But is it Socialist?Nobody, in their highest flight of imagination, could equate the everyday common-or-garden variety of personal or in-group indignation with socialist morality.Just examine by the “cold hard logic”, proposed in this thread, the familiar instances of such working-class “morality” as it manifests itself today. Large sections of the working class indignantly hold xenophobic, individualistic and loutish conceptions that are the very opposite of socialist morality.It is not Engels’s theory that is at fault, but our blind application of it to current contingent conditions.General working-class “morality” is almost indistinguishable from capitalist-class “morality” because it arises on the same foundation — the necessity of capitalist society to daily reproduce itself, and with it to daily reproduce capitalist social relations.In the 1890s that is precisely what Engels said. The working class thinks just like the capitalist class.Sickening state of affairs then, and the sickening reality of the present.Our socialist morality transcends most of what anyone could claim to be specifically working-class indignation today. That’s the fertile breeding ground of Reformism.Working-class morality, in Engels’s sense, is still socially rudimentary, just as we are currently a socially minuscule force.It's always been thus for us since 1904. That’s always been the spur!
Christian MoralityChristian morality originally expressed the hankerings of the socially useless Roman proletariat,¹ a morality that could never survive in tact once Christianity became a world religion.Across the grain of its foundational doctrine, the Church was forced by material circumstances to resort to archaic theological terror: Be moral or be damned!Christian Morality as Part of Class IdeologyMorality is a part of the social superstructure, and must ultimately prove itself to be socially useful or perish, to be replaced by an altered morality that does prove to be socially useful.The social superstructure’s essential role is to preserve the social mode of production that calls it forth. In a class-divided society, it serves class rule.The morality of a class-divided society is communally duplicitous. It appears to be universal but it is actually the property and tool of the ruling class.To play out this duplicitous role, class-divided morality must ultimately rationalize and absolve many of the anti-communal practices it forbids in theory but performs in practice, simply because the ethereal utterances of its abstract God prove absolutely incapable of curbing actual anti-communal behaviour.There is one exception. Class-divided morality will never rationalize or absolve criticism of its material foundation — class ownership and control.And so the medieval Church obligingly caved in to social reality, and redeemed, through financial donation abetted by prayer, the socially necessary behaviour its “moral” teaching condemned in thought but was powerless to prevent in practice.[In this way, social being determined its consciousness.]PowerlessChristian morality settled into a moral sludge that purports to be, but never can be, a genuine expression of simple direct communality.Social circumstances inverted Christian theology to the extent that anti-God, and not God, became the enforcer of morality. Satan is the unwitting Christian moralist, the divine punisher of evil, while a morally indifferent God remains remote from our moral dilemmas and sufferings, here and hereafter.Satan, and not God, is truly “the god of this world” [2 Corinthians 4:4].The tacit proof that God is not morally interventionist is amply demonstrated by the Church’s “show” commissions for establishing God’s occasional miraculous interventions that, if moral, do little more than condemn Him as immoral for not intervening more frequently.²The history of Church morality provides 2000 years of proof that morality follows social need and not the other way round. It is proof, if such were needed, that pure moral thought is incapable of changing society.[Social being determines consciousness.]Abstract CommunalismThough religion and philosophy have proved powerless to alter society, they nevertheless expose to daylight the underlying communalism of society that persists, despite all social vicissitudes.This underlying communalism is no more than the now abstract recognition that we are social creatures, that we need each other, and what we are now we have inherited from our social past, and that we have a role to play in our communal present and future.This abstract recognition has often spurred humanity on. The materialist conception of history shows us how it may be realized in a world in which communal morality, instead of the cash nexus, becomes the natural relation that binds us all together in one united society.Footnotes¹ The capitalist proletariat, in the West, is equally becoming communally useless as it becomes increasingly useful merely to financial capital. Let’s hope it doesn’t thrust an equally insipid “morality” upon us all. We see the Left eagerly taking up moralistic