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So what do you imagine the nature-imposed necessity, that compels all life forms to daily reproduce themselves, compels society as a whole to practice and think about, if it is not its own ever-recurring social process?If not, show me how society can free itself from that determinism, characterized by Marx as acting with the inexorability of a law of nature.If you accept that society is incapable of freeing itself from having to implement its own renewal, what do you imagine social practice is compelled to implement if not the social renewal process itself, as ever-recurring social practice?If not, show me how social practice is perfectly free of the determinism to implement the social practice of social renewal, and so is in-deterministically free to block the social renewal process just as it pleases.If you accept that social practice is compelled to implement the social renewal process, how do you imagine social relations are compelled to form themselves if not in order to actuate the social practice that must implement the social renewal process?If not, show me how social relations are perfectly free of the determinism to form themselves in order to actuate the social practice that implements the social renewal process, and so are in-deterministically free to form themselves in order to block the actuation of the social practice that implements the social renewal process, just as they please.If you accept that social relations are compelled to actuate social practice in implementing the social renewal process, how do you imagine social thought is compelled to think, if not to think the thought of social relations that must form in order to actuate the social practice that implements the social renewal process?If not, show me how social thought is perfectly free of the determinism to think the thought of social relations that form themselves for actuating the social practice that implements the social renewal process, and so are in-deterministically free to undermine the thought of social relations that form themselves for actuating the social practice that implements the social renewal process, just as it pleases.Note that I have been discussing social, not individual, consciousness.  The latter is beyond the immediate scope of abstract Marxian thought, and the present discussion, because it is far too concrete, and requires many tortuous determinations of Marxian science to comprehend that myopic thing.  But, of course, critics cannot see things scientifically like Marx.Social thought, social relations and social practice may be autonomous but they are highly dependent on the society they serve.  Social thought, social relations and social practice may violate their social conditions of existence for differing amounts of time — so much for the syncretic belief in the “inseparability of thinking and being” — but ultimately they must be brought back to earth by the society they function in and whose reproduction they function for.Social thought, social relations and social practice may delude themselves that they are free of compulsion.  Such voluntarism is the illusion of social freedom in, and from, society.  [The Communists and the Labour Party are exemplars of voluntarism being brought down to earth ultimately, by determinism, against their wills but rather reforming their wills, to serve necessary social needs.]The vaunted freedoms of social thought, social relations and social practice can never be long-term freedoms from such compulsion — they may, however, be semi-permanent freedoms for a portion, or class, in a fractured or socially-riven class society.So far I have only considered the determinisms that permeate each and every society, whether socialist or class based.  These determinisms are tame by comparison with the insidious determinisms that are compelled to reproduce class society as class society.I now turn to the consideration of society, no longer as a unified whole, but as a congeries of classes based on ownership and control of the process of social renewal.  In particular, let’s examine capitalist social reproduction.In haste, and breaking midstream because at a different time zone, I will return tomorrow to consider the far more potent determinisms that are absolutely essential for reproducing class-based societies.

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LBird wrote:

So, ‘idealism-materialism’, with no ‘primacy’, just necessary interaction.  Or, as you say, ‘the inseparability of ideas and material conditions’.

