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Not contradictory.  No-one argues on this open forum in any official SPGB capacity at all.That doesn't prevent them from arguing the SPGB case for socialism.It's not contradictory to observe that many members accept the SPGB Object and Declaration of Principles in their own powerful compelling right, without necessarily reading them as consequences of the materialist conception of history and base–superstructure determinism.  Why should they?Agreement with the SPGB Object and Declaration of Principles is all that matters for world socialist membership, no matter how each of us arrives at it. 

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Now, have a go at my #119.

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Yes, I am arguing the World Socialist case, of which movement the SPGB is a partner, actually the foundation member, and numerically the strongest member.I argue here, at all times, for the world socialist Object and the world socialist Declaration of Principles.I accept Marx's materialist conception of history, and his base–superstructure determinism, which many members don't.I understand that lack of scientific training of most members is reason enough for their distrust of and caution toward the materialist conception of history and base–superstructure determinism.I am, of course, fully cognizant that nearly everyone else, perhaps worldwide almost without exception, just like yourself, pours scorn on the materialist conception of history and base–superstructure determinism.Yet Marx thought these were the essence of his science, and they derive from his inversion of Hegel, another figure universally scorned.  Marx without them is not Marx, but somebody else.I hold that our Object and Declaration of Principles, which derive almost directly from Marx's materialist conception of history and base–superstructure determinism, as expressed directly by him for the French Party program he drafted [see ALB on this], through William Morris and the early SDF, only make scientific sense as scientific consequences of Marx's materialist conception of history and his base–superstructure determinism.In other words, I hold that the SPGB's conception of socialism is scientific, and the only possible scientific conception.I also hold that if socialism, as a social mode of production, is not scientific, it has no chance at all.  It is entirely Utopia.That's what the two founding fathers agreed. That was their legacy to mankind. That's what they gave us to build our new social mode of production upon — world socialism, built by comprehending and committed world socialists.We have to thank the social democrats and Leninists for the dominance of contrary views.The most influential, the Leninists, defied Marx's science, and in their defiance were turned materialistically by his science into converting their ancient feudal societies into socially-necessary engines of primitive capitalist accumulation, with which "Capital comes into the world dripping with blood", just as Marx's materialist science proves it must. Syncretists, like yourself, who accept immediacy as essence, thereby proclaim that Marx's science — the materialist conception of history and base–superstructure determinism — are discredited, false, absurd.You know the rest.  I consider your own stupid opposition to science to be ignorant, ludicrous, and contemptible.  Just try and comprehend a little of it, say like geology, looking at a side cutting, or a sea shore, and if you think that the comprehension of nature is despicable, and that nature doesn't challenge you all the way, I feel sorry for you.

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Nobody writes in an official capacity for the Party, only the Party itself.

Now answer my #119.

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ScienceSo you distrust scientists.  What other socially-necessary human activity do you pathologically distrust?Never, in 1000 posts, have you recognized capital as the source of general social distrust in our capitalist-class society.  Instead you unconsciously hypostasize the general social distrust under capitalism into your very own ego’s paranoid distrust.You materialistically misconceive the general social condition, personally, as your very own alarmist paranoia.  [Social being determines consciousness.]ElitesSo you don’t believe in elites — your contemptible term — while simultaneously arming society to annihilate the unbelievable.Never, in 1000 posts, have you recognized capital as the source of general social mediocrity in our capitalist-class society.  Instead you unconsciously hypostasize the general social mediocrity under capitalism into your very own ego’s impotent mediocrity.You materialistically misconceive the general social condition, personally, as your very own pathetic mediocrity  [Social being determines consciousness.]The IncredibleBut now you do believe in the unbelievable.Your fertile imagination, well-schooled in the mysteries of Leninist voluntarism, concocts the latest gem of syncretic thought that announces to the world that you really have arrived among the elite — the inconclusive forefront of politics.  Breathtaking!Please, mankind, savour this wisdom.  You read it here first.While you attempt to explicate this nonsense, please have a go at my #119.

