twc
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Greetings. Were you a member?The Caribbean islands would have been a fabulous place to hold a world socialist conference, except that none of us could get there.By the way, I'm going to hold you to account — mildly, of course — for your one-line denigration of Engels.One-liners, constantly floating around, turn into established truths. They must be substantiated. The only correct socialist one-liner is our Object. [The clauses of our Declaration of Principles form lines in a continuous argument.]
The original Socialist Party of Australia was founded in 1924 by a mix of [mainly ex-British] seamen, who had been influenced indirectly by the SPGB, and of course local workers. Two of them had managed a clandestine passage to Russia to attend the first Red Trade Union International as representatives of the Australian Seamen's Union. One, the astonishing Bill Casey [of "Bump me into Parliament" fame], privately confided to his mate, Barney Kelly, that it was obvious from the Conference that the only way forward for "socialist" Russia, was for it to actually retreat to capitalism.Casey's brash colleague incautiously spouted this home truth out to the gathering — remember delegates were there merely to cheer and fawn, as now in North Korea — and Kelly was arrested for anti-Sovietism. Casey intervened on his behalf through senior officials, ultimately Trotsky when, fortunately for Kelly, Lenin came out at the Conference with his New Economic Policy, and the stupidity of jailing a prescient supporter of Lenin's new policy became evident. Casey's report to the Australian Seamen's Union is lodged in the National archives in Canberra.These founders were committed world socialists. They were fearless world socialists.Our seamen members rose to dominate the Australian Seamen's Union, after they exposed the fraudulent activities of its former Communist Party officials, whom they caught red-handed syphoning union money off to mother Russia. The resulting scandal catapulted the Australian Party to a national prominence out of all proportion to its actual size of membership.To put things in context, the coastal sea trade [including interstate tourism] between Australian state capitals formed a highly significant part of the Australian economy then, and the Socialists negotiated a new agreement with the ship owners that all seamen, whatever their nationality, who were employed in the trade, had to be payed national Australian rates and expect Australian working conditions.In fact the Australian Socialists rose to such prominence, that one of them was nationally vilified day-in day-out in the press, and jailed for deportation by the Federal Government, over industrial Seamen's disputation.Another stood for Federal Parliament, in the seat formerly held by a previous Prime Minister, telling electors "not to vote for me personally [he had a large personal following] but for Socialism, and only if you understand its implication". I haven't the figures immediately to hand, as I write, but the Socialist Party got something like 10% of the vote, for this first ever Socialist to stand on a Socialist Party platform for a national Parliament, anywhere in the world.An ill-conceived 1935 Seamen's strike — a prolonged national dispute that stopped the ships in the midst of the Depression — was opposed at the time by the Socialists but was fomented by the Communists as a Leninist means of showing capitalism how feeble it was. This industrial dispute finished up smashing the union when those same Communists, in true Leninist treachery, deserted the membership and set up a rival scab union, with themselves as national officials, in league with the ship owners, on secret cosy anti-worker terms, and went back to work, leaving their followers who had heeded their idiotic call to down tools standing high and dry on land, jobless and betrayed.Many of our seamen members found they no longer got work at sea under the Communist dominated scab union. This merely explains the beginning of the Australian party's demise.The Australian world socialist party finally disintegrated after WWII when a younger generation of members, mainly English immigrants, recruited into the SPGB during the Depression years, arrived here full of brash enthusiasm and slowly fell hook, line and sinker for sophisticated Labourism and the brave new world of post-War Australia, and the adulation they received as intellectual poseurs.That was a time in Australia of social rebirth after Depression and War, and things looked so more rosy than they did in the depressed Britain they'd gladly left behind. Socialism was no longer a spur for them, and the lure of local intellectual superiority took hold of them, to the detriment of a working class party.In short, it was the gung-ho brand of egotistical bravado proselitysing, of the very determined kind being advocated above, as amply demonstrated in practice by those particular ex-SPGBers, that brought the Australian world socialist party to its knees. Of course, the Cold War and a determined Federal policy of anti-Communist repression here played their demoralizing parts.Finally, a Stalinist Party stole the Party name, and it settled for the World Socialist Party of Australia. The small party has never recovered. That is the size of the Australian task.
So you, in your ignorance, imagine that I'm regurgitating texts. I challenge you to substantiate this claim.I will not honour your critical thinking charge with anything but the contempt deserved by the haughty.