‘The inseparability of ideas and material conditions’ is deeper than you assume.It may surprise you to learn that the inseparability of thinking-and-being is common consensus among warring idealists and materialists, who nevertheless disagree over whether thinking or being determines the conjunction.Posters, who took comfort from the mere statement of this inseparability condition, were simply deriving circular confirmation of their own take on its meaning, by reading into a common agreement their own take on its meaning.  Oh dear, how easily people can be duped by political ranters proffering a cryptic phrase everyone agrees on, but each interprets differently.You see, “inseparability” is a state of fixity that remains void of content until it is explained by a dynamic theory of its “separable” components [Marx].  You can’t prove anything by the mere invocation of inseparability, but you can sure read anything you want into it.The embarrassing upshot is that those “hidebound” thinkers — the idealists and the materialists — annoyingly never made such a stupid mistake.  They always distinguished themselves from syncretic thinkers by the seriousness with which they take this conjunction of thinking-and-being as one of the serious problems facing mankind, and they seek a commensurately serious answer — not frivolous inseparability.By contrast, it is syncretic contentment in the ineffability of the mere statement of a conjunction of thought and being, that is truly hidebound “thinking”.How stupid!  The ancient Greeks invented philosophy when they recognized the inseparability of thinking-and-being as a problem that must be solved formally.  As always, the Greeks were pre-empted by the agrarian Fertile Crescent, particularly its informal “carpe diem” literature, and probably by others further back in prehistory.  But, contrary to commonsense, not one thinker in that line of thinkers so much as dreamed that inseparability could ever be its own ineffable solution, but each always saw it, quite clearly, as precisely its own outstanding problem.The grand illusion that inseparability is the clinching proof of hermaphroditic idealism-materialism is such a stunning discovery, that we at last appreciate how Marx choked over the stunning discoveries of Proudhon, or Engels over those of Dühring.What a choke!

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Marx and Engels — MaterialistsEngelsEngels explains their common agreed-upon understanding of the term materialism.

Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach, Part. 2 (1888) wrote:

The great basic question of all philosophy … is that concerning the relation of thinking and being….The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps.  Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature … [e.g., Hegel] … comprised the camp of idealism.  The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense.

MarxMarx’s materialist conception of history is materialist in this original sense of “nothing else but” the primacy of being over thinking.

Marx: A Contribution, Preface (1859) wrote:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.  The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

One of Marx’s clearest expressions of his avowed materialism, in the original sense of “signifying nothing other” than the primacy of being to thinking, is.

Marx: Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15 (1859) 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.  Every history of religion, even, 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.”

Materialists in the Original SenseI am not claiming that Marx’s materialism is identical in content — only in stance — to old-time materialism.My limited aim, for the moment, is to establish that the mature Marx of Capital explicitly adopted the materialist stance, and explicitly repudiated the idealist stance.  In other words he remained a materialist despite — and in full unswerving cognizance of — his devastating Hegel-inspired critique of “all hitherto existing materialism”.Marx [and Engels] operated in life-long opposition to Hegel’s idealist conception of history.  As materialists they always opposed the primacy of ideas over social being throughout their entire intellectual and practical lives.The Socialist Party likewise takes its stance on the same side of the divide as Marx and Engels, and so lines up on the opposite flank to holders of all varieties of idealist conceptions of social being.The case for world socialism is materialist, and our Declaration of Principles and our eagerly-sought Object make sense only from a standpoint that is materialist in the “original significance” of the expression [as described generically above by Engels, built upon the foundation described specifically above by Marx].With them, we hurl against the capitalist world their materialist science — “social being determines consciousness”.

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You misrepresent me, and world socialists. All world socialists repudiate Lenin and communism.Your erstwhile communist comrades obsequiously worshipped at Lenin's feet, and you have only partly extricated yourself from his long shadow, still fighting for our benefit the battles you had to fight to gain your  freedom from Leninism/communism's pernicious anti-socialist influence, but ignorantly assuming that world socialism, that historically long preceded Russian communism, ever partook of that noxious elitist position, but always and at all times opposed that position, right from the start in 1904.To repeat — the SPGB and world socialism never ever embraced Leninism/communism at all.  Period.The SPGB and world socialists always opposed Leninism and communism, and were violently, often maliciously, opposed by it.  The devious Leninists [communists] were such an easy theoretical target because their political stance shifted and turned at the behest of fund-controlling and policy-formulating mother Russia, in the interest of the thugs in charge of dictating mother Russia.But in many instances they proved a dangerous physical target, because their leaders were fed by ambition and money, as Marx put it "the most violent, mean, malignant passions of the human breast".That's my take on your smart-alec response.You apparently know little about the disgusting scramble of the first-generation of erstwhile western communist leaders, seeking political power, willing to ride roughshod on the backs of western workers in the process, eager to share in the coffers and reap the plaudits, before reaping the disgrace, of their soviet overlords.I despise them all, in the historical scheme of things.  I despise their anti-socialist descendants, who won't free themselves from the long enduring clutches of their soviet heritage, and still hold society back by having hijacked socialism in their disgusting name.These people may apparently remain your comrades, but they can never ever be mine.To me, communists are enemies of socialism. We are hostile to them. See SPGB clause 7.Don't you ever try this pernicious ploy again!You, your tactics, and your arrogance betray the lingering hallmarks of your Leninist/communist heritage — something that I detected and noted precisely on our first encounter with you.  You came to set the Party straight.  You knew best.By your mark, I knew you then and I know you now. Now, answer my reciprocating peremptory demand without prevarication.

