[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

I’m not sure I agree entirely with twc — if I understand him correctly — that hunter gatherer societies act entirely unconsciously, as there appears to be quite a lot of evidence that they are very aware of the kind of social and even productive activities that can disturb the equilibrium of their groups, and they have very subtle and elaborate ways of dealing with them.

Oh yes, I’m sure you are right. The extraordinary account by escaped convict William Buckley, who lived for 33 years as an “aborigine” among the totally isolated unknown Southern aboriginal tribes before white settlement of Melbourne, contains countless instances, sprinkled with rather humorous examples of his residual European frustrations within his largely assimilated primitive “consciousness”, to the point that he is driven to hide the communal spears to prevent ritual retaliations. Oh yes.And primitive observational “science” functions, when stripped of its mysticism, as effectively [actually more effectively, because it was truly social] as our testable vulnerable base–superstructure science.“Kinship” OrganizationHowever, I was referring to the primitive social organization that universally takes the form of extended “kinship” groupings.I claim that primitive “kinship” social structures arise “unconsciously” out of common ownership of social resources. They arise because they are the appropriate way of organizing social reproduction based on common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.In other words, primitive sexual division of social labour, and primitive “kinship” division of resource control, constitute the adequate elaboration of social labour under common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.This form of social organization — unlike a future world socialism — arises “unconsciously” because no-one thought it into being. It arose spontaneously out of social necessity.People simply arranged their social affairs this way by doing. The thinking came afterwards in the form of mythology.The appropriate primitive consciousness for explaining why they did what they did [actually what nature impelled primitive society to do] is mythical rationalization.The universal constraint of social “kinship” systems upon primitive social organization admits many variations. Look at Lewis Henry Morgan’s voluminous patterns of social consanguinity — patriarchal, matriarchal, etc.My point is that people born into such necessarily-cooperative primitive societies inherit and inhabit a world animated by ancestral and animal totem spirits that sanction the social division of labour and the control of social resources. This circumscribed outlook on the social world is a given of their entire social existence. It is what makes their conscious world meaningful.This remarkable, despite its mysticism, primitive mental outlook is something that people born into our consciously crafted future world socialism will not inherit.Consciousness Came Too LateObjections may be urged against my reference to the "unconscious" nature of the consciousness necessary for establishing and maintaining the basic social relations that sustain social reproduction. As in all things human, consciousness is always crucially involved. [This topic needs a separate thread to thrash out, since it bears ever so deeply upon the materialist conception of history.]For the moment, it suffices that whatever may have been consciously elaborated in the distant past had already become socially established by the time we encounter primitive social organization in history.All historical encounters with primitive societies find any rational explanatory kernel of primitive “consciousness” irretrievably encrusted within a mystical explanatory shell — any non-mythical kernel was long since lost to an established time-immemorial myth that had become the “fact” of primitive existence.But, as the materialist conception of history points out, technological change [increasingly in the form of social contact with an advanced technological society] challenges the dominant social consciousness appropriate to primitive social organization, and ultimately undermines it — and so overthrows primitive society.There are first-hand accounts of this process of the dissolution of primitive social consciousness: e.g. the ancient playwrights, especially Aeschylus’s Oresteia; the ancient historians; the colonial chroniclers, explorers, settlers; the observant missionaries and early anthropologists…The mental conceptions [consciousness] adequate to holding primitive society together proved powerless before technological change. This simply proves that primitive consciousness was an attribute subservient to social organization, even though it appeared to function as governing that social organization.As Hegel put it, the rational kernel finally becomes evident in the demise of the system that nurtured it. Marx saw this historical phenomenon as the hallmark of an “unconscious” [primitive society] or “false conscious” [class society] social superstructure.I consider [perhaps naively] the sorts of social misdemeanours that loom large in the current discussion thread to be relatively minor in the scheme of things. Something not beyond the capabilities of a future consciously-organized world-socialist society, that actually does comprehend the nature of its social reproduction, to be able to solve “consciously” in the interests of the whole community.

[twc]

Hi Steve,You say I wield the materialist conception of history "like a club".Just as Newton wielded his laws of motion and Darwin wielded his theory of evolution, although they wielded their guiding principles more elegantly than I — more like a rapier or a scalpel.Marx used the materialist conception of history everywhere, even where it's not immediately obvious. He explicitly tells us that it was the guiding principle of all his studies, just as the other conceptions continue to be the guiding principles for Newtonians and Darwinians.Scientific theory is useless if you can't wield it. Wielding is precisely what scientific principles are for. That is their social role.We wield the materialist conception of history as much to apply it as to test it. That's because the materialist conception of history is a testable, vulnerable, deterministic science.By following a scientific principle where it leads us and not where we want to lead it is the only scientific approach. If we correctly apply it, and it fails, we deterministically weaken the materialist conception of history as a scientific principle.Somebody, some day, needs to go through Marx and make explicit just how he consistently wielded the materialist conception of history throughout his complex scientific structure.So much hot air has been wasted on challenging or re-interpreting his clearly stated materialist conception of history as a foundation by people who think they have a better foundation. Well, the challenge for such people is to develop a social science whose guiding principle isn't the materialist conception of history, and then we can take them seriously.Until then, challenges to the materialist conception of history remain so much waffle — untestable and indeterministic. On this score, challengers have cowardly eschewed determinism and avoided testability.For the moment we proudly wield [even if  like a club] the extraordinary social conviction that "social being determines consciousness"!

[twc]

Dear Steve,No, I argue from a social level  — the Marxian science of society [the materialist conception of history] — and not from a mechanical level.You seem to argue from a biological level — something like biology determines socialism — or an ideal level — something like fine ideals do.The materialist conception of history plays a comparable role for comprehending human society as, for example, Newtonian mechanics does for understanding the solar system or Darwinian evolution does for understanding biological development, etc. It is simply a testable vulnerable science. Your biologicism or idealism is more a Holy Grail [as you wildly assert the materialist conception of history to be] — a mysterious talisman that humans create in their imagination, interminably quest for on a pure simpleton's errand, and that ever fails to deliver its hoped-for miracles.Science, on the contrary, is more prosaic, and attempts to displace mystical idealism by testable determinism.Science can be demonstrated to be wrong. That is the challenge you must meet.You misunderstand the materialist conception of history if you think that it "pays no heed of conscious human beings" when you must at least know that it aims to understand that very human consciousness you take as being absolute, fundamental, self evident — something that it is not necessary to explain because it is to you, as it is to Socialist Punk, obvious.No product of consciousness is self evident. All consciousness is a social construct. Consciousness is superstructural and not basic, in terms of the materialist conception of history. [You want to make it basic.]Your vaunted ethics and morality — the more selfless they manifest themselves — are clearly non individual. Ethics and morality are attributes of society, not of individuals. Selfless behaviour only makes sense if it is in and for society and not within or for an individual.Ethics and morality are simply not individual at all. If they remain individual, they become their very opposite: selfish. More dangerous if they become internally idealized like the self-absorbed moralism of a Kierkegaard.The more that ethics and morality appear to be individual concerns rather than social concerns  — i.e. the more they appeal primarily to the individual  — the more they misrepresent the very society that calls them forth and to which the individual wants to apply them. Individualized ethics and morality unconsciously reveal how powerless they are within their social context — the more they resemble the current ineffectual social parody of individual charity donations "solving" social problems.No, socialists, like most humans, are necessarily concerned with, for and about other people. Of course, like the rest of society, we find our natural communal behaviour continually blunted by capitalism, but we manage to rise above the inhumanity of our present anti-social society, partly because we must, and sometimes we do so cheerfully enough to our own personal cost.The significant difference is that Marxian socialists have a testable vulnerable science to show us all deterministically how we can realize the ethical social needs you so strongly feel.

