[twc]

LBird wrote:

The complete democratic control of the entire process of science, no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’.

Thought PoliceCensorship of human thought is LBird’s gross misunderstanding of Marx’s thesis III on Feuerbach.Materialist Feuerbach imagines he can change man by changing his conditions of existence, independently of [because he is ignorant of] the determinism inherent in existing social conditions.As Marx put it: Feuerbach, the philosopher, raises himself superior to [above or outside of] the actual process of society. Consequently he, and his philosophical plan, will be brought to earth by the actual social determinism he tries to flout. Marx’s charge against him is not elitism per se.LBird misreads thesis III through his anti-Leninist eyes, with vestiges of Leninism clouding his vision. He is alarmed by imaginary social determinisms in socialism that relate to actual social determinisms in a different social formation, capitalism.Consequently, despite himself, he raises himself superior to the actual process of socialist society, whose determinism he lacks confidence in. He doubts the efficacy of our Party Object to maintain socialism as socialism.Instead he insists the SPGB sign up to instituting the ultimately futile. He wants it to outlaw dangerous thought, to imprison thinking within socially-safe bounds.If the tortured history of science proves anything conclusively, it is that shackled scientific thought will burst its shackles. It cannot be tamed. Science is inherently subversive. “Eppur si muove”.LBird intends to slap social surveillance and re-education upon that part of the social superstructure that is science, in blithe ignorance of the social and scientific determined processes. By thwarting the social superstructure that spontaneously arises from the free untrammeled workings of the socialist social base, he and his imaginary plan will be brought to earth by those very processes.Of course LBird only wants an innocuous “lite” version of Torquemada’s Inquisition, Robespierre’s Terror, Stalin’s Purges. He forgets that those worthies started out thus innocently, inspired by noble intent. Paranoia has always fueled social control.He forgets that if science can subvert socialism, then so can his democracy be manipulated to distort science. In other words, if you can’t trust scientists, you can’t trust any of us under socialism. He comes with vestiges of Leninism that see only authoritarianism as the counterpoise to opposition. He is dangerous.Determinism and TruthMarx adopts the formal structure of deterministic science:  Base → Determinism → Superstructure ≡ ObservationThe base is pure abstraction from a material ensemble.The determinism is abstract formalism from that material ensemble.The superstructure is derived by formal determination from the abstract base — it is still abstract, but it purports to be a mentally concrete instance of the abstract base.The observation is a materially concrete measurement of an instance from that material ensemble.The truth of a base–superstructure deterministic science over the domain of its material ensemble consists in its ability to derive mentally concrete instances that measure in abstraction [within bounds of contingency] the same as the materially concrete instances they purport to be.The truth of a base–superstructure system, and its instances, is the only sort of truth we know. The formal determinism of the system is the only determinism we know.Crucially, base–superstructure determinism proves [or disproves] itself because of its essential feedback between theoretical determinism and practical observation.Theory ⇄ Practice.Such truth is partial. Such determinism is partial. Such base–superstructure determinism is itself a process.The material ensemble, which is only determined for us by the science, is ultimately the thing that subverts the science [by analogy with Marx’s account of social revolution in his famous Preface to the Critique] and forces scientists to rethink the scientific base and determinism.Outsiders can easily gain the false impression from reading the famous 1960s debates on scientific revolutions that science is perpetually revolutionizing itself. But the scientific process is, as Stephen Gould [following Thomas Kuhn] described for evolution, essentially one of stasis, punctuated by revolution.If it weren’t for the stasis, daily life and formal science would be impossible. The working truths and working determinisms of daily life persist, or we could not navigate their instances in our daily lives. They hold for us. Likewise, the formalized truths and formalized determinisms of science persist, or scientific research would be meaningless.It is sheer elitist blather to smear science by sneering at its partial truths instead of celebrating its working truths — the only ones we know and can ever know — that persist for us within a conditional but comprehensible stasis. We all live through such stases. Capitalism is one such.Just as we must agree on daily conventions, so too must science agree on conventions in order that its practitioners may communicate and collaborate. That is not elitism. That is spontaneous deterministic human practice.Abstraction or AssumptionIn LBird’s opinion, the scientific base is an ideological assumption, and the scientific superstructure is an ideological consequence. Presumably, the determinism [couched in mathematics and logic] is also an ideological assumption.On the contrary, the base and determinism of modern sciences have long histories of descent from precursor abstractions that were successively teased, thrashed and filtered out of experience [observation].Take Newton’s laws of motion that are so refined they no longer correspond to measurable [observable] material. Only their deterministic concrete instances do. The student who doesn’t know their history is condemned to take them on trust, or ignorantly mistake them for mere assumptions.In actuality they are distilled residues of abstractions that predate civilization, that were crystallized out by the Greeks — in particular by the anti-religious, and so socially embarrassing, particle materialists — refined by the priestly medieval Schoolmen, and mathematized by Kepler in his three “laws of planetary motion” abstracted from Tycho’s observations of the planet Mars from a Copernican moving Earth.Newton acknowledged the abstraction spadework of his predecessors: “if I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. He also taunted philosophers who build upon formally explicit assumptions: “I make no hypotheses”.[In reference to “bourgeois science”, it might be noted that Newton entered the House of Lords, rising to Master of the Royal Mint. Not one of his precursor giants was a class-conscious proletarian.]The abstract bases [laws] and abstract determinisms [couched in mathematics and logic] of our deterministic sciences are mankind’s supreme achievements.Abstraction and determinism are the substance of our consciousness, and the secret of the efficacy of our human practice. As such, they cannot be mere assumptions.RelativityLBird proffers his account of Einstein’s thought experiment as a perfect analogy of social ideology.A physicist would recognize that LBird is merely describing the [Galilean] relativity of classical physics, that Einstein is here expressly refuting.Thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, classical physics deterministically implies a constant velocity of light — a constancy that Einstein recognizes must violate the addition of velocities of classical relativity, and so has subversive implications for the classical measurement of space and time.Einstein is primarily interested in determinism. Classical relativity stands in its way, and so ends up as determinism’s casualty. [In a very real sense, the comparison of observations across inertial frames is very special indeed, as no such inertial frames actually exist.]But in fact, LBird’s example would not defeat most mammals that navigate the world guided by stereoscopic vision. You see, the ball will never move forward from the man, only up and down beside him. Einstein’s dog would take that into account, and snatch it.Fail to see how that proves science is based on ideological assumption.[In reference to “bourgeois science”, James Clerk Maxwell, as Elder of the Church of Scotland, as avowed opponent of Darwinian evolution, and as proponent of the impossibility of scientific sociology, seems a perfect representative of this detested type. Presumably that neatly explains the elite privileged velocity he assigned to light.]Democracy of ThoughtLBird, wants to subject scientific thought to global democratic decision making lest elite scientists take over the world of socialism. That is imaginary science fiction.LBird has proven that he has no idea of the way science works. Many of his pontifications have the false emphasis of partial truths — the things he scorns.He has demonstrated that he cannot contribute at the leading edge of a specialist science. Of course, no scientist can hope to contribute at the cutting edge of all scientific knowledge as is falsely supposed possible even as recently as the Renaissance.It’s never been possible to do so. The favorite polymath Leonardo the man, not Leonardo the myth, could not have contributed to, say, then current Ptolemaic astronomy.Science is, and probably will always remain a cooperative human enterprise conducted by specialists.Science is definitely elitist in the human sense that it takes dedication, imagination, often extraordinary ability, motivation and sheer hard work to master and conduct it. Consequently it must rely on specialist division of labour, and so implicitly on scientific trust — on scientific integrity.But we have also seen that science’s base–superstructure determinism is itself self checking.Perversion of ScienceThe issue of “bourgeois science” is a complex one. Never forget that Marx [like Hegel before him] developed a theory of human consciousness: “social being determines consciousness”.Marx has explored ideology in deeper ways than just class-perverted science [which he was really the first to expose]. For him, material things like money are ultimately ideological in extraordinarily interesting ways. But such deeper matters are for another thread.I hereby oppose LBird’s insistence that the SPGB subscribe to controlling the meaning of scientific research.