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LBird, so you are the one who is losing patience!  I've tolerated without a murmur your garallous attacks on Marx, Engels, the materialist conception of history, the Socialist Party position, and science through post after post after post in thread after thread after thread.Finally, you peremptorily demanded of me, for undisclosed personal reasons, that I forthwith disclose my own personal position on quantum interpretation — as if that mattered in the scheme of things — something I had studiously avoided doing because I'm simply not competent to judge it at the appropriate level of discourse.Neverheless to placate your arrogant demand of me, I obliged you, partly in order to assuage what could only be conceived as your petulance.And then you rewarded my reply with the opportunity to mount an attack on my abandoning of determinism, or some such accusation.  Your avowed two-way conversation descended into a predetermined dog fight.So I responded by firing a preemptive shot across your piratical bows before you hijacked the thread along your familiar, familiar, familiar lines, for which you display endless patience.Please tell me how have I misrepresented your well-documented [and long-remembered] position, that you've iterated, reiterated and re-reiterated over post after post after post?Now you, LBird, must respond in turn to my peremptory demand:Show me where I misrepresent your position.

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Guilty as ChargedLBird is mortified by reports of a litany of sins committed by quantum mechanics.“M’lud, I recount them, seriatim — violation of classical determinism [Bohr, Heisenberg]; violation of classical logic [Von Neumann]; violation of classical probability [Bell]; violation of classical information [qubit, ebit], violation of classical computing.  Need I proceed?”LBird, with his immodest penchant for pronouncing prior judgement on cases he confesses total ignorance of, has the supreme advantage over scientists of comprehending their scientific method better than they do [sic].On his dualistic idealist–materialist theory [sic], which he tells us conforms to the so-called “critical realism” of soviet historian, and Club of Rome pontificator, Adam Schaff — nature has nothing of importance to tell scientists [sic], while they have everything of importance to tell nature [sic].Consequently, those disgusting quantum scientists deserve to find themselves in a theoretical mess of their own making, because they are all misguided bourgeois scientists [sic] who insist on conceiving nature as fixed for all time [sic] — except, LBird, that quantum scientists are the very last folks that anyone except LBird could ever level this bogus charge at.These reprehensible bourgeois scientists [unlike LBird’s conceived proletarian scientists] will simply throw away their damaged theories when wounded by experimental disagreement [sic] instead of nurturing them, as a kind LBird proletarian would nurture his wounded dog — except that LBird is scarcely in a position to appreciate that each and every owner of the myriad wounded interpretations of quantum mechanics is playing out a long-term veterinary waiting game working on cures for their wounded pet interpretations.Philosophically, these shallow scientific thinkers are, for LBird, all positivists [sic] who delude themselves that objects are exactly as they seem to be [sic].  Who, but LBird, could seriously level such a stupid charge against a quantum scientist who cannot see, but must infer, the transient “objects” under investigation.Socially, these political scientific scoundrels represent for LBird, one of the twin detestable bulwarks of capitalism, namely science [sic], the other being the market [sic].  We should let the master of true scientific methodology explain such alarmism.Copenhagen InterpretationLBird’s knee-jerk reaction to his confrontation with quantum hearsay is to assume that all tacit scientific agreement over the vague-at-the-edges Copenhagen interpretation [which is a growing beast that is swallowing decoherence] is solely the result of machinations by a scientific cabal.Paddy has described the quantum interpretive situation perfectly.  