My politics are World Socialist.That means I am a nondescript member of a leaderless, democratic, socialist party, that has always stood against leadership into socialism. It has held a political stance against leaders, and leadership into socialism, for over a century. It is simply unlike the anti-democratic Left.I have never been a leader of, or managed, a single person throughout my working career, on socialist principle, by genuine disinclination and distaste of the very obnoxious thing. That comes from growing up in an open world-socialist household.On the other hand, I have been always managed and led by other people, lately much younger and inexperienced than myself. That conforms to my inherited socialist views against preferment under capitalism if it involves the subjugation of my working fellows, which it almost invariably does.My knowledge simply comes from a lifetime interest in reading everything I could on socialism, just like many other members do. There is a natural division of labour in this, and folks complement each other.You may consider my socialist stance, at work in a dog-eat-dog capitalist workplace, to be absurdly self denying. In a capitalist rational sense that would be correct. But I cannot bring myself, emotionally, to do otherwise.You have chosen the wrong person, and the wrong Party, to hurl charges of leadership at.
LBirdian Economics of the Non-Elite VarietyWrong. Money is a means of circulation. Circulation of money is a necessary function of cyclic capitalist reproduction. Wrong. Money does not represent exploitation. Profit, the phenomenal form of surplus value, represents exploitation.Money represents value as a repository of socially necessary labour time. If money represented exploitation, no-one would touch it with a barge pole.Wrong. Money is not for individual exchange. Value, as socially necessary labour time ipso facto can only be social. Money is essential for social exchange. It is through social exchange that surplus socially necessary labour time is realized as surplus value in the phenomenal form of profit.Wrong. As for estimating the worth of an individual product, you ignominiously retreat back into a social formation that precedes capitalism.It is you who needs to be educated before you start educating the working class from above it. You are a total fraud. Harvey’s “oxidizable money” is about on equal par with your “democratic truth”.
IdeologyMuch of what you tell is too true. Sadly, it is not the whole story.The SPGB’s case has been attacked root and branch. Its conception of primitive socialism [that’s what started it, and derailed that discussion, the first of many derailments], its Marxian science, its socialist Object and its materialist Declaration of Principles are declared to be mere ideology.They just happen to be the SPGB’s ideology and not someone else’s ideology, and the SPGB should simply grow up and acknowledge this uncomfortable fact about the human condition. So the SPGB must acknowledge that all thought is based on ideology, and political thought on political ideology.Because the charge has been laid by an avowed anti-materialist, it is worth pointing out that class ideology can only be a materialist position, along the lines that social condition determines social ideology.No idealist could credibly maintain that social ideology determines social condition throughout an entire social epoch, or mode of production. No idealist could credibly argue that class ideology has the social power to determine a man’s social condition as that of a worker, a serf, or a slave, simply because he holds such conceptions of himself. No idealist could credibly maintain that a man in the social condition of worker, serf or slave could become a capitalist, lord or master, merely by thinking “ideologically” like a capitalist, lord or master.Class-ideology turns out not to be idealist at all, but the oldest political form of materialism.This, of course, was already recognized by those bête noir 18th century materialist philosophes, Diderot, Holbach, La Mettrie, Condorcet, et al., who expressed it in plain language as “opinion governs the world”. These detested fellows already proved that if social classes have their own social-class ideologies — and these pre-French revolutionaries knew a thing or two about social-class ideologies — then social-class ideology must be the product of social-class condition, and not social-class condition the product of social-class ideology.Socially-Necessary False ConsciousnessMarx was weaned on such French materialism — remarkable stuff — in his Rhineland youth, and spent his entire lifetime exploring the far-more complex nature of social consciousness that is raised upon the foundation of a social mode of production.Marx went far beyond the fine old philosophes, and employed the term “ideology” to connote a different social category. For him, it did not mean all of social thought, nor merely social-class thought. He reserved the term “ideology” to mean the insidious false consciousness shared by an entire society.