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EqualityEquality and democracy are not absolute Kantian categorical imperatives.  They are not inalienable human rights of man.  They are not ideals that transcend scrutiny by human rational thought.For Marx, imposing human social equality is actually imposing human social inequality:

Marx, in the Gotha Program (1875), wrote:

One man is superior to another physically, or mentally…This equal right [of equal pay for equal work] is an unequal right for unequal labor [but] it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only…To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”

There could be nothing clearer.Marx resolves the issue by “from each according to ability to each according to needs”.  We all need each other, and complement each other.DemocracyDemocracy only makes rational sense if participants have a common interest in, and a clear knowledge of, what’s at stake.  Democracy is there, for us, solely to resolve common interest and common knowledge but different considered viewpoints.In a society based upon the capitalist mode of production, common social interest is hijacked by private stake in capital expansion, the true subject, object and goal of the capitalist mode of production.  Common social interest is swamped by warring venal sectional interests.In a society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the material conditions of life, everyone in the community participates equally in social decision making, bringing to the democratic table differently considered viewpoints, abilities and needs.  Common social interest is not swamped by private, or anti-social, interest in capital expansion but remains practical social interest, even if communally divisive.  That’s what democracy is for.The precondition for rational democracy under socialism is consequently a common knowledge of the running of society by each member of the whole community.Specialist knowledge, particularly that at the inconclusive forefront of science, is something that even specialists must take conditionally on trust.  It simply does not meet the preconditions for democratic decision making by the whole community, and rarely even by the specialist community, and would be held suspect if its truth were always decided by so unscientific a procedure.Instead, actual consensus at the forefront of science arrives in surprisingly novel ways, that finally turn out, just as surprisingly, to be totally appropriate to the issue at hand, being integral to the long-sought solution, and not a precondition of it.  Consensus may then strike with the suddenness of a gestalt switch, overturning everything held communally dear, that finally makes sense of the hitherto inexplicable, and instantly renders the exercise of democratic decision making pointless and incorrect.Society is thus compelled to take much specialist thought on trust, though conditionally so, just like the specialists do themselves.  That is the reality of research, and social decision making must therefore democratically decide how it must approach inconclusive scientific issues, but it should in no way imagine that society can solve such inconclusive issues conclusively by democracy.The question remains on the table:When you and your voluntaristic big-C Communism impose control over specialist thought, in the name of your categorical-imperative big-D Democracy, while the concrete needs of social practice demand that complex scientific thought cannot be circumscribed by democratic social ignorance, and the scientists rebel against your Kantian edict, will you be able to sustain your control without giving up your rights-of-man big-D Democracy over everything that threatens big-C Communism, no matter whether democracy is an appropriate mechanism or not, because it conforms to an incontrovertible big-C Categorical Imperative?Will you be forced by material circumstance to resort to a reign of terror to continue to impose your absolute decision making stranglehold upon mankind?