My own take is that some, or possibly a great deal, of the difficulty in interpreting quantum mechanics arises out of its conceptual incommensurability with our evolutionary concrete conceptual equipment.Put it this way.  We are constitutionally incapable of conceiving in any other dimension than in our concrete three dimensions.  That was essential for our survival in a three-dimensional macroscopic world.Even when we imagine that we are conceiving in only one or two dimensions [as say when we follow the extraordinary Ancient Greek geometer Euclid], we are still actually “conceiving” those lower dimensions concretely with our three-dimensional mental baggage.  That same baggage is also exactly what we bring to our imaginative “conceptions” of the fourth [and higher] dimensions.The fact remains that we are constitutionally incapable of concretely “conceiving” other dimensions in the same visceral way we apprehend three dimensions.Well, similarly, in our concrete macroscopic world, we can quite easily grasp the concept of a spinning top.  We’ve seen, grasped and played with them.But in the incommensurable microscopic world of quantum mechanics, we cannot adequately grasp the concept of an electron’s spin in that same concrete visceral way.We can imagine an electron’s spin [in a similar way to imagining a four-dimensional object] by referring it back to what we viscerally and objectively know in our macroscopic world.  But we would be quite wrong!Now the electron spin constitutes the very simplest of all quantum systems to investigate.  It only has two measurable states — it always measures up or down [or + and –, or binary on or off, except that it turns out to be binary in a different sense of bits, namely peculiar quantum bits or qubits].A two-state system should be a breeze by comparison with classical mechanics.  But it is riddled with most of the quantum puzzles, so that up and down are not necessarily up and down even though they measure as such, but that truly amazing [dialectical] story should be told another time.DeterminismNobody is really considering giving up determinism.  As I argued in http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/whats-so-special-about-base–superstructure-determinism [What’s So Special About Base–Superstructure Determinism] all science that aims to be predictive is deterministic.  To follow up on that theme is for another time.But LBird should be cautious about taking sides in debates in which each side makes its own claims about fundamental reality.  If the Bohmian interpretation makes serious headway folks will drop the Copenhagen interpretation like a ton of bricks.  Meanwhile the lame theoretical dogs continue to hop along on three legs, viable enough for getting around but not whole, awaiting a cure.

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So far in our discussion, I haven't adopted any position.  But to satisfy your request — the Copenhagen interpretation.

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Everybody learns, and communicates, quantum mechanics with the Copenhagen interpretation.The Copenhagen interpretation, despite everything, is more than just an ideology, having won its prominent position by holding its own against reasoned opposition. I, however, have not expressed my own view, which hardly matters in the complex scheme of things relating to quantum mechanical interpretation, for the evolutionary reasons I outlined above.

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These considerations were running through my head when I wrote the text that was quoted:Can humans achieve an aim that is not deterministic?Can humans overcome an opposing determinism?Can humans run a social system that is not deterministic?Is our Declaration of Principles, which derives from Marx, deterministic?If not, in what way is it not deterministic?Is our Object, which derives from Marx, deterministic?If not, in what way is it not deterministic?Alternatively, is social development ultimately voluntaristic, and should socialists impose their consciousness upon the rest of society for its own good?There’s a lot of good, but misdirected, familiar stuff in Stillman, and he misses the significant point about social determinism that only a world socialist standpoint can provide.  I’ll respond in a separate message.