[twc]

My dear Socialist Punk, the situation is by no means as obvious as you think.Much of your referenced material is probably correct. But that is not the point.The materialist conception of history is concerned with consciousness that arises out of the social relations — the conditions of ownership and control — that necesarily coalesce around the substance of social reproduction. In primitive societies these social relations of ownership and control are neither scientifically comprehended nor scientifically constructed by the members of that society in the modern sense that they can be by the members of a future socialist society based on common ownership and democratic control that emerges out of the positive achievements and the destructive ruins of capitalism.Primitive consciousness is prey to the scientifically limited and so uncritical comprehension of the primitive social relations that generate it. [It is necessarily mystified.]Primitive consciousness universally conceives the structure of its own society through that universal extension of the biological family — "kinship relations" — those famous systems of social consanguinity first discovered by Lewis Henry Morgan.What Hud955 is pointing out is that The default [spontaneous] consciousness that arises from primitive common ownership of the means of social reproduction is unquestioned sharing of social consumption — what you conceive of (by comparison with our own society) as a caring society.The possibility of variations on this unquestioned sharing consciousness arises precisely because the primitive "kinship" social structures are essentially "unconscious" or "spontaneous" social constructs.The functioning of primitive "kinship structures" is prey to the limitations of the primitive consciousness they generate. From this arises what you might (by comparison with our own society) conceive of as aspects of a non-caring society.However, judgement of "caring" or "non-caring" behaviour is ridiculous if we use as standards of judgement criteria transferred directly from our 21st century capitalist society back into primitive stone-age society.There are simply no "obvious" socially universal standards of "caring" and "non-caring" behaviour because such standards arise out of and must conform to the needs of society — which, as we socialists know, society is a process.By modern bourgeois notions, primitives behaved both sensibly and stupidly, and they simiarly behaved both caringly and uncaringly.That's precisely how Europeans also appear to primitive consciousness. You only need read the excellent first-hand accounts of the First Fleeters in Sydney [e.g. Watkins Tench] to glimpse this two-way admiration and contempt of aborigines and Europeans for each other's social intelligence and stupidity, and especially for each other's social "caring" and "non-caring".[Recall, the First Fleet biographers were men of the Enlightenment who first filtered their observations of a pristine 50000-year isolated culture through Rousseau's "noble savage" conceptions.]What appears as primitive "non-caring" is, just as YMS revealed, the overriding necessity of a grand unifying social structure trumping the necessity of a mere individual in that structure. [This is exactly what happens in capitalism all of the time. The grand social necessity for capital to expand trumps the necessity for us mere individuals to live in security and to die in comfort.]In other words, the modern rock-solid case for socialism depends entirely on class, not at all on values, no matter how much we are motivated by our common sociability.Values are consequential to the case for socialism. Values are not fundamental to it. Values continually change, and the finest of them are daily trampled underfoot before our eyes.Class, however, is fundamental to the case for socialism. It is constant, and is daily reproduced ever more strongly. 

[twc]

Thank you for guiding us through our confusion.First we ignored ethics. Then we ignored values. Finally we ignored government force.We remained ignorant before our fortunate exposure to your everyday bourgeois modes of thought and practice, which somehow we managed to miss.Ideals, Ethics and Values are Ineffectual

Quote:

why do you defend the "natural" cycle (1) of social reproduction whilst attacking its corruption cycle (2) by the "capitalist class"?Clearly, it's because you value a functioning, positive, fair societyand you are convinced that a socialist system is the proper approach towards that goal.In other words, there are values that underly your socio-economic position. They lead you towards it.