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Big-C CommunismYou say you advocate democratic control of scientific thought because you are a big-C Communist while I, thankfully, am not.As a big-C Communist, you want society to determine the truth content of science because a big-C Communist can never be quite sure what anti-social thoughts scientists might concoct if left to beaver away on their own without proper supervisory micro-management by big-C Communist society.Amazingly, you have naively expressed unbounded delusional confidence that grateful scientists will embrace you with open arms, for proposing global interference in their individual productive lives, by shoving big-C Communist society’s snooping snout between their suspect selves and the world they study.Now, we can all readily imagine gigantic world-wide collaborative research projects being organized and conducted productively over the web.  That may very well be the future of much theoretical research.Scientific research necessarily involves collaboration, but it crucially relies on division of labour, upon divide and conquer, not merely to investigate and comprehend all of nature, which is a humanly impossible feat, but just to investigate and comprehend in depth a mere part of nature.Research, simply because it investigates the as-yet-unknown, is difficult to conduct and often frustratingly fruitless for sustained periods.  It necessarily requires dedication, self discipline, controlled imagination, clarity of thought, and stamina for damned hard work, and sometimes this requisite combination lies uncomfortably beyond the frail capacities, drive, inclination or personal interest of any given human being.Each of us is made of different stuff.  We all possess different skills, inclinations and interests, and thankfully each’s different capability helps complement each other’s.  We are not equal in specific abilities, thankfully, and socialism is not going to make us so.  That’s precisely why Marx adopted the old Saint Simonian catch cry “from each according to ability to each according to needs”.But big-C Communism seeks to make us different folks conform.  It wants to homogenize our scientific thinking, even the essentially vague musings or playful ideas of exploratory scientists.  Why so thorough?  Why total surveillance?The big-C reason for controlling scientific thought is to tame it, to emasculate it, to ensure that it is never subversive of big-C society.  For idealists, thought is the ideal “substance” of material being and, consequently, thought brings with it the ever-present fear that it is the harbinger of action, and so potentially the harbinger of reaction.LBird may object to being called an idealist thinker, but there is no serious doubting that his readings of the young Marx have thoroughly steered, and parked, himself into this actual position, even if he prefers to masquerade as an overt syncretist, the easiest thought position to hide idealism under, because it is no commitment at all.  Syncretism, as supposedly genuine thought about the relation of being-and-thought, is actually empty of any serious thought content [Hegel].Interestingly, the even younger Marx, in his university dissertation, passed the most terrifyingly withering judgement upon syncretism I’ve ever read, hurled against that juristic master of it, Cicero.  Even juvenile Marx was never a syncretist, whatever LBird may conclude to the contrary from Marx’s later juvenilia of the 1840s, by which time he was a committed materialist.To repeat, no-one can possibly doubt, from LBird’s contributions here, that his overt arguments are proudly idealist and, concomitantly, unflinchingly anti-materialist.Of course, LBird syncretistically bandies around the regulation materialist phrases so as to pacify the mob, and thereby establish credentials of some sort that satisfies his self esteem, but he actually repudiates materialist thought as being beneath his very own elitist contempt, as suitable only for those ignorant pedants, the hidebound Engelsians, who are responsible for ruining everything.  Oh Dühring, meet your adequate avenger.Have I misrepresented you?Your ExplanationLBird’s explanation is as follows.  Big-C Communists abhor any form of elite thought because big-C is necessarily idealist, and thought necessarily precipitates action, and so elite social thought necessarily precipitates elite social action.  Consequently, big-C must control elite social thought in order to pre-empt control of society by elite thinkers.What drivel for a society in which the material means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled.  