[The more obvious, less insidious, forms of social ‘ideology’, recognized by all and sundry, as such, ready-made weapons of demagoguery, are derivative of Marx’s more general form, and are subservient to it.]The ideology of an entire social mode of production is tacitly agreed upon by all members of society, regardless of social class, throughout most of the lifetime of that social mode of production. Social ideology is insidiously democratic in the pervasive sense that it is unconsciously accepted as incontestably just so, by both master and slave, lord and serf, and capitalist and worker.Ideology, in Marx’s sense, is the pervasive thought environment that arises out of monopolized ownership and control of the necessary implements and resources of social reproduction by a social class [or classes] and not by all of society.The necessity for society to reproduce itself reinforces in the social consciousness, that is shared by all social classes (since all classes depend on social reproduction), the rationality of maintaining society under its existing inflexible practice of class ownership and control, and thus under the malleable (because forms of thought are flexible, while the practice of class control is adamantly sacrosanct) existing principle of anti-social thought. In this way, inflexible conditions of social reproduction unconsciously reproduce accommodating social ideology.Men trapped within this shared social ideology can imagine all sorts of fanciful ways to escape from it, idealistically, but so long as their consciousness remains trapped within its bounds and forms, bounds and forms that are appropriate to the mode of production, they cannot escape its clutches socially.At most, men trapped within the protective ideology of a social mode of production can only escape its clutches ideally, not socially, and so anti-socially, by exchanging old owners and controllers of the social means of life for new ones. But the new owners and controllers of the social means of life still remain trapped within the thought confines of the materially necessary social ideology they share with all, and their transformation of ownership and power simply leaves the general practice of class ownership and control in place, and hence the social mode of production keeps on generating its necessary protective ideology in the minds of men.The SPGB Object and Declaration of Principles are not ideological in Marx’s sense.Rather they are necessary means for exposing and overthrowing the material foundations of capitalist ideology, and replacing them with material foundations that are truly social for all society, and that thereby do not generate, because they do not need to generate, the false consciousness that constitutes the ideology of an anti-social class society, capitalism.
Firstly, the SPGB has been democratic in all aspects of its existence as a democratic political party, with a democratic political Objective and democratic political means, enshrined in its politically democratic Declaration of Principles, for over a century, and you know it, or else prove otherwise.It is you who are doing the catching up, and we recognize it, and appreciate it.Secondly, the SPGB was opposing the undemocratic politics of big-C Communism, that you are fleeing from, long before you were born, and has always without exception opposed anti-democratic political big-C Communism since big-C Communism emerged as a political force nearly a century ago, and you know it, or else prove otherwise.It is you who might acknowledge the SPGB's consistency in the face of big-C Communist denigration, insult and worse, throughout the 20th century, so that you don't have to start off democratically opposing capitalism from scratch, on your own, but in the company of committed democrats, within a century-long established tradition of socialist democratic politics and socialist democratic objective.Thirdly, for the entirety of the 20th century, the SPGB was never part of big-C Communism, whose unconscious role, it recognized from the start, was predetermined for big-C Communism by material circumstances of its existing pre-capitalist worlds, to act as mere brutal engines of capitalist primitive accumulation, as the precondition for bringing capitalism to its backward parts of the world.Fourthly, democracy simply can't dictate to nature what to do. That's when democracy, when it's brainlessly applied to circumstances for which it is inappropriate, turns into dictatorship.As I asked you before, will you be able to hang onto your hair brained imposition of democracy over human thought, when human thought rebels under the yoke?Fifthly, there will be no social classes in socialism, when the necessary resources and implements of social reproduction are commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community. We've read your arguments that scientists will become the new ruling class, unless kept in check, but that is pure paranoia.Sixthly, and lastly [like Falstaff], it's pure nonsense to parrot meaningless phrases, that have cryptic meaning to yourself, like elite economics and the market is neutral.The capitalist market is not the problem — it is the only possible solution to capitalist social reproduction. It is only a consequence, but not the source. To make the market the issue is just as dangerously anti-socialist, and wrong-headed, as to make government the issue, along with the anarchists. The market and government are consequences of the real issue.The real issue is private ownership and private control by a social class of the necessary resources and implements of social reproduction. Remove that by socialist democratic politics, and you remove the market and government, by removing the social base upon which these phenomena rest.It is your attack that remains entirely at the level of ideas, that is the most dangerous aspect of trying to bring about something and removing something else which generate the ideas you attack, but leave the material causes untouched.