[twc]

DeterminismEngels wrote this 70 years before the Russian Revolution.He condemns Bolshevik politicians [Lenin and Trotsky] before they were born to betray their working-class movement should they seize power under social conditions unripe for realizing their political program.Leaders over the ProletariatEngels was writing in the aftermath of the European Spring [1848–49]. This was a heady time of democratic upheaval against authoritarian regimes — a time just like the Arab Spring or the end of the Soviet Union.Engels continues:

Frederick Engels wrote:

We have seen examples of this in recent times. We need only be reminded of the position taken in the last French provisional government by the representatives of the proletariat, though they represented only a very low level of proletarian development.Whoever can still look forward to official positions after having become familiar with the experiences of the February government … is either foolish beyond measure, or at best pays only lip service to the extreme revolutionary party.

Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, impose your consciousness upon the “unconscious” proletariat [as you call it] for its own good, just like Lenin and Trotsky?[Just like Christian missionaries; like the Taliban; like the intellectually superior everywhere — is that also just like you?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, cling to anti-democratic power against the majority, even on failure to deliver your program, just like Lenin and Trotsky?[Just like England’s Charles the First; like France’s Bourbon kings; like Russia’s Tsars; like ruling classes at all times. Will you respect the people’s wishes, or will you ignore their demands because you know better than the people?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, impose state terror in perfect conformity with your vanguard Party’s hierarchical power structure of authority control from above over those below?[Of course few people intend to resort to terror, like young innocent Mr Lenin and young innocent Mr Trotsky. But once an anti-democratic course is set in train, determinism sets terror in its wake. Anti-democrats have cowardly discarded the sole mechanism for bringing opposition out into the open. Instead they send it dangerously underground — hence the necessity for secret police. Anti-democrats advertise their fear. They have already proven that they are afraid. Do you intend to terrorize the opposition into safe submission until you’ve successfully educated its “unconsciousness”?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, twist ignominious policy failure into glorious victory. Will you lie in the teeth of humanity that a pathetic state-controlled market-capitalist system is “communism”, just like Lenin and Trotsky?Or, Celtic, are you prepared to consider that an alternative system of society described by our Object is what Marx, Engels and the World Socialist Movement, have always considered communism, or socialism to be? The only social consciousness that liberates us all from the insidious false consciousness of capitalism is the class consciousness that comprehends the necessity of achieving our Object. That understanding has to be assimilated by each of us individually. It can’t be imposed.