If society based upon common ownership and democratic control can’t generate social cooperation as a rational mode of human behaviour then nothing else can, and socialism can never succeed because you cannot enforce human cooperation against its will, except by compulsion.Cooperation must be the rational outcome of necessary social practice [just as now anti-cooperation is the rational outcome of necessary social practice].To return to big-C.  It fears control of society by which elite?  By elite scientists, of course.  Possibly the world-weary seers fictionalized benignly by Jules Verne, or more likely those impossibly malign megalomaniacs of the pulp Ian Fleming variety.  These pulp megalomaniacs are the feared alter egos of big-C Communists.Have I misrepresented you?Paranoia of VoluntarismBeing a proud syncretist, you are necessarily a defiant political voluntarist.Voluntarism and idealism [especially when veiled beneath overt syncretism] are perfect bedfellows.  Voluntaristic thought is the adequate expression of idealism in politics.  And syncretic rationalization is the perfect soporific to lead blind voluntaristic followers into political romanticism.Big-C Communism is to be born out of political voluntarism, thought which is ipso facto able to inspire and precipitate action which can transcend the determinism of the being it seeks to change.  Heroic political voluntarism inevitably taints big-C forever, and holds it in thrall to continuing thoughts of heroic counter-political voluntarism.Consequently, your big-C has no choice but treat specialist thought it doesn’t comprehend with suspicion, as potentially conspiratorial, exactly as occurred to Robespierre, Lenin, etc.  Non-conformity becomes the indicator of conspiracy, and so breeds suppression of thought.Big-C claims to be different.  It implements social control of thought for our own good, and for the noblest of reasons — to keep big-C society in tact.  But so did all the others.  Do you, like them, envisage a police force and military-style surveillance to enforce it?  Or do you envisage milder, more considerate, big-C vigilante mobs of thought police?And if division-of-labour, or elite, thought is socially destabilizing, what about equally, division-of-labour, or elite, philosophical thought, which includes morality and religion, and the latter necessarily encompasses atheism?  Will big-C society determine how we all should think about them?What about aesthetics?  Will big-C society feel equally threatened by provocative art, literature, music, theatre?.  Will big-C society homogenize elite art and make it safe for big-C society?We are not talking about general discussion.  We are talking about your general control, or reign of terror, the historical type indicator of paranoia attendant upon any voluntaristic social revolution.In your case, this reign of terror takes on an especially pathological form, when hatched and provisioned in the fertile mind of a covert idealist before the revolution.You proclaim revolutionary voluntarism as the “progressive” side of voluntarism but, once achieved, big-C must fear voluntarism’s “regressive” side, for voluntarism is dual-edged thought.  If we can create big-C society voluntaristically, we can equally uncreate it, voluntaristically, through reaction, subversion, or just simply by moving beyond it.Your democratic remedy — the only one available to voluntaristic idealism — is consequently democratic control of thought itself, the very substance of voluntaristic idealism.  The intellectual core of our being.Sure, as democratic, the social act of policing scientific thought might seem remarkably benign, and so totally unobjectionable, but it is human thought, after all, that we are dealing with here.Scientific thought is the most subversive thing we humans possess.  And it is determined by social practice.  Thought that does not accord with necessary social practice will be necessarily weeded out in the necessary process of social practice.  Socially shackled thought, bred by social practice, will always break its bonds.  Such thought is ultimately uncontrollable.Thankfully the history of mankind confirms this.  Human thought is the social indicator of the human practice that engenders it.  If human practice is forced to shackle thought, then human practice must already be socially shackled.  Such shackling of society may accord with big-C practice, but it is not socialist practice.In championing human thought, you are forced to shackle it.  That is the Achilles heel of your idealist voluntarism.