Yes, I do assent to (2) and (3). But my assent is not fundamental — as you blithely assume. My assent is consequential.You assert the fundamental motiving power of deep ideals, ethics, values — the furthest a bourgeois brain can fathom.Did it ever occur to you that every human being and every social movement assents to (2)? And yet none can actuate it.Did it ever occur to you that people daily seek to fulfill (2), partly because they are impelled to by the necessity to keep cycle (2) ticking over? And yet they fail to achieve it.Did it ever occur to you that essentially all political movements towards implementing capitalism — numbering dozens even within the 20th century alone — assented to (3)? None called itself a “[pro-]capitalist” party; but instead all called themselves “social” (Mussolini) or “socialist” (Hitler), alongside the multitudinous avowedly “communist” parties. Why is this so, if they didn’t assent to (3)? Yet none of them could actuate (3).People and movements that place sublime trust in the efficacy of ideals are deterministically doomed to failure through the objective determinism of having to implement and to be subservient to cycle (2), whose overwhelming objective determinism over-rides all ideals, whether grand or tawdry.The necessity of cycle (2) turned them all — Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, et tutti frutti — into their detested opposites: witting or unwitting capitalists.An objective determinism that derails the most strongly held ideals, ethics and values is some powerful determinism.But look at it the other way. Ideals, ethics and values that succumb to social necessity are feeble indeed. If they succumb to deterministic necessity they are proven to be illusory.What other proof do we need that something is illusory if it proves to be ineffectual?So, no! Contrary to your wildest dreams, I don’t assent to (4). Nor should any socialist.Liberty, Equality, FraternityThe French bourgeoisie fought their Revolution under the banner of bourgeois ideals — the rights of man. Ours is the world they implemented.Our world substitutes capitalist liberty for feudal dependence, capitalist equality for feudal hierarchy, market fraternity for feudal dominance.But the great transformative motivating ideals, ethics and values remain unrealized. They are proven to be ineffectual.Did it ever occur to you that that’s precisely why these universally grandiose ideals, ethics and values are so readily tolerated — even encouraged and embraced — by class societies. That it is precisely because they are safely unattainable that they constitute the great bulwarks, the great buttresses, of class societies. For class tyrannies, their very ineffectuality is their supreme virtue.Did it ever occur to you that precisely because the great vaunted ideals remain remotely abstract they constitute an irresistible attraction to pontificating “philosophers” who lord their critiques of apparent social stupidities by haughtily sneering at the, to them non-understandable, practical behaviour of common humanity compelled to suffer under social necessities — just as you haughtily scoff. It is ever so easy to scoff at uncomprehended deterministic behaviour.Not only are the great ideals tolerated by those who prosper precisely because they violate them, they are actively promoted as inspiring and motivational — the very things you want to guide us by. Such tainted intellectual goods can only succeed in suffusing a commonly shared aura around a class-divided world — a communal aura that sanctions the vicious actuality of class-divided societies whose very essence these ideals deterministically contravene.The origin of these semi-universal ideals must therefore be sought in the very conditions of social reproduction [for capitalism, in cycle (2)] that they must deterministically arise out of. The link is far too strong to be otherwise.These fine ideals are the exact opposite of our harsh social actuality. That they emerge as motivating social ideals implies that we need them as social actualities. Why else would they emerge?That they persist as motivating ideals implies that social reproduction [cycle (2)] systematically violates them, day in day out. They are reproduced as unattainable.That we can’t realize these ideals is the great critique of our present social actuality.It was Feuerbach who first gained an inkling into a specific instance of this general social-inversion process. He comprehended the essence of Christianity as the distillation of everything fine humanity hopes for in the actuality of mankind.It was Marx, standing on Feuerbach’s shoulders, who saw further that this ideal distillation of actuality was an unconscious critique of the society — social formation — that needed it.Marx was able to prove the great social generality that, through the necessity of cycles (1) and (2), the social relations and consciousness required to prosecute these indispensable cycles is deterministic of our ideals, ethics, values and even our government and its forces — the very things you calumniate against us as totally ignoring.Well, yes, we do ignore them — at least the ideals — as motivators with good reason. But we believe we have a fair chance of actualising them when we actualize cycle (1) — but that, along with government force, is subject enough for another post.So, in this limited sense, (2) and (3) indirectly, or consequentially, motivate us. They don’t fundamentally motivate us.We are motivated fundamentally by class consciousness — also a subject for another post.Ideals Enslave UsFor the moment I won’t pursue Marx’s scientific base–superstructure formulation of his deep insight that “social being determines consciousness”, except to point out the obvious — that it is the reverse of your bourgeois “idealistic” illusion that “consciousness determines social being”.However, I make two brief closing observations.A century of misguided attempts to bypass our Object and Declaration of Principles has demonstrated that socialism based on non-science is a miss far worse than a mile. Your universally self-evident ideals are a miss, in some ways a most insidious miss.Ideals are comforting. Ideals are reassuring. They are consoling — the more rarefied, decent and obvious they are, the more inspiring. But, as far as human activity is concerned, it is worth contemplating that whatever consoles a slave in his servitude does his master an incalculable service.Not only are ideals ineffectual, they are enslaving. They merely reveal what is wrong with our social condition.

[twc]

Guide needing GuidanceA guide has descended upon the forum to set the Party straight. He imagines we must be ignorant of his capitalist modes of thought and practice — as if any sentient human being can avoid the commonplaces he takes to be his own intellectual productions even as they succeed in confusing him.He comes to commandeer our help in settling his confusions for authoritatively supplanting “false” anti-capitalist modes of thought and practice with “correct” bourgeois ones. So he must manipulate the forum by taking charge of its thought and practice.His enterprise is born ad hominem and must die ad hominem — in personal superiority or in wounded pride. Socialism is mere collateral damage to his motivating arrogance. I therefore address him as "you".Social ReproductionThe scientific understanding of ethics and so-called human values is based upon the materialist conception of history.The materialist conception of history expresses the necessity for social reproduction to proceed. Society must produce and distribute wealth in order to consume it. 

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social-reproduction ≡     production → distribution → consumption ↻ (1)

This recurrent process [↻] is humanity’s indispensable necessity. As such it is the only rock-solid foundation we have for constructing a science of society.Importantly for a deterministic science — one that explains by prediction — is the recognition that cycle (1) is the fount of social determinism. Without it, society collapses. With it, society exists; society persists. That’s some determinism.Since you assume that socialists act unconsciously of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative [the sermon on the mount, etc.] and are unconsciously motivated by deep internal personal values, let us turn the tables upon you. Aren’t you always and everywhere acting ineluctably, but unconsciously of, the concrete determinism of cycle (1)? Or have you mentally — i.e. bourgeois philosophically — managed to free yourself of it?If you agree that none of us can escape cycle (1) then you are inexorably forced to comprehend its deterministic implication: that all social determinisms — including your bourgeois-modified social ethics and values — are ultimately subservient to this one, simply because they can never violate it without triggering a social collapse.That is a powerful observation on how cycle (1) must condition our social behaviour and so our consciousness.Class Distortion of Cycle (1)A second social law — something perhaps astonishing to you — is that cycle (1) is itself a process. Its form changes. It develops.An obvious analogy is with Marx’s commodity which he takes as the economic “cell form” of capitalistic reproduction. But here we’ll delve into Marx’s deeper social thoughts. Borrowing his cell analogy, we take cycle (1) as the “[omni-potent] stem-cell form” of social reproduction.Every form of society is potentially present in cycle (1), but it requires the right conditions to generate a specific form. Those are conditions of ownership and control of the means whereby cycle (1) must operate. The determinism of all social formations arises inexorably out of ownership and control of the means of life — the substance of cycle (1).Take our Party Object and Declaration of Principles, both of which may puzzle you:The Party’s Object expresses the conviction that common ownership and democratic control of the means of social reproduction by the whole community is the foundation of a society that does reproduce itself directly according to reproductive cycle (1). That society is socialism.The Party’s Declaration of Principles expresses the conviction that [legal] ownership and [political] control of the means of social reproduction by a class of the whole community — the capitalist class — is the foundation for a society in which a part of that society has gained power over the rest of that society to distort reproductive cycle (1) in its own interest. The wealth-conservative nature of cycle (1) deterministically ensures that any distortion is necessarily performed in opposition to the distribution of wealth to the whole community. Capitalism is such a society.[We could stop here and agree that such a social formation should be immediately replaced by socialism whose conditions of ownership and control deterministically generate cycle (1). However, we continue.]Capital reproduction, the subject of Marx’s Capital, is the form taken by cycle (1) under capitalism — when the conditions of cycle (1) are owned and controlled by the capitalist class, and not by society.Our reproductive cycle is no longer the circulation of goods for social consumption but the circulation of capital for personal enrichment.Control of the substance of cycle (1) has permitted the capitalist class to impose a parasitic process upon cycle (1) — a parasitic process that is entirely dependent on cycle (1). Contrary to deceptive appearance, mighty capital is meekly subservient to the mightier social process it grossly distorts:

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capital-reproduction ≡      production → distribution               ➚ profit          ⇥ exchange  [= market]               ➘ consumption  ↻ (2)