positions on every conceivable injustice under capitalism, a sign of anti-socialist imbecility. ↩ [Back]² The late Christopher Hitchins was “devil’s advocate” at Mother Teresa’s beatification, even though she had renounced Christianity. He wrote “I was invited by the Vatican into a closed room containing a Bible, a tape recorder, a monsignor, a deacon, and a priest, and asked if I could throw any light of my own on the matter of “the Servant of God, Mother Teresa.” But, even as they appeared to be asking me this in good faith, their colleagues on the other side of the world were certifying the necessary “miracle” that would allow the beatification [towards conferring sainthood upon her] to go forward.” Revoltingly disgusting! But what else can one expect of the “morality” adequate to a class-society. ↩ [Back]
alanjjohnstone wrote:If we discuss abstract philosophical (or economical) questions then we should be relating it to practical politics.That’s precisely what Marx’s materialist conception of history does for practical politics.The materialist conception of history reveals the following highly practical politics to our highly practical species:a part of our species possesses the means of life of the whole of our species;a class of society owns-and-controls all of our society’s means of production;the owning-and-controlling class of society lives at the expense of society;the owning-and-controlling class need not labour for society;the owning-and-controlling class can live off the proceeds of the social labour it owns-and-controls;the owning-and-controlling class exploits the dispossessed-and-controlled class;the owning-and-controlling class robs-and-rules society;a society, so constituted, is the possession of its owning-and-controlling class;a society, so constituted, is riven in two;a society, so divided, survives in part because material conditions — for long periods of history — offer society-as-a-whole no viable alternative mode of production;a society, so divided, survives in part because it creates a social consciousness that justifies and rationalizes class rule;for its own survival, and thus for the survival of its own society, the dominant-class creates a dominant-class ideology;an indispensable function of dominant-class ideology is to unite actual social division into an imagined social unity;a society, so divided, necessarily breeds a class struggle between the possessors and the dispossessed;the dispossessed in a divided society can only transcend the divided society that dispossesses them by gaining ownership-and-control of the means of life;all political activity that is not directed towards gaining common-ownership and democratic-control of the means of life cannot transcend the bounds of a society based on private-ownership and private-control of the means of life;all political activity that is not directed towards gaining common-ownership and democratic-control of the means of life is socially reactionary;all other political action is, consciously or unconsciously, directed towards maintaining a society based upon class rule;the world socialist Declaration of Principles and Object are the only practical political means to socialism.
stuartw2112 wrote:No historian, not even those sympathetic to Marx, takes [the materialist conception of history] all that seriously.It tells us next to **** all about the real problems of history and is next to no help at all in the doing of it.[The materialist conception of history] has nothing at all to do with the question that started this thread.Marx took the materialist conception of history extremely seriously all throughout Capital — “The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies”.¹I don’t know what else Marx would have to say to convince you that he “took it seriously”.World socialists also take it extremely seriously — see my last two points above. It is the foundation of their case against capitalism and for socialism.It is not a dilettante toy that you play with whenever it suits your intellectual fancy.Most “historians”, as prodigiously skilled analysts as many of them are, fail to see beneath the concrete contingencies of historical situations. Few are consistent scientists like Marx, and cannot comprehend the scientific, and therefore testable, necessity to explain the concrete by abstract theory — the materialist conception of history — which is a non-trivial task.The sort of history you seem to allude to is largely descriptive, and ultimately like any pursuit that “restricts itself to the facts” finds that the facts themselves are tendentious, and so the “factual” historian is forced against his will to choose his own alternative theory of history to make sense of his “facts” or merely rest his “factual” case upon his own persuasiveness as an author. Yes, Marx is no help to such an “historian”.The materialist conception of history has everything to do with it. It is the only way of conceiving it. Social being determines consciousness.Footnote ¹ Marx. “A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy”, Preface. ↩ [Back]