[twc]

Ed wrote:

I agree with you, but …

Et tu Brute

Ed wrote:

I also find it to be a very common misconception.

All the more reason to expose it!

Ed wrote:

We can help teach others without resorting to petty point scoring.

There was no “resorting to petty point scoring” — Socialist truth hurts.

Ed wrote:

We can debate in a friendlier way.

Tell that to Alex. He spat precisely targeted anti-SPGB accusations at ALB, alanjjohnstone, etc, which they took on the chin out of deference to his youthful naivety and boundless enthusiasm.A friend would tell Alex that he has much yet to learn about the dynamics of the human society he wants to save. An enemy would obfuscate at the ultimate expense of that society.

[twc]

Alex Woodrow wrote:

We, as human beings, are capable of producing an abundance of resources all in our local communities.

Humans don’t create resources. Nature does.We, like all life forms, appropriate Nature’s resources. But our appropriation is ultimately an exchange between Nature and itself. We and our resources are ultimately Nature’s. That is an inescapable constraint Nature imposes upon all life forms.The hallmark of us humans is that we consciously appropriate Nature’s resources. We fashion them to our needs and desires. In so doing we set in train an inescapable action–reaction between technology and culture that is mediated by conscious thought.In reshaping Nature to our needs and desires, we simultaneously reshape our conscious thought, which reshapes our needs and desires, and so reshapes our relationship with Nature. In so doing we reshape ourselves.That is what we humans are. We are what we do and what we are conscious of doing. That is our dynamic.Alex, you seek to curtail this dynamic. To stop it in its tracks, Such efforts must plunge us into some form of comfortable “rural idiocy”. Stop the world, you want to get off. We oppose your agenda tooth and nail.

Alex Woodrow wrote:

There are alternatives to copper you know, as we can use other materials such as aliminium wire, tinsel wire etc. So there are ways around this.

The county of Cornwall suits your copper—aluminium—tinsel scenario. Let’s contemplate an imagined closed commune and its plan to wire its local Internet somewhere in Cornwall.Cornwall exhausted its copper supplies years ago. It also lacks aluminium — a metal whose energy-intensive refining amounts to congealing ore and electricity and, in any case, exceeds the production capability of a local closed commune.So imagine that our Cornish commune had the good fortune or foresight to settle upon a silver-rich locality. It collectively decides to wire its Internet with “tinsel” wire, and so starts mining silver deposits that are found in its commune-managed territory. [“Tinsel” was originally fashioned from silver shavings.]Of course, in the imaginary localist mine-is-mine and yours-is-yours world of autonomous resource-owning communes, our silver-privileged community is a fortunate commune. You see, “tinsel” isn’t an option for all Cornish communes. The unlucky mineral-poor communes must try something else, or go without their wired Internet.But Alex Woodrow assures us that every community can stand on its own two [or two hundred] feet, and so will doubtless succeed. Anyone who suggests they mightn’t succeed is ipso facto called a “capitalist”, whatever he misunderstands by that term.Alex, for someone who violently disparages Marx, it might be worth considering Marx’s epigrammatic gloss on local resources: “it is impossible to catch a fish in a pond where there aren’t any”.[Our local commune, of course, will deliberately ignore the fact broad-band is moving to optical fibre and wireless. It will stick appropriately to its locally-sourced narrow-band metal.]Before proceeding, let’s examine a geological map of Cornwall — all of Cornwall, not just the little bit of it that is owned and controlled by our isolated ownership-and-control conscious commune.Notice, if you will, how unevenly mineral resources are deposited. Notice the concentrated zones of mineralization in association with granite outcrops. These hold the tin and tungsten deposits, while copper and arsenic deposits extend beyond, and lead and zinc extend even further beyond.The global science of geology — better still, the science of global geology [geo = world, globe] — explains why local Cornish mineral veins form in this manner. But such global science possibly falls beyond the limited horizon of our local property-conscious closed-upon-the-world commune which, unlike excluded Moses, is comfortably cocooned within its self-sufficient land of milk, honey and privileged “tinsel” silver.So, our imaginary commune dwells on the granite, jealously guards its mineral private property, and is ready to mine its possessed silver for wiring its communal Google-free wholesome internet.However, while delving underground our communal miners [being good Cornishmen] discover that they must pump out the continuously in-flooding subterranean aquifer, whose course they have necessarily disturbed. Our idyllic commune now must confront the far-from-idyllic prospect of having to manage the toxic arsenides that are inexorably seeping into and souring its ground water.Does this autonomous self-sufficient local commune blithely divert its toxic effluents downstream into the alien waters of the equally autonomous and self-sufficient neighbouring commune that sips in blissful isolation of upstream contamination. Does the alien commune matter to it at all? [Alex implies that they don’t even deign to talk.]If, according to Alex, you aren’t a “capitalist” you must agree that your untouchable neighbour commune can very well stand on its own two feet! Problem solved. Your neighbours are resourceful and can solve the problems you bequeath them. Both communes faithfully remain parochial, xenophobic and imbecile to the end.[If only the ancient civilizations along the great rivers had stopped at this stage of social isolation. we’d still be living in blithe indifference towards each other and everyone else!]And so, to conclude our insight into an idealized localist world of autonomous self-sufficient harmony, our isolated communes continue to live autistically ever after, one texting over its private fairy-tinsel intranet and the other drinking from its private fairy-melted snow. Except that Nature connects them.Total Dependence With modifications, this parable holds for the entire globe. That’s precisely why we need a global solution.John Donne expressed conviction in our inter-related humanity, and against notions of human isolation, as well as anyone has.