The capitalist market, or the exchange phase of social reproduction, stands as a barrier between social distribution and social consumption, and will only let capital reproduction proceed if the social consumer is able to realize the capitalist’s capital for him. Otherwise there’s no social consumption. That’s a pretty nasty determinism, but it recurs everywhere daily world wide.Cycle (2) is a flagrant violation of our sociability. The capitalist market is a superimposed process for syphoning off wealth from cycle (1) for the capitalist class at the expense of society. What are we to make of the ethics and values adequate to maintaining this bourgeois class’s dominance?Your bourgeois-imbibed ethics and values are deterministically tainted. They must conform to the social parasitism expressed in cycle (2), which is the capitalist-modified form of the fundamental cycle (1), or else they wreck capitalist society. That’s some moral and intellectual determinism operating recurrently on you — as on us all.And you arrogantly seek to impose your bourgeois modes of thought and practice upon our socialist ones!Everything you’ve confidently come to lecture us on is morally and intellectually parasitic upon genuine social ethics and values. It is the reverse of what you take it to be because capital reproduction is a process of class robbery, the reverse of what you take our current social reproduction process to be.A clear example of parasitic social ethics and values are those formulated in religion and arrogated to the church from society. Church ethics and values are now exposed to general scrutiny because the needs of cycle (2) stand in opposition to those of the historical church. And they must succumb, along with the church’s practice, to the actual dominance of cycle  (2).Social RelationsThe most human of social laws is Marx’s observation that “Social being determines consciousness”. If you reflect that cycles (1) and (2) can only become autonomous if humans make them so, it becomes clear that our social relations — our jobs — are unconsciously carrying out cycle (2). To actuate these relations we must think them through — consciously or unconsciously. That’s how we generate our consciousness.Following Marx, we socialists strive to implement an alternative society where humanity consciously thinks through its social relations. That can only occur deterministically in a truly social society in which we all own and democratically control the substance of cycle (1). That society is socialism.The ethics and values that arise in such a society no longer assume the perverted forms they necessarily take under capitalism. They are directly social.

[twc]

ALB (Letter to Morning Star) wrote:

Leon Kuhn's cartoon (M Star March 23) has Marx writing: “Banks in capitalist society are institutions created for the systematic robbery of the people.”I have my doubts that Marx did actually say this.

Agreed.My assertion that the “the money system robs and rules the vast majority of the world” fully agrees with Adam’s and Bill’s critiques, despite its similar wording to the cartoon.I refer to the “money system” — the circulation of capital. The cartoonist refers to the banks — the lending of capital.Capital is created in the money system’s production and distribution phases, where concealed robbing and ruling prevail.Capital is realized in the exchange phase, where overt equality prevails. The banks are a necessary apparatus of the exchange phase.Banks merely facilitate the creation of capital. They do not create it. Their purpose is to make it possible to rob.Banks may, as now in Cyprus, rob the living daylights out of the working class as dire necessity within a money system in crisis.But, as Adam and Bill make clear, banks were not “created for the systematic robbery of the people” The money system does that for them. Banks only aid and abet it.

[twc]

steve colborn wrote:

…  the money system … every bit as pernicious as classical slavery.

The slavemaster had responsibility for his slave. The capitalist class has none.The money system spreads its influence over the world and its people, wrecking both in the process of extracting surplus value from them — without concern for them, but only for perpetuating capital as capital.It is thus more pernicious than classical slavery for it is fiendishly difficult for people to see through it  — to see the money system as the necessary vehicle of capital expansion — to comprehend how it functions to rob and rule the vast majority of the world, whom it will necessarily crush if they can't assist it expand or if they [even unconsciously or innocently] stand in the way of capital expansion.The money system has its basis in class ownership and control of the means of social reproduction.We end it by implementing our Object.

[twc]

Richard Seymour (Guardian) wrote:

To paraphrase Karl Marx on religion, the demand to abolish banking is a demand to abolish the state of affairs that needs banking.

   … is the demand to establish our Object.

[twc]

David Harvey Accuses Marx of “Arbitrary” Value AccountingDavid Harvey’s unprecedented video lectures on Marx’s Capital [http://davidharvey.org] contain deep flaws that arise from his serious doubts over Marx’s materialist conception of history and the foundational role that it plays in Capital.Nevertheless, Professor Harvey clearly describes the aspects of Marx’s Capital that trouble him beyond his capacity to understand them. He thereby simplifies the critical task of any reviewer of his course who understands how Marx grounds Capital on the materialist conception of history.In a Q&A session within lecture 8 for Volume 2, David Harvey reiterates his utter bafflement over why the labour associated with distribution is socially necessary, while that associated with exchange is not.Q&A — starting 53m:30s into the lectureQuestion [Interviewer]In Chapter 14 of Volume 2, Marx singles out “communication” and “transportation” as “special sectors” that have important knock-on effects upon the rest of the economy. How do you think about Marx’s approach to these two sectors?Answer [David Harvey]At first sight it seems a little strange.Marx says “most things that go on in the marketing process are not productive of value”.“They are necessary costs of circulation”.But, with transport and communication, Marx says “No, they add value”.It’s often seemed rather curious to me why he decided that they were productive of value, and retailing was not.Marx’s argument is that a commodity is not complete until it has arrived at market. [If it’s at the factory gate, it’s not complete because it hasn’t got to its market place yet.]On the other hand, there’s a separate kind of addition of value that has nothing to do with the original production process.It’s a complicated kind of argument he’s making here.I’m sometimes not sure it all adds up right.Still Poisonous Academic ContextWhat is striking about David Harvey’s noncommittal waffle — make up your mind, Prof. — is its serene academic unconcern over finding Marx’s value theory incomprehensible, and so nonchalantly disposable.The understandable context, of course, is that attacks on Marx’s value theory became a mark of academic pride after Baran and Sweezy (1966) resurrected Bortkewicz’s Marxian demolition accounting for [but actually against] Marx’s value theory, and attained their zenith when genial Meek and hostile Steedman (1977) turned sympathetic Sraffa (1960) diametrically against Marx’s value theory.Thanks to Andrew Kliman (2006), that context has been well and truly subverted, and these assaults upon Marx’s value theory should really have lapsed into history. Except they haven’t, and academic vestiges of them persist, with varying degrees of hostility [e.g. Steve Keen].Reproductive CyclesDavid Harvey’s confusion over Marx’s value accounting is best understood by reference to reproductive cycles (1) and (2), and their capitalist [mis]conception (3), quoted here from the previous post:

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social-reproduction ≡     production → distribution → consumption ↻ (1)

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capital-reproduction ≡      production → distribution               ➚ profit          ⇥ exchange  [= market]               ➘ consumption  ↻ (2)

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capitalist-class-false-consciousness ≡               ➚ profit            exchange  [= market]               ➘ consumption  ↻ (3)