Too Fabulous to Last ForeverDavid Harvey, in his always entertaining and frequently excellent, though always [un]consciously anti-socialist, talks, proposes compound growth, which is merely the expression of capital itself, as one of the most alarming of his 17 contradictions of capital.¹There must be dozens of graphs of compound growth on the web, but I computed my own using Wolfram Alpha, the primary mathematical tool of the web.The inspiration is Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 24, where Marx discusses an entire British administration, under Pitt, falling for a certain Dr Price’s scheme of borrowing at simple interest but charging [the nation] at compound interest, and thereby solving the British national debt once and for all. Such are: “the fabulous fancies of Dr Price, which outdo by far the fantasies of the alchemists; fancies, in which Pitt believed in all earnest, and which he used as pillars of his financial administration”. Dr Price’s Paradigm ExampleDr Price’s epitome of capitalist desire is: “A shilling put out to 6% compound interest at our Saviours birth” (presumably in the Temple of Jerusalem) “would… have increased to a greater sum than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn’s orbit.”Marx’s discussion is worth reading for the litany of fantasies that arise naturally out of the institution of banking.²With regard to fixing the national debt, Marx proceeds: “With Dr. Price’s aid, Pitt thus converts Smith’s theory of accumulation into enrichment of a nation by means of accumulating debts, and thus arrives at the pleasant progression of an infinity of loans — loans to pay loans. “[Dr Price] regarded capital as a self-regulating automaton, as a mere number that increases itself (just as Malthus did with respect to population in his geometrical progression), [and] he was struck by the thought that he had found the law of its growth in the formula s = c (1 + i)ⁿ , [1]in which s = the sum of capital + compound interest, c = advanced capital, i = rate of interest, n = the number of years in which this process takes place.”[Capital, Vol. 3, Ch. 24.] New Shillings for OldHere is the graph of Dr Price’s formula for c = 1 shilling, invested to mature after n = 2014 years.The horizontal scale from 0 to 10, represents the fixed rate of interest i (%).Thus 1 represents a fixed rate of interest of 1%, …, and 10 represents a fixed rate of interest of 10%.The vertical axis from 0 to 80, represents the yield s, as the number of shilling coins, amassed over 2014 years, in powers of ten. This is a logarithmic scale.³Thus, 3 represents 1000 shillings [one thousand, or 10³],6 represents 1,000,000 shillings [one million, or 10⁶],9 represents 1,000,000,000 shillings [one billion, or 10⁹], …,80 represents one followed by 80 zeroes of shillings [10⁸⁰]. How to Read the Graph i s 1% 10⁸ 2% 10¹⁷ 3% 10²⁵ 4% 10³³ 5% 10⁴² 6% 10⁵⁰ 7% 10₅⁸ 8% 10⁶⁷ 9% 10⁷⁵ 10% 10⁸⁵Reading from the graph, Dr Price’s 1 shilling, invested at 6% per annum compound interest, after 2014 years, would yield 10⁵⁰ shillings, or100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Visualizing ThisIf each shilling stacks 1 mm high, a column of them would reach:the Moon when the yield was 10¹¹ shillings [~400 AD]Pluto when the yield was 10¹⁵ shillings [~600 AD]Proxima Centauri when the yield was 10¹⁹ shillings [~750 AD]the Andromeda Galaxy when the yield was 10²⁵ shillings [~1000 AD]the edge of the Observable Universe when the yield was 10³⁰ shillings [~1200 AD]And we still haven’t got to Dr Price’s 10⁵⁰ shillings.⁴ Notes¹ http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/the-contradictions-of-capitalism ↩ [Back]² Marx passes the [to me] fascinating observation that: “romanticism in all walks of life … is made up of current prejudices, skimmed from the most superficial semblance of things. This incorrect and trite content should then be “exalted” and rendered sublime through a mystifying mode of expression.”Yet young Marx and Engels dabbled in romantic poetry, while mature Marx admired Shelley and Byron, William Morris is our socialist pioneer, Rosa Luxembourg loved German romantic Lieder, etc. ↩ [Back]³ Similar logarithmic scales in powers of ten are used to measure earthquakes [Richter], sound [decibel], acidity [pH]. A logarithmic scale in powers of two is used for camera apertures [F-stop], etc. ↩ [Back]⁴ If a shilling weighs 10 grams then a pile of them would weigh as much as the Universe when the yield is 10⁵⁸. At a higher fixed interest rate of 10%, Dr Price’s shillings are destined to overflow the Universe’s volume before our current century is out. ↩ [Back]