Quote:

No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. … Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Donne captures the global position of the SPGB.The Socialist Party opposes any local section of society that seeks to control Nature’s resources in its own local sectional interests. See our Object.Nature’s resources are mankind’s alone, to be controlled democratically and held in common by the whole of society. In other words, not to be owned and used by a section or part of society [as they are now by the capitalist class].Mankind has suffered far too long because the substance of its life has been controlled by a portion [always the privileged minority] of society in the interest of that privileged portion, and so against the interest of the rest of society [always the majority].Localism selfishly seeks the right for a local section of society to control its property relations to its local resources in order to wield them in its privileged local interests. Localism is indifferent to the rest of mankind, which it excludes and forbids from its private possessions. Localism, like all privileged ownership of Nature’s resources is a position inimical to and hostile to mankind.Rights and privileges are artifices constructed by society. It is sheer effrontery to believe that one, or a group, of us can actually own a piece of Nature. If anything, Nature owns us, in that the global contains the local. Never forget we are part of Nature.Human right and privilege are always and everywhere a social power over other people exercised through things. They are necessary fictions in a class-based society — essential creations of a society which needs to justify private ownership and control of Nature’s resources. They vanish when all mankind controls Nature democratically.That’s precisely why Alex Woodrow, who accepts private property in Nature’s resources as a right and privilege of locality, can’t see a conflict between his localism and capital. There is little disparity between them. Localism is merely a fantasy form of petty capital. It is naively and unconsciously anti-social.We are all Nature. We are all different parts of it — none equal. But we can all work together, democratically holding Nature’s resources as one, united as associated humanity to help make living worthwhile for all of us within the Nature we all must manage. Only society in concerted effort can achieve and sustain this.

[twc]

Alex Woodrow wrote:

Anyway, if anyone here has examples of problems that may occur in a society of localism, then would it be all right if you could please say, as I really don't see any problems of localism.

The problem with localism is that society is global. Localism cannot sustain itself locally. It cannot reproduce itself on its own terms.That alone is sufficient to damn it.Society condemns the local to inhabit the global — to at most function as local organ of global organism. More than that is disease of the global organism.We are in this together. Humans need each other. We are individuals because we are society.Our resources [minerals and agriculture], technology [science and engineering], culture [language and arts], and prowess [we humans ourselves] are global.They form the essential social “substance” by which society daily reproduces itself.The global character of our social “substance” is a fundamental constraint that confronts our fragmented capitalist society. Localism now opposes itself as a barrier to social progress.The localism that strives to localize our social “substance” is as anti-socialist as nationalism and racism. The proletarianism that limits its sights to local worker control of local factories is fundamentally anti-socialist.Political localism revolts at the frightful conquest of the local by the global. It reacts against what capital is impelled to do, simply because it is capital.Global capital clinically annihilates local capital. Global capital mercilessly plunders local labour. It is the nature of capital to rape our social “substance”.Seekers after the grand old days of local capital should never forget that local capital was equally avaricious on the local scale. The fault lies not in the global but in the capital.As the Communist Manifesto put it far too long ago “The workers have no country. … They have a world to win.”That world is inextricably global. To win it, we have no choice but to deal with that!

[twc]

Determined and Inevitable?

Quote:

Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes.

It’s great to realize that we do agree on the underlying determinism of the materialist conception of history.

Quote:

The difference that remains between us I believe, is that I conclude from this that socialism is not inevitable and you appear not to.