The Materialist Conception of History is the Theoretical Foundation of CapitalOf course, David Harvey can’t formulate his bewilderment in terms of our cycles (1) and (2) because he has already dismissed the materialist conception of history as plain wrongheaded [“reductionist” in his terms] — an approach that prevents him from taking Marx’s claim seriously that the materialist conception of history is absolutely foundational.To us, Marx means exactly what he says in his famous Preface that the materialist conception of history is the “general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies”. If the materialist conception of history is flawed then so is most of Capital.David Harvey mistakenly confuses circulation [the transformation of capital through all its forms, the most obvious being the tangible ones of commodity and money] with distribution [the movement of commodities from their productive “source”, e,g. a mine, farm or factory, to their consumptive “sink”, the consumer].In his confusion, he blends distribution into exchange — an understandably capitalist misconception. Despite Marx, he misconceives capitalist reproduction from the narrow standpoint of the capital-reproductive sub-process exchange [cycle (3)].Capital-reproductive cycle (2) makes it abundantly clear that distribution facilitates [→] circulation, while exchange impedes [⇥] it. The two are not identical as he assumes. They are fundamentally antagonistic.Thus his limited viewpoint generates an implied accusation that Marx adopts “arbitrary” value accounting practices in Capital — a very serious charge indeed!While seemingly innocent, this episode is characteristic of the long line of ultimately mischievous anti-Marxian accusations that arise from confusion and misunderstanding.David Harvey well knows what Marx says, but arbitrarily selects those bits of Marx that appeal to his still bourgeois-clouded mind. Marx is all or nothing. Marx is a scientist who is never arbitrary. David Harvey, however, is. His own arbitrary selectivity is the onlie begetter of his claim of arbitrariness.Realizing Surplus Value is a Cost to the Capitalist — the Market is a Drain on ProductionThe capitalist market is not just a barrier to distribution — as we see from the circulation of capital, cycle (2) — but the labour and means of production consumed in setting up the market and realizing surplus value impose a gigantic drain on production. These two observations are proof positive that the market is a parasite imposed-upon and living-off an absolute social necessity — cycle (1).The economic cost of the gargantuan capitalist mechanism of exchange is something way beyond David Harvey’s comprehension, but it is plainly there for all to see in Marx. Value associated with the parasitic edifice of the capitalist market is negative — not “additive” in any way at all as David Harvey thinks, but rather “subtractive”. The market is — how shocking — a cost to capital.The reason, of course, lies in the deterministic necessity of social-reproductive cycle (1). That is fundamental to social reproduction. It is the inescapable invariant of social reproduction.Though capitalist-reproductive cycle (2) is autonomous and independent, it is ultimately subservient to the determinism of cycle (1). This subservience relays to cycle (2) the purely dependent determinism of a parasite that is ultimately bound to a genuinely deterministic process, which it must preserve in order to preserve itself.The determinism of the circulation of capital — the blather about “unseen hands” — the patently false assertions about “market efficiency” — derives solely from the necessity for a parasite to preserve its host.The proof that Marx sees the circulation of capital from the standpoint of cycle (2) is that he sees all labour and means of production associated with exchange [the market] as a cost to capital. Precisely the destructive role of a parasite.In other words, Marx sees the market as a necessary cost to capitalism. He sees it as destructive to value, and any labour or means of production involved in exchange [the market] as mathematically negative value, or value destroying, not creating.Since labour and means of production in the advanced capitalist world are increasingly associated with exchange [the market], a huge proportion of labour is now destructive of value. This is entirely so in capitalist terms.Marx’s “Socially Necessary” refers to Cycle (1) — Exchange is not Socially NecessaryWilliam Morris and Robert Tressall long ago showed that labour and means of production associated with exchange were unnecessary for social reproduction. But Marx had already shown that, in capitalist terms, they were essentially destructive of value — the very thing the capitalist seeks.If the costs of marketing are too high, distribution falters, and so production grinds to a halt. Society cannot live off exchange — only the capitalist class can. Society cannot live off the market — only the capitalist class can.The parasite must bear the burden of its parasitism. The capitalist must carry the cost of extracting surplus value. Capitalists don’t get to consume all the surplus value that arises in production and distribution because those pesky workers engaged in exchange must consume part of it. And, shockingly, their labour is not productive of surplus value, but effectively consumptive of it!The modern capitalist class employs a vast destructive labour force economically analogous to the drone Roman proletariat, but one that is actively engaged in extracting surplus value for the capitalist class, and therefore consuming what rightly belongs to the “deprived” capitalist class.What a degrading social system it is for workers of the world that it must of necessity employ the relatively well-to-do workers of the advanced capitalist world to exploit the relatively impoverished workers of the developing capitalist world to maintain the extremely well-to-do capitalist ruling class of the world in the luxury that these world-class parasites claim as a social — but actually their class — right!Re-stated at the Level of David Harvey’s DiscussionDavid Harvey naturally states the reproduction of capital in Marxian value terms as value-schema (4):  M — C ··· P ··· C′ — M′             (4)where M = value in its money form;  C = value in its commodity form;  P = the process of producing surplus value:    production → distribution    [as in cycle (1)];  M′ and C′ = money and commodity forms expanded with surplus value.As does Marx, David Harvey divides the value of the commodity C into socially-necessary means of production MP and socially-necessary labour power LP, value-schema (5):       MP   M — C ≺  ··· P ··· C′ — M′          (5)        LPWe’ll now make explicit the “socially-unnecessary” [or Marxian value destructive] means of production mp and labour power lp that are exclusively involved in changing the form of value from M to C and from C′ to M′. These constitute Marxian socially-unnecessary means of production and labour power, as expressed in value-schema (6):     mp    MP        mp′   M ⊀  — C ≺   ···  P ··· C′ ⊀  — M′    (6)      lp      LP       lp′The fact that exchange [or the market] and the means of production tied up in it [buildings, communications] and the labour devoted to it [retailing, marketing, advertising, stock-trading, and general swindling] are socially unnecessary is at the core of the case for replacing capitalism with socialism.Socially Necessary means/implies DeterminismMarx states point blank in Capital Volume 1 that political economists have “never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him”. This is the expression of determinism.The fact that the market — a necessary cost to society for capital to rob society — is generally perceived as being socially necessary is part of the protective illusion of the capitalist superstructure that must be unveiled.A socialist society based upon our Party Object will deterministically relate through socially necessary labour and means of production [cycle (1)], entirely free of any vestige of a market excrescence that the capitalist class now imposes upon it [cycle (2)] to enslave the rest of society in its narrow venal class interest.[The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Party.]