Marx’s Response to Dr PriceIf capitalists seek compound interest, why doesn’t Dr Price’s formula totally overwhelm us all?Marx responds¹ “The process of accumulation of capital may be conceived [if you really want to conceive it this way] as an accumulation of compound interest [only] in the sense that—the portion of profit (surplus-value) which is reconverted into capital, i.e. which serves to absorb more surplus-labour, may be called interest. But …” [Marx reveals the processes that limit the accumulation of capital. As a scientist, he must draw upon his underlying theory, as developed in Capital Volume 1. There he explains interest as one of several forms of surplus-value. Consequently, the special form interest must also, like general surplus-value itself, ultimately depend upon the division of the social working day into necessary and surplus labour times. This is Marx’s crucial theoretical insight. The following explanation is therefore a crucial test of Marx’s theory.²]“Aside from all incidental interference, a large part of available capital is constantly more or less depreciated in the course of the reproduction process, because the value of commodities is not determined by the labour-time originally expended in their production, but by the labour-time expended in their reproduction, and this decreases continually owing to the development of the social productivity of labour.”“On a higher level of social productivity, for this reason, all available capital appears to be the result of a relatively short period of reproduction, instead of [the result of] a long process of accumulation of capital.”“As demonstrated in Part III of this book³, the rate of profit decreases in proportion to the mounting accumulation of capital and the correspondingly increasing productivity of social labour, which is expressed precisely in the relative and progressive decrease of the variable as compared to the constant portion of capital.”“To produce the same rate of profit after the constant capital set in motion by one labourer increases ten-fold, the surplus labour-time would have to increase ten-fold, and soon the total labour-time, and finally the entire 24 hours of a day, would not suffice, even if wholly appropriated by capital.” [Here, by the way, Marx is calling on external determinisms — that of the astronomically-limited working day and that of the biologically-limited working day that intrude crucially upon the capitalist mode of production — in addition to the determinisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself.]⁴“The idea that the rate of profit does not shrink is, however, the basis of Price’s progression and in general the basis of ‘all-engrossing capital with compound interest’.”“The identity of surplus-value and surplus-labour imposes a qualitative limit upon the accumulation of capital. This [qualitative limit upon accumulation of capital] consists of the total working-day, and the prevailing development of the productive forces and of the population, which limits the number of simultaneously exploitable working-days.”“But, if one conceives of surplus-value in the meaningless form of interest, the limit is merely quantitative and defies all fantasy.”Notes¹ Capital, Volume 3 Chapter 24 is stunning. It begins “The relations of capital assume … their most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. We have here M — M′, money creating more money, self-expanding value, without the process that effectuates these two extremes.” ↩ [Back]² The exponential growth of profit creates an insuperable problem for the Sraffians, whose 1960s conception of Marx demolished Marx in the 1970s, and held sway to the end of the 20th century, until the TSSI school restored Marx’s original conception of his work. The Sraffian school, following Ricardo, are “physicalists” in the sense of equating profit with physical goods. On their conception, if profit grows exponentially then physical goods must also grow exponentially, and our Universe must fill up exponentially with Sraffian products, bulkier than Dr Price’s shillings. [None of this is intended to denigrate the fine scholar Piero Sraffa himself, who remains the skilled editor of the collected works of David Ricardo.] ↩ [Back]³ Capital, Vol. 3, Part III. The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. ↩ [Back]⁴ Autonomous robots, that in imagination work continuously for free — and so escape astronomical and biological determinisms — create a terminal problem for capitalism. They render surplus labour-time meaningless; they thereby annihilate profit. The fact that they produce goods of zero value, and so of zero price, is merely incidental to the terminal crisis they pose, if we ever get that far, for the capitalist mode of production. ↩ [Back]
Early Press Photographs of World Socialists Yesterday, I discovered fascinating photographs of World Socialists among the newspaper archives incorporated into the National Archives, in Canberra. The photographs were taken in 1925–28.They show Jacob Johnson, Bill Casey and Bill Clarke, all members of the [World] Socialist Party of Australia, and officials of the Seamen’s Union of Australia. In effect, they are photographs of socialists “in action”, even if only on union matters, then of national significance.I have posted these superb-quality images in our World Socialist forum, as Installment 9 of the “1935 Australian Seamen’s Strike”, at: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/1935-australian-seamen%E2%80%99s-strike#comment-12768.