Yes, like you, I certainly believe we have to fight for socialism. It won’t happen without us — man is the agent of his own history.But socialists can’t simply make history blindly — that’s the stuff of class society, which has scant interest in society as such.We socialists can gain mighty help from history itself — that substance inherited from the past. That substance can only be comprehended by the materialist conception of history, and we must wield it as our tool for achieving and maintaining socialism.Our Object is the greatest challenge ever hurled at the world, and it is pure scientific prediction. As such, our Object is the one great consequential conclusion [i.e. consequence of determinism] of the materialist conception of history.Our Object puts class society on notice: we understand property [ownership and control], we can defeat property’s ownership and control of mankind and its hijacking of our common human social process, and we can forever sustain that triumph over the socially destructive private ownership of our individual lives.We wield the substance of past history for our own future. That substance of history distilled into its abstract essence is the materialist conception of history.Our future is determined by our past [that’s the determinism of all autonomous processes, like the serpent shifting its past fulcrum into its future one]. If man is the product of his circumstances [determinism] we’ll change those circumstances, and so change man.We know how to make man human in concrete actuality, and no longer just in our minds — something mankind has excelled at during the tenure of class society.The materialist conception of history gives us the confidence that we can weave our future out of our past by overcoming the desperate barriers necessary for sustaining our present.For that purpose, I believe that the materialist conception of history and our Object are precisely equivalent to the necessary class consciousness.

[twc]

emily_chalmers wrote:

Thank you so much for your response; it will be extremely helpful. I'll let you know how it went when I'm finished. I should be working on it for around another month.

On writing about socialism and determinism in another post, I recalled that I wrote about it in response to your socialist questionnaire, on the question: “Is socialism inevitable?”.I then, as now, agree that socialism is inevitable  — a response which apparently strikes most people as akin to fatalism.Emily, you did offer to let us know how your research went. I trust it went successfully, and look forward to learning of its results.

[twc]

Determinism or What?Of course determinism can’t explain every possible contingency. No-one ever thought it could; though you seem to think it must.You assert socialism isn’t determined. Why then are you confident that we can establish it? How then do you intend to hold it together?I consider class consciousness to be simply our recognition of the determinism inherent in the materialist conception of history. That recognition is indispensable for establishing socialism. It alone gives us confidence in our social commitment to common ownership and democratic control. If social being determines consciousness, then it alone ensures that socialism will be self-sustaining.There’s enough target material here for you to get stuck into.Determinism or ContingencyYou imply that contingency [chance] destroys determinism [causality, necessity].If so, there could never be any determinism, because the world we inhabit is thoroughly contingent. Yet that world is just as thoroughly alive with determinism, and much of what we take to be pure contingency is readily explicable deterministically.Determinism and contingency are inter-penetrating concepts. Both are abstracted from the same phenomena. Determinism is the abstract view. Contingency is the concrete view. [We usually find competing contingencies, and so competing determinisms.]Marx describes our process of concept formation as the “descent from the concrete to the abstract”. [For Hegel, our descent is a phenomenology.]Abstraction is how we apprehend the concrete in our minds. Marx describes this process as the “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”. [For Hegel, our ascent is a logic.]Science is the union of the descending and ascending arcs. [For Hegel, science is the union of phenomenology and logic, For Thomas Kuhn, it is the union of revolutionary and normal science.]In ascent, [normal] science sees abstractions implementing contingent concrete instances of their abstract selves. Abstractions tell concrete things how to behave [e.g. Newton’s laws].In descent, [revolutionary] science considers contingent concrete forms to distill into an abstraction of themselves. Concrete things tell abstractions how to behave [e.g. Newton, Darwin, Marx, Einstein].For Marx, science is the formal union of contingent concrete things dictating to abstractions that dictate to contingent concrete things. Fortunately, evolution has made us expert at recognizing abstract form in concrete contingent actuality.[Idealist Hegel discovered this formal union but, for him, abstractions and concrete things are forms of the World Spirit.]Contingency is the substance of determinism. Our abstractions, distilled from concrete contingency, constitute the base of a deterministic superstructure wherein we consciously navigate concrete contingency. That is the formal structure of our determinisms.That consciousness is how we, along with all sentient creatures that are compelled to live by their wits, manage to survive. Without being able to comprehend determinism in contingency we couldn’t make our way through the world.Darwinian DeterminismDarwinian determinism has similarities [we ignore differences here] to the determinism of the materialist conception of history. It is thoroughly studied, even debated in public, and yet no consensus seems to obtain.So, as you understand, I’m giving my own view.Karl Popper once adopted the position that determinism was absent from evolution. He declared “the theory of natural selection is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme” [Unended Quest 1976], a view he later repudiated.Stephen Jay Gould stressed that Darwinian determinism was re-directed by random contingency [minor as well as major ones, such as catastrophic mass extinctions]: “wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale [530 million years ago]; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay”.Perhaps so, but winding it back a mere 2.5 million years to the Taung Australopithecine boy, must increase those odds enormously. By then, evolution had solved a host of foundational problems for “anything like human intelligence”, and it now had no choice but to work with the new Australopithecine material. What plastic mental material to manipulate for issuing forth “anything like human intelligence”!The first point I make is that blind evolution, just like purblind social development, is forced to work with material “transmitted from the past”. It must remake its own circumstances out of its own former self. [That looks awfully like determinism to me.]Gould took the panda’s peculiar “thumb” as a wonderful instance of contingency co-opted by Darwinian determinism. But we have already recognized above that determinism working upon contingency of its own making is the nature of actual concrete processes.The second point I make is that both blind evolution and purblind social development solve the problems their development throws up. Species and societies both create their own worlds. They do “make themselves”.photosynthesis turned a greenhouse into a benign atmosphere [capitalism seems hell bent on reversing this archaic 2.5 billion year process],mating created diversity out of cloning,lungs and legs conquered land, and wings conquered airnurture led to training, intelligence, etc.[Marx saw society solving its problems in exactly the same fashion as evolution. Obstacles are there to be overcome. And they are overcome, in society, just as in evolution. Enough for now. To explore determinism in society is to start a new thread.]