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A neat overview of quantum mechanics by the guy behind the wonderful video “Capitalism and Other Kid’s Stuff”, whose enjoyment I savoured once again.  Now, comments relating to quantum mechanics…ChaosPaddy uses the term “chaos” in its everyday sense.  He is not implying that quantum systems evolve from predictability to chaos over time, like some classical systems, e.g. the weather.  On the contrary, quantum systems hang on to their characteristic predictability over time.  They are not at all deterministically chaotic in the classical-physics sense.Physical Determinism Physics, both quantum and classical, asserts that the future state of a physical system is the deterministic result of laws of motion operating upon its current state.  A physical system evolves from its known state, through a sequence of deterministic states, into an unknown but predictable future state.If we measure the system’s known state, allow it to evolve over time, then measure its new state, and compare this measurement with our prediction, we expect agreement to within experimental error.Why then Classical Chaos? Classical chaos arises because the concrete world of classical physics is thoroughly contingent, while the laws of classical physics are thoroughly abstract.  Given enough time, a concrete classical system will evolve deterministically away from abstract predictability toward abstract unpredictability — the perceived phenomenon of chaos.Systems susceptible to evolving into chaos are those in which uncertainties in experimental measurement, no matter how tiny we make them, compound themselves “exponentially” over time to overwhelm our abstract deterministic prediction of future states, so rendering any long-term abstract prediction ultimately meaningless.Such systems are said to be critically sensitive to their initial conditions.  Quantum systems are far, far, far more puzzling than that.Nobody Knows Why It [Quantum Mechanics] Works — Yes, But That’s true, but the puzzle of why any science works applies universally to each science, each in its own way, and each way appropriate to the idiosyncratic piece of the universe that each science seeks to comprehend.This very same puzzle of why day-to-day comprehension works holds also for us in everything we do in our daily lives, and also holds for everything society does in its social being.Quantum mechanics is not classical mechanics — a subject whose historical battles are largely forgotten nowadays, but classical physics was once fiercely riven by puzzles raging over comprehension of its abstract workings, from the mysteries of the calculus to the nature of physical force and energy.Yet classical mechanics has this enormous advantage for us humans over quantum mechanics.  Half a billion years of organic evolution has endowed us humans with the survival ability to recognise and navigate our way around the classical physics world of daily experience.But organic evolution has thoughtlessly not endowed us macroscopic creatures with any special evolutionary heritage for comprehending the microscopic world, which lies beyond the daily experience of all forms of sentient organic life upon Earth.The macroscopic classical world and the microscopic quantum world are worlds that are truly, in Thomas Kuhn’s strikingly memorable term, “incommensurable”.The greatness of Bohr is that he wholeheartedly grasped quantum incommensurability from the start, and valiantly defended the strange new quantum beast in its own quantum terms against the onslaught of reacting classicists, especially Einstein, who sought to comprehend that unfamiliar quantum world in familiar [but to Bohr incommensurable] classical terms.[This message is already long.  I’ll defer my take on quantum determinism for another occasion.]Historical Determinism Marx’s guiding principle — the materialist conception of history — is deterministic:  “it is not consciousness that determines being but social being that determines consciousness”.The Socialist Party’s Declaration of Principles and the rationale behind its Object only make sense in Marx’s deterministic terms.If our Object does not deterministically guarantee the viability of world socialism — if common ownership and democratic control do not deterministically ground the day-to-day reproducibility of world socialism as a viable social system — then the Socialist Party Object is not worth our defending, and the Socialist Party and world socialism, as we conceive them, have no deterministic right to exist at all.Historical determinism is the beating heart of the Socialist Party’s case for world socialism.  It cannot be side-stepped.  The nature of world socialism’s beating heart must be comprehended by all and, for socialism to succeed, must be ruthlessly defended from the standpoint of unfamiliar socialism against the incommensurable standpoint of familiar capitalism.Voluntarism, or the attempt to sidestep determinism, is merely the ignorance of determinism.  Freedom is the recognition of determinism.

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Marx’s own SimplificationValue, Price and Profithttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/value-price-profit.pdfHis simplified account of value begins at §VI.