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The real question is:  Will you be forced, by the inexorable materialism of social being, to oppose your purely idealistic adherence to democracy, in order to sustain big-C, once you institute your global thought control regime? The question is not academic, but one that all reigns of terror must ineluctably confront, not in the safe abstract world of social thought, but in the dangerous concrete world of social practice, where we must prove ourselves, and what we really believe:Can you afford to remain democratic?

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My dear boy, can’t you see that plate tectonics explodes everything we ever thought fixed for all time about the Earth, its continents and oceans.  There is nothing fixed for all time about the geological science that discovered this historical geological process.  There is nothing fixed for all time about the dynamic historical process of plate tectonics itself, but it's hard to imagine us going back to fixed continents just because we suddenly, on a whim, refuse to read the rocks.I fail to see how anyone could miss the fact that our ancient lithosphere has been recycled almost beyond recognition.  If that’s not history, of the rise and fall kind, what on Earth is!Did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that our oceans had a lifetime of about 200 years, that the Pacific is old [and hence wide] and its sea floor is subducting under the Pacific rim continents, and hence the ring of fire.  The Atlantic is young, and there’s no subduction zone, and no ring of fire.  This unfixed for all time conception was forced upon us against our wills and, presumably, against our better judgement at the time. It's written in the rocks.Geology is essentially reading the rocks, but reading them dynamically.  Why do you insist that this science is static, and fixed for all time by its practicioners?  You calumniate them.For you, our comprehension of the Earth's dynamics are far from dynamic and so, for you, they cease to be subversively amazing. Yet this unfixed for all time history is also, for you, just as likely to be the perverse construction of an elite cabal, in their own superior interest [whatever that could mean in this testable context], and should instead have been decided on, democratically, [in total denial of rational social division of labour] by every human being on Earth.Why do you insist on democratic voting on scientific theory, on all things scientific — as you once said, on every last aspect of every scientist's work and thought? You must do so because of the non-deterministic idealist bent to your "philosophy", which consequently forces you to rely on determination of all truth by thought alone, as you fail to comprehend that abstraction reveals external determinism, which is largely independent of humans, or it could never work for us.By the way, your Bashkar agrees that “experimental activity gives us access to structures that exist independent of us.” That is one of the two cornerstones of his Realist Throry.  And he is correct in this.But this implies that such independent-of-human structures are really that — independent of us.  Well, of course, we misinterpret them willfully or in ignorance.  But mostly they resist mere human whim, opinion, etc. to an extraordinary extent. If they didn't, there's no way scientists could agree, and that most subversive of activities, science, could never proceed.If there were no objectivity, independent of us humans, in science, we could never convince non-socialists of socialism through scientific argument.Marx's science gives us access to social structures that, although we individually function in their construction, in a social sense exist and develop independent of us. If Marx's science is mere ideology for you, then socialism remains entirely voluntaristic — entirely devoid of any determinism, entirely up to brow beating your opponent into submission.

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Great ScottRobert Falcon Scott hauled a 16 kg load of fossil plants on his fatal Polar expedition, realizing that plants found in Antarctica had to be of scientific importance.  They were intended for an English paleobiologist who couldn’t accompany the expedition because of her sex.  She was Marie Stopes.Glossopteris indica was a tall leafy fruit-bearing conifer that lived 300 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs.  It was known to have flourished on the Indian subcontinent (hence the species name indica), but here it was once flourishing 13,000 km away, separated by ocean, in frozen Antarctica.Scott had stumbled on the indicator fossil for the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.  If you find this fossil, you know that you are standing on ancient Gondwanan rocks.  This species flourished throughout Australia, Africa and South America, as well as throughout India and Antarctica, but it flourished nowhere else in the world, not even in Asia just across the Himalayas.What are Scott’s Antarctic rocks telling us about India, Asia and the high Himalayas, about stable Australia and volcanic Indonesia, about the mutability of continents?  Just what is this long-extinct Gondwanan tree saying?I raise these questions in the context of a determined anti-materialist barrage insisting, with a finality intended to resist any possible overturning, that rocks patently don’t speak.  That rocks don’t tell us anything.  That rocks don’t ask questions.  That it is only we, idealistically, who ask the questions, and never the rocks, materialistically.Mute but MutableSure, a rock is mute, as non-committal as any other specific concrete phenomenon.  That’s Hegel’s point:  being is precisely nothing for our thought processes.  Empiricism, as long as it clings to the concrete [to mere being] consigns itself to remaining conceptually contentless.But geological thought is a process that abstracts, from the concrete, the concepts it reflects back upon the concrete to comprehend it.  Of course geology considers rocks concretely as immediately concrete objects, but it also comprehends them abstractly as contingent abstract instances of pure abstract deterministic processes.In so doing, geological abstraction discloses the enormity of time [just as astronomical thought discloses the enormity of space].  The rocks reveal the history of our planet.After all, it was the geologists, who scorned the physicists’ thermal-cooling age for the solar system as hundreds of times shallower than the deep time evident from paleontological processes.  Only when the physicists discovered that rocks were radioactive could they begin to measure and so comprehend the Earth’s extraordinary age, and so understand why, though the Earth has cooled as expected, its interior is still kept hot by radioactive decay.For those who consider scientific irreducibility to be an absolute barrier to comprehension of processes at different levels of organisation, the tale told by the Earth’s rocks discounts the bogus claim that [detested bourgeois] scientists don’t see the world as history, or that [detested bourgeois] scientists always think reductively.Geophysicists can think quite adequately, reductively or irreductively, as appropriate to the occasion, thank you very much.  It’s a pity some proclaimed “socialists”, presumably [admirable proletarian] scientists, can’t think so clearly as appropriate to the occasion.Zircons are ForeverZircon crystals, from the Jack Hills range of Western Australia, are four billion years older than Glossopteris.  Radioactive geochronometry and atomic microscopy [atom-probe tomography] confirm one of them is 4·4 billion years old.The Earth was then only 150 million years old, and its surface must have cooled to allow zirconium silicate to crystallize out as zircon crystal, in apparent association with water, in our earliest prototype continental lands, or more likely, in our earliest sea floors.  They have endured eons of subsequent heating, cooling, weathering, crushing and twisting, and still survive, while the less enduring continental rock they formed in has long since been recycled.And now rocks from those earliest continental lands have been found in Canada [as gneiss that is just a little younger than the Australian zircons].  If you stand on these rocks, you are standing on our earliest continental crust [lithosphere].Perhaps the process of plate tectonics was already underway — the 200-million year cyclic mechanism that would eventually create a future Gondwana, and then pull it apart, rifting a future India from a future Antarctica, to smash it into a future Asia, and deform the resulting collision zone into a future Himalayan range.  And scientists don’t think historically?  And rocks don’t tell us anything?Rocks Tell the Story of Life.I would love to recount the story of life on Earth, which includes us as a tiny coda, that is told by the rocks.  But this is already too long.  Perhaps that’s for another time.