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

I'm unclear how you are using the word ‘determines’

In the sense of “social being determines consciousness”.In the sense of “general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society” [Grundrisse, Ch. 1, ‘Method of Political Economy’].In the sense of an abstraction whose concrete utility can be tested by “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete [which is precisely] the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” [Grundrisse, ibid].

Hud955 wrote:

the word 'determines' has a strong and a weak sense

If you choose to sterilize determinism by imagining it in a ‘weak sense’, it ceases to be deterministic. Emasculated determinism loses its procreative powers.You, like all of us, have found the received abstraction of “determinism” at loggerheads with social reality. So did Marx. But he saw no reason for a subservient abstraction to take the knife to recalcitrant reality, and castrate it, in our minds.The received mechanical abstraction of “determinism” that applies, after a fashion, to billiard balls does not hold for quantum mechanics, nor for evolution, nor for the materialist conception of history, nor for any complex system, which is what reality (including real billiard balls) happens to be.

Hud955 wrote:

the materialist conception of history has the capacity to free us in some degree from 'necessity'

First, whence your ‘necessity’ if for you there’s no such thing as social causality “(in the accurate sense), at least at any level that we can comprehend”?My case will always be [subject to someone proving convincingly that our Object and Declaration of Principles are mistaken] that it is precisely the causality that can be comprehended by the materialist conception of history that can free us from the necessity of capitalism and secure us the necessity of socialism.

Hud955 wrote:

The materialist conception of history does give us grounds for believing that it is both possible and even, perhaps, likely, because certain material forces that we can comprehend are tending in the direction of socialism. And those of us who are conscious of it can in the meantime act to further that social understanding.

How low have we sunk, after a century of global abuse against Marx, socialist theory and the materialist conception of history, to parade this abysmally “weak” claim that there may be “grounds for believing” not even in socialism! Only the eunuch’s hope that restoration of virility is “possible and even, perhaps, likely”.And why do we hold out such forlorn hope? Not out of social necessity, not out of determinism, and especially not out of causality. No, we hold out such hope simply because “certain material forces that we can comprehend [sic] are tending in the direction of socialism”. How demoralizing!

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

Marx, in fact, very rarely speaks in the language of causation.

Nonsense.Materialists hold that man is the product of his environment. Marx holds that social being determines consciousness. If materialism isn't causal, what is its point? If Marx "very rarely speaks in the language of causation" what is his point?If you hardly ever hear "the language of causation" in Marx, it's because a fixed abstraction of "causation" — something that transcends specific actual instances of it — is effacing the varied concrete forms it takes in different contexts. [Celebrated forms of causality include those of classical physics, quantum physics, Darwinian evolution and the materialist conception of history.]Socialism must be materially caused or it remains forever unattainable. Socialism must reproduce itself causally, or it is totally unsustainable.Socialists have little choice but to "speak in the language of causation" at all times. What alternative language should we be talking in?

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

According to the MCH, man makes his own history and is not a mechanical puppet whose strings are being pulled by some (impossible) meta-historical process.