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Yes, “The Alternative to Capitalism” by Adam Buick and John Crump [now available on Amazon/Kindle] is the best comprehensive book-length introduction to capitalism and socialism, and says all that is necessary about Marxian economics at the introductory level.However, I was thinking of the body of Marxian economics itself, as encapsulated in Capital, for which there is ultimately no genuine alternative but to dive into Capital, and then, from that springboard, read as many popularizations as you can, as critically as you can, until you’ve had a surfeit.David Harvey may save some students from drowning.BeginningsIt is not that Marx was unaware of the difficulty that confronts the student at the beginning of any science, since it is precisely at the beginning of a science [as Hegel was first to demonstrate to the world] when indeterminacy rules supreme.  All of the scientific categories are here newly born, freshly minted, and they commence their life’s journey as abstractions, not besmirched by actuality — all potential and none actual.That potentiality, the tiny acorn that will eventually grow into a spreading oak, is what makes the beginning of science so fabulously unsullied.  Pristine science lacks, in its naive purity, the concrete determinations that only come with its maturity. If you can, you should never cheat yourself of that scientific baptism of fire — that journey into the unknown that takes you on the thrilling ride from the abstract to the concrete.  For that journey is but the journey of every process, from birth to death or to renewal in an other, just like that of our own lives.For Hegel, as for his avowed student Marx, that journey — from pure abstract potentiality into impure concrete actuality — is the life history of a science, developing its abstract self out of its concrete other, ever building upon its abstract foundation by concrete determinations, converting the indeterminate into the determinate.  That is Hegel.  That is life.  Grasp it!To develop science otherwise, is to want maturity before childhood — to demand the science before the science.  Worse, it is to confront the science as a fixed and static thing, that can be grasped in its immediacy, and so mistake the science for something complete at birth [ab initio].To develop the science on Hegel’s lines is to consciously recognize science as a process.  Closure, if it comes at all to the science, cannot be already in place at the dawn of morning, or we have no living process.  As Hegel poetically put it — Minerva’s owl [wisdom] only spreads its wings at the dusk of evening.Marx was openly conscious of the difficulty of all beginnings, just as the Socialist Party is openly conscious of the difficulties it faces at the dawn of the activity needed to bring about socialism — where all its activity appears abstract and still unformed because it is as yet unpropitious to realize its abstract theory as something formed in actuality.  That’s why we need science to comprehend our still abstract position.Marx expressly warns his reader of the difficulty, stating in one of the prefaces his agreement with the geometer Euclid [according to Proclus] who is supposed to have said something like — “My dear Pharoah Ptolemy of Egypt, I’m afraid learning is going to be as difficult for you as it is for everyone else: there’s no royal road to learning”.Learning is ActiveIn vulgar terms, there’s no substitute for head down and bum up.The medieval geometers considered that, by the time a student showed that he comprehended Euclid’s fifth proposition [the opposite angles of an isosceles triangle are equal] — the pons asinorum or bridge of asses — the student had grasped the necessary rudiments of how to think geometrically.  That is the precondition.What Thomas Kuhn clarified to the world is the generality of this process of learning.  By working through a science’s paradigm examples, the student learns how to think in that science.  That is the precondition.Simplification!My opposition to developing Marxian economics differently from Marx, either methodologically or terminologically, is that we thereby indulge the fantasy of someone who can’t comprehend Marx in Marx’s own terms.The earliest “simplified ” re-interpretation of Capital was provided by the Russian Dmitriev [1897], who was implicitly hostile to Marx, although that significant observation somehow got lost over time.Dmitriev successfully re-interpreted Capital mathematically along input–output lines, as later adopted by Leontief, whom Adam rather admires.So far, at the beginning of Dmitriev’s re-interpreted Marxian science, well before it has worked out its mature determinations, the Russian’s simpler re-interpretation of Marx lurks deceptively innocent — so insightful and so helpful.But Dmitriev’s re-interpretation of Marx develops into maturity over the next century, and takes on a life of its own, based upon its own simple-to-understand Marxian foundation.Dmitriev influenced overtly hostile Bortkiewicz [1906–07] who influenced totally sympathetic Sweezy [1942] and Sraffa [1961], who influenced the great historian of the labour theory of value Meek, and through controversy, Samuelson, who influenced Steedman [1977] who influenced a whole generation.  The rest, as they say, is history.That simple innocuous easy-to-understand re-interpretation of Marx exploded into a powerful maturity that proved conclusively thatMarxian value was, at best, a redundant economic category, because physical input-output quantities suffice to specify prices and that values actually came out in the wash, sometimes embarrassingly as negative quantities;Marxian value was incoherent because the rate of profit could be positive when the rate of surplus value was negative, etc.When Minerva’s owl eventually flew at dusk, not much remained of Marx’s Capital.  Dmitriev had dropped a cuckoo into the Marxian nest, and the Marxians kept on feeding it.We really need to tread carefully when simplifying Marx — reducing him to us rather than extending our reach to him.Whenever we find ourselves in violent disagreement with Marx, we might pause to consider the possibility that the error may be our own.  Come back to him tomorrow.  Marx thought long and hard about capitalism [and, of course, socialism] more deeply than most of us are ever likely to.At the very least, Marx demands to be understood before he is dismissed or simplified.