[twc]

OffenceThe term "drone" describes someone who takes a stance against working for society — nothing more; nothing less. It was originally coined to refer to the Roman proletariat by analogy with the non-working caste of the beehive.You repeatedly argue against socialist cooperation by claiming that our "drone mentality" makes us fit only for capitalist exploitation. "Drone consciousness" is your trump card against socialism — your apology for class rule; your license for capitalist drones to exploit proletarian ones; your justification for suspending working-class liberty; your rationalization of one man's social superiority over another in order to extract socially necessary labour out of him.You will retract this calumny against all mankind only after you are satisfied of its untruth. Then will you lift your veto and grant us permission to proceed towards socialism — an unlikely concession "on the available evidence".Your Religious SarcasmAn idle bread-and-circuses Roman proletarian — the profanum volgus [Horace] — could take moral comfort from your account of why unfree slaves needed to be whipped because every last Roman was, like him, an unregenerate drone.This proletarian drone belonged to the mob with the leisure to spread Christianity. Socially useless, they desired to be eternally so — saecula saeculorum.The "necessary exploitation of drones" took its sanctimonious form over that most-unfortunately un-Christian commercial need for Christians to rape, pillage and colonize the world. It helped the Southern slaveholder salve his conscience in the new nation founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. There are clear affinities between selective dronism and racism. You have illustrious predecessors.Dronism is always the universal justification for reactionary coercive powers over people — bringing back the barbarity of times considered long since past. People are just plain lazy! Employers and politicians use our low rates of productivity to curtail our benefits. There are numerous unspeakable instances of social barbarity on the grounds of dronism.If you now take offence at my use of the term drone, I can only conclude that you intended to offend us all. No-one resents his own considered pronouncements, served back to him, unless he's shocked by the picture of himself they reveal for everyone to see.You think this a caricature of you. No. It is the image you repeatedly paint of yourself. Tis your arrogant misfortune to have offered yourself up as exemplar of this anti-socialist category.RefusalI gave you every opportunity to distance yourself from the drone claim, but you stuck to it like a limpet. You re-affirmed that the insipid Roman proletarian's prejudice-against-work was your adopted capitalist proletarian mentality.Recall, I carefully asked you what social stance you'd take, not now under capitalism, but as you would under socialism. And you contemptuously shrugged your shoulders at me, snorting "I don't know."Since you choose to equivocate on this absolutely central point for socialism [as you well understand, since you consider this central point to be socialism's achilles heel, and therefore refuse point blank to commit yourself], I have no choice but to break your artificial deadlock, and decode your equivocation as a "non" on Roman patrician Cicero's sound advice about interpreting equivocations of your political variety — take pretence as rejection ["mihi simulatio pro repudiatione fuerit" Atticus XII, 51].You never intend to work under socialism. That leaves you with two alternative strategies for your personal survival:react against it — sabotage socialism. Not practically, of course, since that involves "hard work", but intellectually, as suits your Marat mind.sponge upon it — parasitize socialism. That seems more you. Less Roman proletarian; more English aristocrat!What are you going to be: a socialist saboteur or a socialist parasite?Saboteur — then our political swords are well drawn.Parasite — then you depend crucially for your survival on the survival of your host. [Beware, socialism swallows its parasites whole. For their benefit, as it turns out.]Socialist reproduction is easily understood by humans [unlike the mystifying capitalist process, which thrives as long as it veils its purpose of exploitation]. Socialist reproduction is able to serve the possibilities of human needs, free of privileged sectional class control. Its scope exceeds our present socially-limited imagination.[An open cooperative technical process, such as socialist reproduction, unlike the closed antagonistic process of capitalism, performs the open-collaboration miracle. Its clarity of vision and humanity of purpose turn reluctant drones into workers, automatically attracting them to participate.]In socialism, we are developing an adaptive system in which the dominating emergent phenomenon will no longer be socially oppressive like value and surplus value, but will be a finer, not yet properly understood, expression of our collective sociability after its curtailed possibilities have been cut loose from private greed and authoritarian control.IncommensurabilityThere can never be a suitable yardstick for comparing successive social formations like capitalism and socialism along the limited lines you seek. One social formation succeeds another because it solves a deep social crisis [not just an economic one] that is unsolvable in the former because it arises as an essential condition of the system's reproduction process. Such a social system has outlived its utility.The social transition happens not because the successor [or child process] is better than its predecessor [or parent process], but because the child can pass through its parent's impenetrable barrier to social progress. It does so because the child has its own different [actually more restrictive, because more determinate, but its consequences are more open] social reproductive basis that solves the crisis.Marx's reproductive social bases are social relations of ownership and control of the means of social reproduction. This is what his materialist conception of history is about. Read Marx's famous Preface, which puts it far better than I can. That's also why we read his Capital indirectly for the "evidence" you seek. That's why our Party Object is precisely as it is. Ownership and control of social reproduction is the basis of everything social — the basis of us as individuals.Different social formations are incomparable because their social reproductive bases are different. Social attributes are incommensurable across different social bases, as is the case across all dialectical transitions.Thomas Kuhn pointed out that the same incommensurability occurs in science. Aristotelian, classical, relativistic and quantum world views necessarily deal with similar phenomena [appearances] but interpret them quite differently within differently-based scientific frameworks [paradigms]. These frameworks, like Marxian social formations, smash barriers to progress by solving deep obstructive crises within their parent frameworks.Consequently, comparison along your default bourgeois lines is meaningless, because your terms and connotations are bound to incommensurable systems. This renders your whole enterprise meaningless. It is impossible to cast it in any meaningful form in your terms.There is little further to discuss about the evidence or lack-of-evidence you seek for socialism, or the problems of the actuality of socialism, if it's never going to happen or, if instituted, it will never work because of the prevalence of human drones. But I'm happy to discuss the evidence in another post, even though your stance renders this pointless.ScalabilityDid it ever occur to you that capitalist scaling is hampered all the way up by social [not technical] antagonisms at every conceivable level — political and economic? In hostile capitalist circumstances, scaling is a miracle. It should never work through lack of cooperation.The solution to this apparent impossibility is our underlying social interdependence. Capital, being parasitic upon it, cannot destroy our social interdependence. Its expansion depends crucially upon our sociability.Our social interdependence is the secret to why capitalistic antagonism at every level scales into pseudo cooperation. It is only in times of war that our social interdependence finally ceases to hold the edifice together.It is not difficult to conceive how this pseudo cooperation [or its collapse] is a potent source of the most amazing rationalizing ideology. Before one gets carried away with the cooperative wonders of capitalist scaling, it is sobering to recall that it rests on armed force from the small scale up to the global. Of course capital scales coercion! That's what it's all about. [The technical problem is trivial by comparison.]Socialist interdependence rests not on coercion but on cooperation. It will remove the barriers to sociability thrown up in the interests of private capital. This will happen irrespective of unimaginative toy algorithms preconceived on unrealistic capitalist assumptions.Satis satisque.

[twc]

Quote:

Rather than dealing with particular issues that I raise and explaining why they are invalid or misguided….

I'm working through your contributions from their start in the Comments forum.I owe you the courtesy of first comprehending your political standpoint — the context within which you formulate your political ideas about socialism.

Quote:

… you instead claim that I am some kind of brain washed drone.