It can equally be said that man does not make his own history — just as it can equally be said that workers don’t run capitalism. Both do what they must under compulsion.The assertion that man does not make his own history is surprisingly the essential slant of the materialist conception of history.Firstly, man does not make his own history “out of the whole cloth”. He is compelled to accept the historical fabric handed down to him by his former self, and make what he can out of it. Man’s making of his own history is thwarted by a historical fabric of his own making.This is a constraint recognized by the materialist conception of history that is imposed upon man’s making of his own history. It limits what man can do. It is the fundamental argument against voluntarism.It is also the first determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of his transmitted world.Secondly, to the extent that man doesn’t comprehend the warp and weft of his own history, man cannot be said to make it consciously at all. On the contrary, history can be said to make an unconscious tailor out of him.In an uncomprehended historical process man is quite correctly characterized as mere puppet controlled by the process of uncomprehended history, even though he is its necessary agent — even though he actively imagines that he controls history.That is a second determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of false consciousness.These are two powerful determinisms that limit man’s freedom over the making of his own history.Thus we come to perceive Marx rapidly marshaling determinisms of the materialist conception of history in a few compelling lines of his “Brumaire”.Sure, man for Marx is definitely not the same “mechanical” puppet he is for the French philosophes, whose materialist world view Marx absorbed in his teens and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Sure, the historical process for Marx is definitely not the “meta-historical” process of World Spirit it is for Hegel, whose idealist world view Marx absorbed at university and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Marx does come close to considering social man in pre-socialist society as akin to a conscious puppet [until now unconscious of his own historical process]. Isn’t that a reasonable characterization of the blind capitalist personas we find around us, directed by the needs of capital to the detriment of the needs of society?That mankind behaves like puppets is a critique of the conditions that call forth such behaviour — not a slur upon our species but upon our conditions.Of course, the most fundamental determinism of the materialist conception of history is that man’s social being determines his consciousness.At the very moment when man becomes conscious of the historical process — conscious that he is “determining the course of history” [as in our achievement of socialism] — his consciousness is most subservient to the determinism of his social being.He hears his social being crying out in agony to him for action to realize what it cannot because in substance it is after all man who “makes his own history”. The contradictory assertions of making and not making our own history are here most urgent, and here explained.We find that, when man is supreme determiner of history, he is its supreme puppet. He is in thrall to that most paradoxical of circumstances in which the determiner [the puppeteer social being] determines the determined [the conscious puppet man] to determine the determiner [to change the puppeteer social being].Man can never ever fully free himself from the necessity of playing puppet to the puppeteer — his social being. He can only come to understand it, and to comprehend the necessities it imposes upon him to control it.The bourgeoisie understand the need to control the social being they blindly constructed, but they must fight a parasitic process they built upon the essential social process.[As Hud955 suggests, primitives had a direct social process to control but, as I suggest, their inability to understand their social process scientifically left them prey to mythologizing it.]To return to social revolution. Even when freeing himself from one form of social subservience man necessarily enchains himself to another.That’s where social subservience to our Object “common ownership and democratic control of the substance of social reproduction” cuts in to determine our consciously-social socialist being.I assert that the essential difference between primitive and future world socialism is the historical product, among which the most important conscious acquisition is Marx’s materialist conception of history that finally permits us to understand and so control our social being.

[twc]

Buckley’s ChanceThe most explicit account of Australian Aboriginal “murder” comes from a European who lived amongst them — separated by 1000 km from the nearest European settlement in Sydney and environs — for 32 years.Convict William Buckley, aged 23 years, escaped from an exploration camp near Melbourne in 1802, and managed, despite overwhelming odds, to assimilate into the Wathaurung tribes until their dissolution following the 1835 actual settlement of Melbourne. The improbability of his survival has entered the vernacular in the phrase Buckley’s chance.The Wathaurung called Buckley “returned from the dead” because his skin was white. He explains, when describing a tree-platform death-and-cremation ceremony, “the fire cheers and warms the dead man. All things being completed, one word was uttered … The dead is gone to be made a white man”.Buckley, 6ft 7in Cheshire farmer, apprenticed builder, regimental foot-soldier, recipient of stolen goods, transported convict, escapee, hunter–gatherer, became uniquely placed anthropologist:

Quote:

I have seen a race of children grow up into women and men, and many of the old people die away, and (by my harmless and peaceable manner amongst them) I had acquired great influence in settling their disputes.

Primitive “Murder”Buckley found Aboriginal warfare to be more terrifying than his campaign with the “King’s Own” Foot in the French Revolutionary Wars.Over three decades he witnessed 50 killings. Members of his own clan were summarily killed for their imagined implication in a fatal snake bite.Warner summarizes traditional violence thus: “Special factors contributing to high Aboriginal death rates were constant raiding for women, never-ending chains of payback killings, and the belief that most deaths (except for those of infants and elders) resulted from an enemy’s sorcery and must be avenged.” [W. I. Warner, A Black Civilization: 1937]Buckley recounts:

Quote:

Numbers of murderous fights I prevented by my interference, which was received by them as being well meant; so much so, that they would often allow me to go amongst them before a battle, and take away their spears and boomerangs.

On the payback killing of one of his own adopted or biological children:

Quote:

The dead man’s family forced my poor blind boy away from me, and killed him on the spot, merely because he had happened to be in the same hut in which their sick young man had died, believing that the blind boy must have been in some way responsible for his [untimely] death.I managed to escape with his little sister, moving on, and on, until meeting up with the tribe of her future husband, to whom she had been promised in infancy. They immediately vowed vengeance, and two or three of them set out for the purpose of murder, returning in a few days with the intelligence that they had killed two of the children of their enemies.