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Excellent, robbo.

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Nagel: “What it’s Like to Think Like a Bat”One should not indulge the philosophers by acknowledging any merit to their problems; it only encourages them.  Nevertheless, I’ve nibbled the bait because the problem relates to socialism.As far as self consciousness is concerned, Hegel has written as much as can be said about it from an idealist point of view, and an idealist point of view might seem an appropriate starting point for comprehending the consciousness of another species.  However, Nagel, by bringing biology into the problem, expands it into the realm of Darwin and the evolutionary biology of our sensory and conceptual apparatus.DarwinBiologically, Nagel’s question looks similar to our recent discussion of how to “conceive the quantum world”, except that Nagel considers cross-species consciousness instead of cross-worlds conceptualization with the same consciousness.Nagel’s problem may therefore be amenable to considerations along lines suggested by Karl Marx.  But first, to Charles Darwin.Darwin, returned from his voyage on the Beagle, confided what he then considered socially-explosive thoughts on the biological evolution of consciousness to locked private notebooks “read monkeys for preexistence [Plato’s pre-existing ideas]”.  “O, you materialist!”.  Twenty years later, Darwin completely overturned our conception of biological inheritance.MarxMarx, on reading the Origin of Species, wrote:

Marx: Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15 (1867) wrote:

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life …“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.