DJP wrote:LOL. The whole of quantum physics runs on probalistic models (i.e is not deterministic) I would have thought that explains quite a lot.Your LOL demonstrates how readily a syncretic philosophical mind falls for appearance. Socialism, by the way, is nothing if we fall for appearance about society.Classical Probability TheoryProbability theory is a deterministic mathematical science. It is the only way we can determine the likely outcomes of random events, like the toss of a coin, when we don’t know and can’t control the physical conditions precisely enough to determine the outcome from first principles.Probabilistic determinism does not annihilate physical determinism; it merely acknowledges physical determinism as contingently inappropriate to the task at hand. It is our human ability that is deficient, and our human inability forces us to resort to probabilistic determinism.Probabilistic DeterminismProbability theory operates at the phenomenological level, by treating random events as subsets of the superset of all possible random outcomes, and it considers probabilities as the relative sizes of subsets and the superset.Example. For a coin toss, the superset comprises {heads, tails}, and its size is 2 because it contains all of the two possible event outcomes. A throw of “heads” comprises the subset {heads}, and its size is 1 because it contains the only one possible outcome that is “heads”. The probability of throwing “heads” is the ratio of the size of the “heads” subset to the superset, or 1 / 2.Probability theory lacks any knowledge of the underlying determinism at work, and consequently can’t determine the precise outcome of any given coin toss, but it can determine the precise average of a long run of coin tosses. In gambling, a determinate long-run average is all the house needs to rob its mug punters, without ever resorting to any actual physical determinisms, known and controlled, that surreptitiously rig the short-run odds in its favour.Sorry, but determinism is alive and well, and living in Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. Otherwise these star-studded peddlers in voluntaristic freedom-from-proletarian dreams would have gone bust long ago. Viva las determinismo!Quantum DeterminismWe formerly discussed the serious problems of interpreting quantum mechanics, where concrete appearance is entirely probabilistic. But to repeat…Bohr grabbed the quantum nettle and simply accepted the reality of probability being just how nature is at the microscopic level, and agreed to get along with it. Natural probability lies at the heart of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation and, even if it remains disturbingly problematic for some, this interpretation remains the comfortable lingua franca for most.Everyone knows that Einstein was reluctant to give up classical determinism [he was inspired by thoughts similar to those given in my argument (immediately above) about classical probability not annihilating determinism but only being ignorant of it; Einstein fought for a covert determinism beneath the probability].What most people don’t know is that Bohr was mainly able to meet Einstein’s many objections from the vantage of his consistent quantum viewpoint, by pointing out Einstein’s dualistic [or unconsciously syncretistic] mixture of classical and quantum viewpoints that sunk his counter-case. Bohr’s great putdown of Einstein’s familiar quote about god and dice is “Einstein, stop telling god how to behave!”There is, of course, also the celebrated, alternative, overtly deterministic, interpretation by Bohm, that considers the universe to be physically deterministic at the microscopic level. As in a previous post, I declare my incompetence to rush in where angels fear to tread, and will not offer any opinion here. Inconclusive Forefront of ScienceHowever, LBird knows how to solve the problem of quantum interpretation, because it falls within the category of something he has expert knowledge of — a problem at the inconclusive forefront of science — which he vehemently cast a strong opinion on in a recent post.LBird solves all problems, especially those at the inconclusive forefront of science by voting on them. Voting? Yes, by voting on the inconclusive forefront. A standup could make a hilarious routine out of this.However, he is not joking. He is fanatically serious. He and his big-C Communists will decide what scientists are allowed to think by a poll That'll keep such distrusted elites in their proper place. I’m afraid that universal mediocrity is our sorry lot under big-C Communism.LBird romantically condemns anyone who refuses to go along with his hair-brained franchise, to vote on the nature of nature, as being anti-democratic and anti-proletarian. I am not joking. Sadly, this is the serious babble of a more-democratic-than-thou, pro-proletarian, poseur.Voting is entirely inadequate to the task at hand. Voting is impotent in the face of nature’s determinism, which determinism is something proletarian scientist LBird refuses to allow of nature herself, but only to us.For idealist LBird [actually he’s an idealist-leaning syncretist], nature is non-deterministic, and determinism being our social construct has a perfect right to be voted in or out, particularly at the inconclusive forefront of science.This is slurping the dregs of the residual stultifying Kantianism of Popper, partly evident in his influential students. LBird is a dualistic casualty of learning his science, ignorant of the context, primarily through such folks.Quantum ProbabilityQuantum mechanics, as abstract theory, is thoroughly deterministic.Quantum phenomena at the concrete level are incontestably probabilistic. But phenomenal appearance is not explanation, but that which is to be explained.Quantum mechanical theory, of whatever stripe, solves the deterministic wave equation, or put another way, the wave function evolves deterministically, thereby providing an explanation of the phenomenal appearance. Determinism explains the concrete probability.I’m afraid quantum mechanics has turned out to be far-and-away the most precise deterministic theory we have, and it relies entirely on determinism to explain concrete probabilities.Determinism is the stuff of explanation.