Buckley describes a world of interminable retribution killings that determines his periodic retreat to the seclusion of his famous estuarine fishing hut where he is later joined by a “wife”. [So it seems possible to live on the fringes of hunter-gatherer society — but then Buckley was always a unique phenomenon within that society].And yet most of the time, harmony prevails. One wonders just what his imaginative Aboriginal clan, feasting on kangaroo around the campfire at night, made of his tall tales of horses and carriages on the city streets of London.Expanding FrontierEuropean settlement in 1835 focused Aboriginal retaliation against the European rape of their traditional absolutely-indispensable means of social reproduction. Necessity of a new alien mode of social reproduction supervened upon their ancestral own.  Broome [Aboriginal Australians, 1994] estimates 1000 Aboriginal and 80 European deaths in border skirmishes over the subsequent 15 years of European expansion into Victoria.“A settler taking up a new country is obliged to act towards its original occupiers in this manner [murder] or abandon it.” [settler Neil Black, Geelong, 1840].ImplicationsI see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history in the very domain where it can most readily be tested. But that’s matter for another thread.Suffice to say here that, if we treat the materialist conception of history as only “a guiding principle”, we remain scientifically bankrupt — bereft of any definite principle on how to proceed other than by what suits us.Moreover, Marx didn’t say that the materialist conception of history was a guiding principle of his studies. He said it was the guiding principle of his studies. That tiny the, in Robert Frost’s estimation, makes “all the difference”.

[twc]

Enjoyed Brian Morris's excellent Marx as Anthropologist talk.Wonderful to hear it "like it is/was" from an erstwhile hunter–gatherer himself.[Yes, Steve. We do need a new thread, but I had not read your post when I drafted my reply off-line on the tram.]

[twc]

Myths change because they are actual processes. Change of form is a given.I was considering the persistent abstraction of actual processes:the signature “thingness” that characterizes them all,the abstract invariant that survives their actual transience.That abstraction is the consciousness born of common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.Many actual implementations of primitive common ownership are possible — but all appear to take the form of a modified family. Nurture is a natural focus for social coalescing and foundation for social cohesion. Hence the common ownership and control relations in the form of inter-dependent “kinship” groupings.Egalitarianism is a Capitalist StandardIt is contrary to the materialist conception of history to judge a society as socialist by how well it conforms to abstract egalitarianism. Common ownership and democratic control constitute the only scientific criterion. How else can anyone scientifically comprehend the social implications of socialism?Egalitarianism is a bourgeois “right” we all now enjoy, even though most of us abuse its great advantage to the working class — equal suffrage — by perpetuating the system that implements it.Humans are not and never will be equal as humans. [Only quantum particles are identical. Macroscopic entities, like humans, always differ. Amazingly, even tiny macroscopic objects like snowflake crystals differ. No two snowflakes are identical — physicists are confident that this is ever so, even throughout all of Earth’s history.]Anyone who desires socialism out of notions of Égalité — i.e. in order to restrict, limit, constrain, unify, destroy, cripple, curtail, outlaw human diversity — misconceives socialism in capitalist terms.Diverse socialism retorts: Vive la différence!That’s why Marx, in his critique of capitalist thought, governance, jurisprudence and ethics — everything the capitalist philosophers, politicians, jurists and ethicists hold dear — hurled at social-democrat “egalitarians” the unanswerable riposte:“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)…”“Equal right is therefore a right of inequality like every right.”I fail to be impressed by arguments against primitive socialism based on notions of inequality.Murder and the Whole CalamitySimilarly, applying bourgeois criteria to primitive murder, warfare, rape, or whatever you want, in order to claim that a society based on common ownership can’t be a socialist society, is simply not scientific.One must follow the science fearlessly where it leads, and not where you want to lead it. Science is solely there to wield.One must explain primitive behaviour in terms of primitive socialism, and not by abandoning it.It strikes me as not at all difficult to explain primitive murder, warfare and rape within primitive socialism. Primitive consciousness inhabits a mythical world alien to ours, which it is crucial to understand scientifically.Reinterpreting the Silenced PastThe unalloyed past is now lost. Reinterpretation is therefore reconstruction. I assert that the only way forward is through the materialist conception of history.

[twc]

Steve,Reference to irascible Dr Jacob Bronowski recalls his flamboyant educational skills.I haven’t watched his “personal view” Ascent of Man for years, but it’s hard to forget the Auschwitz scene nor that self-indulgent sipping of Napa Valley vintage in his Californian coastal mansion overlooking the Pacific as he pontificates upon the future of mankind.The man aggressively projected himself as thoroughly anti-Hegel and anti-Marx in the common mould of his time, partly in conformity with understandable anti-Leninist cold-war attitudes, but also encouraged by the then-dominant accretionist–falsificationist “philosophy of science” of Kantian/Schopenhauerian self-savior of social democracy: Karl Popper.I will never forget Bronowski’s contemptuous putdown of Hegel as Lear’s fool. Hegel and Marx are contemptible collateral damage to his forthright hatred of totalitarian regimes. If anyone wants to survey the background to Hegel and the planets, a brief explanation. Bode had said of a gap in a hypothetical mathematical progression of planetary orbits “can one believe that the Founder of the universe had left this space empty?” Hegel simply replied, in passing, that if instead of Bode’s progression you tried Plato’s progression from his Timaeus there is no empty gap to fill.[That Hegel’s mathematical modifications are arbitrary is entirely another matter. The student was yet to become the mature philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel.]I wonder what the Standard thought of Bronowski and his Ascent at the time?

[Author]

Posts