Marx then immediately re-summarizes his materialism:  “the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific” method, is to develop consciousness, deterministically, from “the actual relations of life”.[If only historians had adopted Marx’s precept.  But the early adopters, like Kautsky and Plekhanov, have been so anathematized by vicious Leninist attack, that the whole Marxian materialist enterprise now seems irredeemably tainted by Lenin’s touch, just like socialism itself!]Marx would doubtless scorn Nagel’s bat problem as an artificial proof of what Hegel’s Encyclopedia amply demonstrates — that we conceive phenomena to have behaviours appropriate to the level of their existence;  that the deterministic development of each conceptual science depends on the piece of the universe it investigates, and that each piece’s behaviour is not immediately reducible to behaviours appropriate to other pieces at other levels of existence, but may nevertheless be generated out of them.Marx and Hegel, despite fighting tooth and nail for conceiving the world at appropriate conceptual levels, also agreed on “mediated reduction of the immediately irreducible” at an over-arching level — like Hegel’s self-generating Idea or Marx’s more modest materialist conception of history which generatively “implements” different social formations, each with its own “irreducible” behaviours.It is therefore possible, even if not currently achievable, to “reduce conceptually irreducible” consciousness to some over-arching conceptual schema that may encompass Nagel’s bat.  We could never sustain our ever-changing society, one of our own remaking, without the already conceptually mediated within our consciousness, upon closure, instantly becoming the new conceptually immediate for our consciousness, and relegating the immediately appropriate for the mighty past, upon such closure, to the mediated dustbin of expired concepts.This subversive over-arching process is no more than Hegel’s generative conceptual method, the irresistible drive our evolutionary heritage for abstracting from immediate experience the necessary mediated concepts we reflect back upon immediate experience to survive it.Insofar as animals, including bats, actually think, their actual thoughts are presumably compelled, as Marx says of ours, to comprehend their actual mode of production for sustaining life.  That’s what evolution created their actual thinking for, just as it did ours.Their actual thinking, as perceived by observers of dogs and cats, is never immediate experience but is always abstractly mediated experience.  Actual thinking, unlike instinct, is always a mediated response to experience, and that experience, being primarily experience of necessary production, like ours, has scope for contact with ours.Bats too, if they “think”, must mediate their experience “conceptually” to avoid falling down holes and bumping into closed doors, most of the time.  Despite divergent evolutionary pathways, our conceptual apparatus evolved to handle much in common with theirs, just as has our sensory apparatus — our eyes, touch, smell, hearing — despite the fact that they echo-locate while we bump into closed doors in the dark.So a bat, if it could ever gather its thoughts together as we can, would “talk” [in indecipherable bat speak] about its immediate “social being”, about feeding, breeding, rearing, socializing and foraging, as immediately appropriate.  More complexly social, a lion (in ignorance of Wittgenstein) might at least be more complexly articulate than a bat, and our common production needs may be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering its roar.[As Xenophanes mockingly observed about 500 BCE “if horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and each would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own”.]As to animal self consciousness, in the sense of consciousness of self, thinking behaviour (as distinct from instinctive behaviour) must quickly learn to distinguish self from other in order to survive — which tail not to bite and which to bite [self and other], which child to feed, etc. the whole world of ethology.In other words, self consciousness is a pre-condition for thinking behaviour itself, and only becomes a “philosophical problem” when thinking people have removed, in thought alone, their own self-consciousness from self consciousness’s own necessary survival roots.

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My definition:  Voluntarism.  [politics] A movement toward socialism that operates in ignorance of, in defiance of, or in denial of any conception of social necessity, or social determinism.It includes all our opponents, but excludes the Socialist Party through its Declaration of Principles.You bring in the Left.  It is precisely the Left that advocates socialism through voluntaristic reform of capitalism or through voluntaristic non-class conscious militancy.Can you name any voluntarist group of the Left, e.g. Labour, Communists, Occupy, etc. whose socialist wings have not been fatally clipped by the social necessity, or social determinism, they ignored, defied or denied?Can you name one instance where Left voluntaristic hostility was not tamed, like a cowed horse, into servicing the once hostile needs of capital, and thereby far more dangerously proving to immediate consciousness the invincibility of master capital?Taming consciousness is precisely what the social superstructure is for in capitalist society.  The superstructure is the consciousness of the capitalist class, and that consciousness has one sentient role — to ensure capitalist society expands value, or capital behaves as capital.  Any opposition, like blustering voluntarism, is just another irritant among the many this sentient partner has to deal with as expeditiously as it must to ensure it doesn’t impede the functioning of capital.In this actual context, to seriously interpose “free will” between social determinism and human action is a sick joke, and you really know it to be vile, despite the academicism of your freak philosophical mates.Serious humans navigate life in knowledge of and subservience to natural necessity, or determinism.  They avoid falling down holes or bumping into closed doors, most of the time.  They still believe they are free to fall down holes and bump into closed doors, but they also recognize the consequences attendant upon flouting such natural necessity, or determinism, and decide not to fall down holes or bump into closed doors instead.Marx is saying no more about political action than serious people say about everyday life, in which people are cognizant of the ground rules.  So must the Socialist Party be.