Not "brain washed". Materialists recognize that everyone succumbs to capitalist ideology to various extents.Here's the evidence for your own declaration that capitalism has turned you into an anti-social "drone":"… still requires people to choose to spend a couple of days working rather than not; people can be selfish arseholes, maybe socialism will change people but I don't want to bank on it.""… many jobs require people [to] spend years of their lives training: doctors; or engineers; or well anything..""… mechanism for solving the 'I don't want to do that shitty job!' problem""How do you get people to work hard on boring/unglamorous/hard jobs of which there will still be many?"… As someone who has done hard labour I am fairly sure that many people's short answer is "Someone else can do it ."How then do you plan to spend your social time on Earth — lazing away anti-socially in category 1?

Quote:

It is worse, however, that you persistently attribute views to me that I don't hold and have never expressed.

Not necessarily expressed explicitly. You reveal much implicitly. "Hard work" for you is a "work ethic". How capitalism maims us!Work should be the joy of life — but is so now only for a lucky few. Your explicit horror of "hard work" helps us comprehend your inability to support socialism. But we'll examine that anon.

Quote:

You have not bothered to understand my issues or reply to them.

Don't worry.

[twc]

Unconvinced and UnconvincableYou are a person not inspired by much social confidence or social drive. Capitalism has turned you, as it has turned so many people, into a social drone, unwilling to help, unwilling to solve problems, and ever ready to obstruct those who are. So you pose social problems and demand social solutions at the adequate level of a dispirited wrecker, unwilling to be roused to help their fellows.SocietyIn human society, everything without exception depends on our common sociability — our language, our goals, our institutions, our relationships. We are in this together. Together we must produce and reproduce society in order to produce and reproduce ourselves.Antagonistic capitalist society, where for you "life under capitalism is not hell", can only survive and reproduce by milking our common sociability. It does so within a class division that arises naturally out of class ownership of the means whereby society must survive and reproduce itself.Your dismissal of our sociability is based upon the perverted form it necessarily assumes under capitalism, where our sociability is split at the most fundamental level of social reproduction. There is nothing more fundamental for us than the necessity for society to reproduce itself.Society and our sociability are split because capital demands it. They are split to serve capital, and they must continue to be split as long as capital controls our social being because capitalist social reproduction is a necessarily self-replicating process.Our social existence is thus reproduced as split, so long as we allow capitalism to exist — so long as we allow it wreck our lives.Capital's socially necessary perversion of our sociability — the consciousness of our split social being — creates a social hell for most of us. A hell, whose hellishness increases as capital finds it harder to expand at our expense.Capitalism may yet stoke its hell fires sufficient to convince even you — let alone the four billion social beings already frying in them. Your acquiescence in capitalism — for all its faults — succeeds in transforming you into a socially callous drone without your even trying.Once humanity at large sees capitalism for the social hell it actually is, and must continually reproduce itself to be, it will throw off its capitalist yoke. It will no longer let a class own and control the means of life for all. It will ensure that its social being reproduces undivided sociability.With common ownership and democratic control of the means of social living, there will be no fundamental division of our sociability that constantly arises directly out of the absolutely necessary conditions of our social being. On the contrary, the commonality of these necessary conditions of life becomes itself the necessary condition for the survival and reproduction of our common humanity — our sociability.Our Party Object is the sought-for self-perpetuating social unity. It is the socialist analogue of capitalist self-perpetuating social division.We will then be free to embrace our common sociability as something natural, something not sundered by class control over the very foundation of our existence.Your Capitalist Economics For you, economics is "the study of the allocation of scarce resources, and that's how the Nobel Committee understands it too"!As such, your economics is an artificial non-science. Its problem domain does not apply to actual human society [this is acknowledged by its domain founder, Nobel laureate Debreu]. Its "scientific" principles have been demonstrated to be false [this is openly acknowledged by its guru, Nobel laureate Samuelson] (see Keen "Debunking Economics").Your economic "science" cannot be and never will be used by actual practitioners in commerce [this is commonly acknowledged in the trade]. Take cunning Merton and Scholes, whose spectacular losses stampeded the Federal Reserve into saving Wall Street from the havoc wreaked by their Nobel Prize winning scheme awarded for its "infallibility".You might consider applying your "reluctance to be convinced by the evidence" to the misconceptions of bourgeois economics Nobel laureates.Much Nobel work is "phenomenological" science — practical "science" that is acknowledged to be disconnected from the stupefying theoretical "science" taught by the universities, and tacitly ignored by the market.You might also consider applying your reluctance to be convinced to bourgeois economic "theory" itself. Andrew Kliman ["Reclaiming Marx"] has conclusively demonstrated that bourgeois economic "theory" is irredeemably flawed in both its conservative Walrasian neo-Classical General Equilibrium formulation and in its radical Sraffian neo-Ricardian formulation:The theory describes physical relationships [not social ones], and so inevitably has no choice but to identify profit with surplus physical product [like the physiocrats]; whereas even a five-year old knows that over-abundance of physical product lowers prices;Its determinism is simultaneous [either an instantaneous Walrasian auction or Sraffian simultaneous linear equations]; whereas capital's determinism is essentially temporal, with production, where capital is expanded, separated by distribution from exchange, where capital is realized [at least in intent] within the market — the only state of capitalist "production as a whole" that the bourgeois economist considers.[In passing, Keen's rabid Sraffian reservations on Marx are revealed as pure drivel after Kliman].Your willing embrace of bourgeois economics leaves you bereft of science, of consistency, of reality. Only economic theology remains — a self-affirming apologetics — and even here its priesthood prefer 18th century free-market delusionism.This then is the apologetic economic platform from which "you" confidently launch "your" skeptical assault on those of the Party working to expose the capitalist economic deception and to overthrow a system of society that needs to rely on such dishonest support to continue robbing us of our common sociability. And you confidently embrace it.Fancy you, who "tries to support things based on expected outcomes", falling hook, line and sinker for something whose only expected outcome is to bind us in deeper bondage. [As an aside, that bourgeois term you parade as your gold-standard criterion, "expected outcomes", strikes me with terror as the language of capitalist coercive control over labour in the workplace.]Your economics is their economics, not ours. Your thought is their thought, not ours. Yours is an instance of Marxian "social being determining consciousness" — your own. We have established where you are coming from.

[twc]

What you Don't [or Won't] Understand

TR wrote:

this is not an academic discourse.

Academic trivia are not the question. I winced at your academic sneer at "social constructs", given that the case for socialism is based on Marx's scientific [non academic] insight that "social being determines consciousness".No socialist is haughtily superior to "social constructs". I took your main argument seriously, not academically, but as science.I saw you increasingly depicting yourself as the scientific martyr. A pale shadow of Homer's noble Cassandra — the truthful prophetess fated forever to be disbelieved. The seer who now warns against humanity uniting itself under socialism, prognosticating that such reckless mixing of the "races" will be the Trojan Horse that destroys the grand illusion of cooperative humanity.If you are equally serious about our inability to achieve our Object, without first conducting scientific research into "race", your genuine concerns for socialism need to be addressed.So I confronted your motivating definition of "race" and found it to be not only non-scientific but to be essentially anti-scientific.Your definition assumes "race" but, as you formulate it, it is incapable of proving "race". On your definition, "race" can't be demonstrated scientifically to exist in the "material" sense you want it to.On the contrary, I see your definition as showing no concern for anything other than establishing the existence of "race" as such to wield it for unspecified purposes. To that extent, as far as attaining socialism is concerned, your definition is merely "academic".