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1.  SPGB Object and Declaration of PrinciplesThe SPGB Object and Declaration of Principles are the most concise, and correct, account available of Marxism and, indirectly, of Marxian economics.2.  The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists The most direct introduction to [quasi-]Marxian economics, for a century now, is found in:“The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, Robert Tressell [or Robert Tressall, in the original edition].Chapter XV.  “The Great Money Trick” — in the original, heavily modified (Jessie Pope), 1914 edition [Grant Richards]Chapter 21.  “The Reign of Terror.  The Great Money Trick” — in the restored (F. C. Ball) 1955 edition [Lawrence and Wishart].The “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” is available on the web from Project Gutenberg, Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks, etc.  The original version is a free download.  A free audio stream is available from LibriVox.3.  Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harveyhttp://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/This video course of twenty-five 90-minute lectures is the best comprehensive companion and introduction to reading Marx’s Capital yet produced.  Each video may be streamed live for free over the web.In addition, the audio track of the whole course, but only the video track for the Vol. I lectures, may also be downloaded for off-line indefinite playing on your computer, tablet or mobile phone.David Harvey is frank about personal misgivings he holds on such central aspects of Capital as Marxian dialectics and the Marxian materialist conception of history.This turns out not to be a damning impediment, since David Harvey makes it clear what he considers Marx to be doing whenever he states his disagreement or misgivings.  In other words, the student who wants to discover Marxian dialectics and the materialist conception of history at least glimpses what these conceptions may imply, and can formulate his/her own evaluation.No lecturer can be criticized for dutifully exposing, as clearly as he can, his own disagreements with the author he is discussing.  In actuality, David Harvey handles the dialectical passages reasonably well, partly because he, perhaps alone among academics, has regularly read and lectured on Marx’s Capital annually [sometimes twice or thrice annually] over the past 40 years, so that he is thoroughly familiar with its content and has absorbed almost into his bones Marx’s methodology.What is amusing to those who’ve read Hegel, is that Harvey praises Marx’s methodology, but disparages Hegel’s, while remaining blithely unaware of the Hegelian roots of the Marxian methodology he is carefully explaining to his class.The strengths of the video course are David Harvey’s expository skills and his pleasant personality—important if you plan to keep his company for over 40 hours.The weaknesses of the video course derive from vestiges of David Harvey’s still half-jettisoned Leninism.  Socialists should have little difficulty in detecting these.  They do not diminish the overall quality of the course, for which (in any case) there is no equal out there.In addition he has a habit of waffling on at times, but even this typically turns out to be fine [like a comedic interlude in Shakespeare] to divide up the more difficult bits.The strengths of the theoretical political economy are David Harvey’s insistence on returning at all times to anchor all theoretical issues upon Marx’s graphical representations: Marx’s C—M—C and M—C—M formalism, and the Volume. II reproduction formulae.As a student, you will encounter Marx’s graphical representations so often and explore them so thoroughly that they become constant companions.  You could not possibly complete the course without understanding Marx’s theory of capitalist social reproduction, and the inherent weak links in that process — the weak links that capitalist society is daily compelled to overcome, and typically organizes itself to smooth over, or lurch into crisis.If any student doubts determinism, they should be left in little doubt, after comprehending this course, that capitalism must survive deterministically.  And, despite David Harvey’s expressed doubts, they should be left in little doubt that social being determines consciousness.The weak points of David Harvey’s theoretical political economy explanations are probably not important for a first course on Marx’s Capital.  But they are vitally important for a second course.David Harvey makes heavy weather of the Volume II reproduction schema — the crown jewels of the Volume.Worst of all, he fails to repel the total demolition job of 30 years of Sraffian friendly fire aimed at exorcising the central Marxian concept of value completely out of the body of Marxian economics.  If the Staffians were correct, there is no point in studying Marx’s Capital at all.[David Harvey’s naive flounderings in defence of Marxian value are on a par with LBird’s, and are quite impotent to reinstate value where it belongs.  Students who want to comprehend value as the central Marxian concept of capitalism should eventually read Andrew Kliman’s “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital”.]4.  SPGB Talks and the Socialist StandardFinally, the huge repository of SPGB talks and Socialist Standard articles on Marx’s Capital, clearly presented in the SPGB’s consistent century-long tradition, holds countless lucidly simple introductions.