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Thanks.Carolyn Merchant, in your quote, describes a concrete social phenomenon.  If proffered as its own ineffable meaning, it is open to any interpretation you please, which possibly suits her purpose.Peter Stillman, in your quote, advances the brave politics of committed voluntarism through the insipid philosophy of non-committal syncretism.  No actual scientist abandons causality so quickly.  No actual human thinks that determinism really implies no free will.  No actual socialist ever thought other than Marx “puts human consciousness into an intimate relation with other aspects of human life.” — which is about as mind-numbingly vapid a conclusion for an article on Marx as syncretism can muster.  It is “a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”.Your own “there is no such thing as social being without consciousness”, though equally vapid, has the virtue of bordering on its own disproof.

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Crass Misreading

robbo203 wrote:

the idea that material conditions (or, if you like, the “base” in the base/superstructure model of society) “produce” or give rise to, ideas … derives from a crass misreading of the statement that it is “not consciousness that determines social being but social being that determines consciousness”.

Marx was quite familiar with your preferred non-crass reading, but you delude yourself if you think Marx could ever subscribe to it.  His materialism forbids explanation by pure immediate experience, and commits him to explanation that is mediated by abstraction from experience.Now, it is highly significant that Marx declares “social being determines consciousness” in a scientific manifesto [Contribution, 1859] in which he writes with the clarity of a manifesto.Only a moron or fraudster blunts the point of a manifesto.  Obfuscation soon enough follows as the work of affronted lackeys, who tone things down to the level of their own “non-crass” syncretism.To me Marx is clearly repudiating the abstract commonsense claims of both idealism and syncretism, and is certainly not endorsing them as you assert, presumably to favour your non-crass reading.Marx’s materialistic attack on claims for untrammelled thought effectively scuttles your own “creative” voluntarism, or utopianism, as it was then called, and this is the main reason you find his materialist message to be crass, and the main impetus for obfuscating its crystal clarity.Post #119In post #119, I retraced a suggested path of Marx’s abstract materialist development of consciousness out of social being.  The rest of Capital is the working out of this development in concrete detail.Explaining this development materialistically was claimed here to be absolutely impossible.Well, I hope that, by shining a spotlight on the unfamiliar nature [as judged by some posts] of Marx’s own materialism, I’ve helped to clarify what Marx was getting at when he said his conception of history was materialist and, equally importantly, just what Marx was not getting at.Concrete Phenomena are Not Scientific PrinciplesI am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that a scientist means exactly what he says he means when he consciously formulates an abstract scientific principle that states:            A determines B .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that the scientist intends to use his abstract scientific principle to explain the puzzling contingent concrete phenomena that it was abstracted from:            A and B appear to interact reciprocally .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe — contrary to syncretists — that a contingent phenomenal observation is not an abstract scientific principle.  For example, the contingent phenomenal statement:            A and B merely interactis a restatement of concrete content in the same form as a scientific principle, but it still remains contingent and concrete in content, and so void of any abstract scientific content, and is definitely not an abstract scientific principle, even if it looks like one to the syncretist.Thus I am led to the inexorable conclusion that you are simply confusing the thought-realm of deterministic scientific abstraction with the phenomenal-realm of concrete contingent experience.  Consequently, for you:            crass ≡ scientificThis issue of materialism v. syncretism is too fundamental to drop here.I fully intend to hound robbo203 for his non-crass response to my #119.

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