TR wrote:

I should certainly be in a better position to respond to you if you would convey your thoughts in clear English

I'm happy to walk you through, step by step, whatever unclear English confuses you.

TR wrote:

rather than wrapping yourself in academic terminology and…well…sesquipedalian rumination.

Don't you dare pull the ruse that you can't understand most of what I'm saying. Don't you dare shift the blame onto me. You want analysis, and it's what you've got.Don't you dare dodge the many issues on the grounds of their being incomprehensible to you. Make the effort to understand them, just as you demand that we make the effort to understand you.

TR wrote:

 However I suspect you're just being facetious here 

Oh no, I'm not. You are not sneaking out of science by your own convenient academic quibble about my critique amounting to inconsequential facetiousness.

TR wrote:

You start by asserting that my definition of race defines race "in terms of itself."

I explained to you that its circularity doesn't necessarily bother, if you could explain to me how to terminate it. I believe that you can't without violating your inviolable metaphysical stance that "race expresses itself".For you, "race" is expressed by that which expresses "race". Your circle remains vicious — circulus vitiosus.

TR wrote:

This [that my definition of "race" is circular] could be true,

You concede that your definition "could be" circular. But, as is consistent with your behaviour, you twist your limited "could be" concession into a full-scale attack. You now discover that "most" definitions are circular anyhow!

TR wrote:

I would suggest the very definition of a 'Jew' is recursive.

So for you "a Jew is a Jew". Recursive and forever.You really are unconsciously insensitive or consciously inflammatory. Last time you chose "sub-populations of other human populations" and "subject population". I am not prepared to fuel this line of argumentation.Merely lingering over your provocative example is enough to reveal your signature cunning stamped all over it. It's another instance of smuggling into the discussion a tacitly "agreed-upon" instance of "race". This strikes me as consistent with all of your "deployments of racism" in practice.What you Do [or Choose to] UnderstandPosition StatementThe Position Statement on "Biological Aspects of Race" is filed on the official AAPA website underHome > About > Position statements > Biological Aspects of RaceFollow the parent linkHome > About > Position statements to the association's collected position statements  http://www.physanth.org/association/position-statementsThis page is headed Position statements.You originally pontificated on this statement's status. I generously assumed that you first must have bothered to check the obvious facts.Since the actual status of this position statement stares you in the face on the official AAPA website, it is evident to me that a preconceived idea of yours consistently blinds your vision. You consistently see [or fail to see] exactly what you want to see [or fail to see].Since you confidently attribute the term "Position Statement" only to me and not to the AAPA, I take this as revealing just how shoddily you are prepared to operate in defence of "race". You may be stunned to learn that others just don't make things up as you allege — that their scholarship is not as cavalier with the facts as you incorrectly assumed mine to be.Do you still assert that this Position Statement is not one of the AAPA's position statements?

TR wrote:

twc makes a rather extravagant claim that I, "…question the political motives, and so the scientific integrity, of some of the great theoreticians of evolution and anthropology,…"scientists are human and will sometimes exhibit bias in their public representations, especially when those representations are explicitly designed to serve a political purpose in that they represent the views of a body of scientists, as opposed to a single scientist or a single research unit whose findings and summative conclusions would necessarily be more rigorous.

Setting aside your waffle about scientists being human — and setting aside your academic word "summative" which I needed to look up, and strikes me as inappropriately teaching-oriented rather than research-oriented — you perform a neat double pike and unintentionally support my claim about your assertion that scientists will distort the facts to serve a political purpose.Science is based on trust and integrity. You are here questioning scientific integrity. This is almost word-for-word identical to the strategic assault mounted by climate skeptics upon the political motives and scientific integrity of climate scientists.You will never comprehend how I winced when I read the names of those scientists whose integrity you unintentionally impugned. You were not to know!Again, consistently adopting the "race" vision leads you where angels fear to tread.

TR wrote:

This is another example of yours that I must learn from in order to deploy "race" conceptually.

[For your benefit…  Thomas Kuhn pointed out that science is learned by emulation — performing classical experiments and solving classical problems — in order to discover how to act and think for yourself, consistently within a scientific framework. These are his original "paradigm" examples that characterize scientific practice within his scientific Paradigms.]I am following your "paradigm" examples that your definition encourages me to follow in order to learn how to "deploy race" in your "racial" Paradigm. My intention was to let you glimpse just how your encouraged "deployment of race" appears to others, in case you really are a genuine enquirer who honours scientific integrity.I don't believe that you comprehend the simple social necessity for scientific integrity.You want to divide people — so you emphasize love of one's own kind. But "race" always expresses itself as hatred of the other kind. Scientific integrity would consider that.You emphasize commonality only so far — just as Jefferson does in his otherwise brave words "we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal", in which he stops short of exceeding the bounds of a slaveholder's economic standpoint [one in which white owners are equal and so are his black slaves].You don't want integration — so you emphasize like-minded people living in communal harmony. But "race" always expresses itself as ghetto, as segregation, as communal discord. Scientific integrity would consider that.In your noble wants, you suppress the negative. Yours are not Just-So stories, but Just-So-Far stories. You seem to be ignorant of scientific integrity, or you are consciously devious.

TR wrote:

No-one on this thread has been able to state coherently what a 'racist' is if 'race' does not exist.

You really are obtuse or devious.Take the equally spurious analogy of a spiritualist  "So what's a spiritualist if spirits don't exist?"These academic questions only make scientific sense if rephrased in general terms: "what's a social construct that asserts a basis, where no such basis exists?"In your case, "what's a social construct that asserts a biological basis, where none exists?".By haughtily sneering at "social constructs" and by flatly denying "biological determinism", you have already burnt your bridge. You have nowhere scientific to go.You don't know what "race" is yourself. You can't define it coherently.You should at least have bothered to look into the science. But you, someone proven to be inadequate to the task, take it upon yourself to favour us all with your own socialism-saving definition of "race". Why should any socialist take you seriously?While preferring your own non-scientific brew to existing science, you impetuously challenge scientists who have spent lifetimes engaged in more than just academic musings over the bleeding obvious like yourself.Like a fanatic, you naively flourish your trump card in the abstract academic construction that "race exists because racism exists". You don't take science seriously. You rely entirely on academic  artifice.I gave you an opportunity to draw your own conclusion from a simple syllogism at the end of my previous post. Its two propositions [major and minor premises] derive directly out of your own definition. I refuse to hold your hand and walk you through its conclusion.

[twc]

Are we ready to go?I'm about to start reading Rubin up to Chapter 3 for discussion starting 26 January.Anybody else in?

[Author]

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