Young Master Smeet
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LBird,erm. I'm sorry, I'm lost now. I explained:Idealism: [object] is in your mind.Materialism: [object] is outside your mind.Historical Materialism: [Object] is your mind.How's about that? Like a line drawn first into the shape of, say, a man, and then a house, and then a cat. One continuous line. It's the same line manifesting as several different things.
Yes, capitalist and workers consciousnesses are of the same substance, and part of the same reality, which is transformed into various different elements by the operation of history and through its interaction with itself. We are all parts of one system.
SP, well, ask yourself, if the establishment kept swearing blind that the sun was green and sunlight harmful, would you believe them? or, would you find that your lived experience, and your need to go out into the sunlight would contradict them? I'm suggesting that indoctrination and ideological maipulation wouldn't work if working class people didn't find that reality as explained to them (and how they identify themselves) worked. As EP Thompson noted in the making of the English Working Class, the working class is not the passive object of the capitalists. Durham Miners fought hard to create the wages system and a free market in labour, for example.
Lbird, no, I'm the meatbot. But, lets try.Idealism: the page can only exist inside your mind.Materialism: the page exists outside your mind.Historical Materialism: the page and your mind are the same thing.
Lbird wrote:To the idealist, there is no limit to their creative originality in their drawing of a picture of knowledge. They can draw freehand on a blank canvas, and any individual artist can freely improvise, with no external framework to impose a pre-existing structure upon their individual musings and scribbles.That's not idealism. Many idealists, such as Hegel would suggest that the pad is numbered as well, except that the dots are ideas. A dualist would say there are two pads that somehow match each other, and a materialist says the dots exist outside the human mind.
SP,Sorry, I was ansswering:
Quote:I was hoping you would be able to provide some possible analysis to the reasons why milions of workers have conciously chosen to reject the socialist case?and in a hurry, but I think my answer is plain enough.
I remember in March 1998 the Guardian ran a leader suggesting William Morris would have approved of Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine's luxurious rennovation of his official apartments.
Guardian Nonsense wrote:FOR THE baying members of the hunt, the pursuit of Lord Irvine over the cost of re-decorating his state apartments has been rollicking good fun. The no -expense-spared refurbishment has given the impression that his Lordship rivals Marie Antoinette in terms of political sensitivity. He would certainly struggle to win any awards for PR. But is that such a bad thing? Those pillorying the Lord Chancellor tend also to be those shedding crocodile tears for the dumbing down of politics. One of the main criticisms of Westminster is that it is awash with on-message automatons and short on characters. Well, the Lord Chancellor is certainly a character….In fact, Lord Irvine is merely following a noble tradition that dates back more than a century to Labour's roots in William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. Morris saw socialism as the contrast between beauty and ugliness, and between the worker as artisan craftsman and the worker as slave to the machine. In an era of mass output, it is good the Government is helping high-quality small firms to thrive.For anyone who has read Morris' journalism, i doubt very much he would have had anything but baying venom for Lord Irvine.
SP,Imagine if the broadcast media, all the university experts and a substantial number of people kept on insisting that the sun was green, and that it was impossible to see in the daylight.Therein lies my answer.
LBird wrote:Furthermore, even the Leninists at least pretend that, after the revolution, they'll be able to develop workers to understand epistemology, that workers have abilities denied to them by the present society. Even Stalin brought the Russian workers and peasants on educationally, ensuring most had access to the means of developing themselves…And that was Leninism's greatest sin, the belief that you could have the revolution before the working class were intellectually capable of understanding and wanting socialism and could then 'raise their culture'. The point is that teh workers today have the capacity to run their own lives, and run capitalism from top to bottom, in the interests of the capitalist class. As Charlie said in these infamous theses, philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. A working capacity to change the world is what is required.
AFAICS, and I'll end it here, is you want to call materialism idealism-materialism while referring to the same thing everyone else does when they call it materialism. I couldn't care less what the name is. The upshot is that ideas are subject to necessity, and are part of the unfurling of a singular universe without dualism.If the workers try and maintain that Unca' Charlie was some sort of dualist, they're wrong (whetehr or not they vote on it).
My philosophy is trombonism. The world is made of trombones, and the only stuff in the world is trombones. We are trombonebots. There is no intereaction between trombones and catfish, there are only trombones, and thus no priority. Catfishism-trombonism is absurd.
Matter=Ideas. Ideas=Matter.Materialist monism says there is no ideal, only actual stuff. I'll go with stuffbots. Ideabots is ridiculous.
Quote:When you call your philosophy 'materialism', instead of the more accurate 'idealism-materialism'.But, I've told you this before. You don't read.I suppose I would have previously replied that I am not separating them, because I am denying any independent thing called ideas, they are part and parcel with matter. I reject "inkism-bauxiteism" precisely because it does separate the two things, and suggests a form of dualism.
SP,we have the evidence that millions have received our leaflets, seen our adverts, etc. They may not have read deeply, but that would only be indicative of their rejections from the get go. Their ideas are well developed, and we have to respect that decision, rather than assuming 'Ah, but if they only heard what we have to tell them!' Indeed, they often have quite complex and well developed political ideas. yes, they are misinformed, and subject to a bombardment of propaganda, but they are not brainwashed or conmpletely subsumed by ideology, as the Leniniss would have us believe. Our working assumption has to be that they are rational agents, who can run their own lives, and see working within the system as it is as their best option.
LBird,pardon me, but whn did I separate matter and mind? I've said that mind is made of the sam stuff as the rocks, and is material and part of necessity (and is thus not some pale reflection or spearate stuff that mirrors or copies the real world, but is in fact the real world itself). I was merely pointing out, again,why I don't use the term Fishism-Sodiumism like you do (or whatever it is you say, i forget). I just use spoonism because at the very least it suggestion of rejection an anthropocentric univers and reflects the fact that there is only blancmange.