That isn't the point, it's the sideshow.Scientists don't rip off their balls, neuter themselves, or turn hermaphroditic, in order to accommodate conflicting appearance.For Marx, the concrete world is all struggle [while for Hegel, the ideal world was all struggle]. It's always struggle that needs to be comprehended. The world for man is a world of struggle.Struggle is always the real issue, whether in the concrete or in thought, abstractly. Life is compelled to resolve struggle. Struggle is its driving force — for us, class struggle. No ifs or buts.Consequently, as in all successful human practice, struggle needs to be comprehended deterministically, to be settled, or not at all. Successful practice and thought can never surrender to the easy imbecility of syncretism, or dualism, as it's politely called in academic philosophical circles. Dualism leaves struggle to simmer on unresolved.Socialism is consistently materialist. Materialism is born as determinism. Materialism explains thought from being. There could be nothing more determinist than that: being determines thought. It goes to the core of existence. If there is something more determinist than materialism, please tell us what is.Marx's materialism is inseparable from determinism, just as Hegel's idealism is. Materialism is deterministic point-blank, no ifs or buts, period. It cannot be other than deterministic. Possibly determinism, as a tainted but terrifying phrase, sounds terribly "crude" to polite philosophical sensibility, but the fact that materialism is ipso facto deterministic is incontestably irrefutable.Both materialism and idealism aim to explain concrete appearance deterministically. They both have the courageous virtue, and mental stamina, to stick to their guns. They are both schools of principle, and not gangs of convenience.Can you show us how anyone can explain anything non-deterministically. You won't find the answer in the Amazon bestseller philosophy list. Just carry out a simple exercise yourself to see if you can explain anything — explain anything at all — non-deterministically.Think man. Can materialism ever be non-deterministic? Can socialism succeed if it's not determined, but merely willed? Can socialism succeed if it is opposed by determinism?The Party case is materialist, and thereby concomitantly, determinist. It cannot repudiate determinism.
I have argued against the syncretistic view that A determines B, and B determines A, as being entirely void of abstract thought content [being merely descriptive of concrete experience content] unless both A and B are determined by something else.Neither Marx nor Engels thought that Being and Consciousness were, when treating society as a single entity, determined in a more fundamental something else. Neither have most thinkers who tackle the problem of thinking and being.Both Marx and Engels took a consistent stance on the issue of Being and Consciousness, and scorned inconsistent syncretism. I would therefore exercise due caution before dismissing out of hand their considered view which gave to the Party its very existence as a consistent socialist party.Are you really arguing that sometimes capital controls society, but sometimes society controls capital. If so, the capitalist class would rejoice.That's how things appear to be, but you ask even the politicians who try to control capital, and they know that they don't, never can, that they must administer to its ever-changing needs, that they are driven by it, controlled by it; their thoughts, their will, their actions those of mere marionettes at the whim of controlling capital. It makes them act and think against their better nature, and smooth the road for capital to ride roughshod over society.The whole point of science is to explain the immediately apparent by mediated thought. That's where consistent thought comes in.The most significant thought I can make here is that abstraction from experience discloses determinism independent of us. Determinism, independent of us, always takes the base–superstructure form of A determines B, to explain why concrete phenomena appear to contradict that law.You dismiss base–superstructure by the contradictory appearance it is intended to explain. If appearance wasn't contradictory, it simply wouldn't need explaining.
But it was a thoroughly useful thread when you and LBird were trying to find the exact point in space where the mind is located, and purchasing books to find out exactly where and report back for our benefit.Come on, you were talking drivel when trying to locate the exact point in space that social consciousness occupies. The pinpoint on which your angels danced.To Marx, the consciousness of the capitalist class resides in its social superstructure — in capitalist society's laws, its institutions, its arts, sciences — just as Marx describes the social superstructure of the capitalist mode of production.Now that we all know where the consciousness of capitalist society, when considered as an single entity, resides — where else could it be located — will LBird demand his money back from Amazon.You construe the social superstructure as far too crude a category for serious consideration. Presumably, for you, Marx didn't mean what he said in his scientific manifesto that A determines B, that [as in all deterministic science] base determines superstructure, that social being determines thought.That is precisely what the Party's case is based on, and what it can never relinquish, and what this forum is an appropriate place to thrash out.