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SPGB

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

I was responding to ALB’s use of the word ‘phenomenalist ’, not commenting on what Marx had said

ALB’s conflation adequately demonstrates how little the SPGB ever cared for Hegel and dialectics.Intrusion of Dialectics of Nature

Marx (quoted by DJP) wrote:

Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.

In light of your novel ironic interpretation [#146] of Marx’s it’s a pity Dietzgen didn’t study Hegel, you might confer an equally ironic interpretation on this explicit intrusion of Hegel into Capital.Do you consider this intrusion of Hegel’s “quantity passing into quality” as:Marx seriously [even if misguidedly] acknowledging HegelMarx incautiously coquetting with Hegelian terminologyMarx ironically mocking HegelEngels’s misguided editorial interference in Marx’s original textMarx fondly slipping Hegel into Capital in defiance of Engels’s prior warnings.Father of Dialectics of NatureWhat you choose to avoid in your campaign against a dialectics of nature is what stares you plainly in the face in this quote — Marx is its materialist originator, and he does so in print a decade before Engels’s Anti-Dühring — before your very eyes.Here, in this intrusion of dialectics of nature into Marx’s meticulously proof-read printer’s sheets, both in German and in French, of Capital Vol. 1, prepared for publication, and overseen through pre-press, by Karl Marx himself, we discover the perpetrator.Here we confront the terrible truth that Karl Marx was the originator — the “onlie begetter” — of a materialist dialectics of nature.This intrusion into Capital of materialist dialectics of nature can in no way be dismissed as thoughts committed only to correspondence or to clarifying notes — that can always be challenged as not representing the author’s considered view.This intrusion of materialist dialectics of nature, midway through his life’s work, published with the sole intent of providing a theoretical basis for toppling capitalism and for instituting socialism in its place, is the first hard documentary evidence we have in print, written by the undisputed founder of the materialist dialectics of nature himself.Rosa, direct your hostility, where it belongs, against the originator of the materialist dialectics of nature, one Karl Heinrich Marx.[Oh dear, oh dear.  What mischief we have to thank Lenin for!]

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Conflation

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

where have I conflated “phenomenalism with the Phänomenologie des Geistes”?

Here:

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Marx to Engels 05/01/1882:  “You will see from the enclosed letter from Dietzgen that the unhappy fellow has ‘progressed’ and ‘safely’ arrived at Phänomenologie.  I regard the case as an incurable one.” [MECW 46, p.172.]

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

ALB wrote:

The other thing you need to explain is why Marx [05/01/1882] (in the year before his death) described Dietzgen as a “phenomenalist ”.

Anyway, it depends on what you mean by ‘Phenomenalism ’ — there are far more varieties than even Wikipedia acknowledges.

[Author]

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