Young Master Smeet
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William Morris wrote:“No, I do not,” said he, “and I will tell why; it is each man’s business to make his own work pleasanter and pleasanter, which of course tends towards raising the standard of excellence, as no man enjoys turning out work which is not a credit to him, and also to greater deliberation in turning it out; and there is such a vast number of things which can be treated as works of art, that this alone gives employment to a host of deft people. Again, if art be inexhaustible, so is science also; and though it is no longer the only innocent occupation which is thought worth an intelligent man spending his time upon, as it once was, yet there are, and I suppose will be, many people who are excited by its conquest of difficulties, and care for it more than for anything else.
and:
Quote:“You are right, neighbour,” said he. “Although there are so many, indeed by far the greater number amongst us, who would be unhappy if they were not engaged in actually making things, and things which turn out beautiful under their hands,—there are many, like the housekeepers I was speaking of, whose delight is in administration and organisation, to use long-tailed words; I mean people who like keeping things together, avoiding waste, seeing that nothing sticks fast uselessly. Such people are thoroughly happy in their business, all the more as they are dealing with actual facts, and not merely passing counters round to see what share they shall have in the privileged taxation of useful people, which was the business of the commercial folk in past days. Well, what are you going to ask me next?”And just on democracy:
Quote:“Certainly,” said he; “how else could we settle them? You see in matters which are merely personal which do not affect the welfare of the community—how a man shall dress, what he shall eat and drink, what he shall write and read, and so forth—there can be no difference of opinion, and everybody does as he pleases. But when the matter is of common interest to the whole community, and the doing or not doing something affects everybody, the majority must have their way; unless the minority were to take up arms and show by force that they were the effective or real majority; which, however, in a society of men who are free and equal is little likely to happen; because in such a community the apparent majority is the real majority, and the others, as I have hinted before, know that too well to obstruct from mere pigheadedness; especially as they have had plenty of opportunity of putting forward their side of the question.”And, (finally, it took me a while to find the real quote I was looking for):
Quote:For the only claim he has to the title of a ‘man of genius’ is that his capacities are irrepressible; he finds the exercise of them so exceedingly pleasant to him that it will only be by main force that you will prevent him from exercising them[…]What I have said of the man of genius being compelled to work by his genius applies to all superior workmen in greater or less degree, and disposes of the need of a bribe. You need not bribe the superior workman to be superior, for he has to work in any case (we must take that for granted), and his superior work is pleasanter, and indeed easier, to him than the inferior work would be: he will do it if you allow him to. But also if you had the need you would not have the power to bribe, except under a system which admitted of slavery — ie., tormenting some people for the pleasure of others. Can you bribe him to work by giving him immunity from work? or by giving him goods that he cannot use? But in what other way can you bribe him when labour is free and ordinary people will not stand being compelled to accept degradation for his benefit? No, you will have to depend on his aptitude for his special work forcing him into doing it; nor will you be disappointed in this. Whatever difficulties you may have in organizing work in the earlier days of Socialism will not be with the specialists, but with those who do the more ordinary work; though as regards these, setting aside the common machine-work, the truth of the matter is that you can draw no hard and fast line between the special workman and the ordinary one. Every workman who is in his right place — that is, doing his work because he is fit for it — has some share in that ‘genius’ so absurdly worshipped in these latter days. The genius’ is simply the man who has a stronger speciality and is allowed to develop it; or, if you please, has it so strongly that it is able to break through the repressing circumstances of his life, which crush out those who are less abundantly gifted into ‘a dull level of mediocrity’. It is a matter of degree chiefly..https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1886/commonweal/09-genius.htm
Lbird, well, the problem is 'from each according to their ability' isn't it? Elite is a relative term, so no matter how high the baseline average of the group is if someone is a little bit better, they are in the elite. By mere fractions of a second, the average footballer playing in the premier league would thump daylights out of the best players of 1902. The point, though, of socialism isn't to make everyone the same, but to ensure that no-one has a material interest separate from the community, or, more particularly, to be able live better than everyone else just because they are good at one thing. Stephen Hawking would be a terrible football player, a worse binman. Wayne Rooney would be terrible at molecular biology. People have different competences. Socilism won't change that, in fact it would encourage it.These differences will exist, whether you vote for them or not (there will be room in any system, even by accident, for someone to be better informed than their neighbour).Lets try for comprimise: would juries do you, a bit of sortition to decide which theories are favoured and deserve a bit more research?Anyway, you till need to account for from each according to their ability. Your turn.
So, we're agreed that human beings produce knowledge, and that is an active process that occurs under historically specific conditions. We're agreed that in a democratic society people need to be informed and have free access to information, and that everyone will contribute according to their ability. From here we may diverge, but I think this is a problem you need to resolve. The more able members of the community, whom you label an elite willl necessarilly consume more data (to each according to their needs) and scientific resources (including study time), they will develop new propositions, which will enter into the social arena for debate and discussion, as a minority seeking to become the majority view. I think you need to account for why that will not happen if you want to remove the elite, with or without votes.
DJP did answer that point, because peopel have used idealism and materialism in consistent ways over long periods so the terms have an accrued historical meaning. Because Marx and Engels both described what they were talking about as Materialism (even if only a species of materialism) and ultimately for my own part because I want to emphasise the thingness of thought that it has, kind of, a gravity and dimensions and is subject to causation (and that the universe would exist if there were no humans in it and no minds at all).I'm fine with you calling it idealism-materialism, so long as you and the rest of us realise you're just using that to desribe Marxian Materialism.
Just taking a quick skim through Engel's Feuerbach, and I can't see whre he reintroduce dualism, for instance:
Fred wrote:The old materialism never put this question to itself. Its conception of history, in so far as it has one at all, is therefore essentially pragmatic; it divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious. hence, it follows for the old materialism that nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history, and for us that in the realm of history the old materialism becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal driving forces which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces. This inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideal driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes.whilst he recognises ideas existence, that is because, correctly he states
Fred wrote:Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds.Liekwise, this provides interesting basis for cultural materialism:
Fred wrote:Still higher ideologies, that is, such as are still further removed from the material, economic basis, take the form of philosophy and religion. Here the interconnection between conceptions and their material conditions of existence becomes more and more complicated, more and more obscured by intermediate links. But the interconnection exists.(the notion of further remove is something overlooked by the more boorish vulgar communists/materialists who would try to link everything to the daily motions of the stock market like some sort of orrery. Whereas, in fact, intervening ideological causes account for he development of many cultural/ideological facets (and I note Freddy seems to have come across yet another meaning of the word ideology here). AFAICS what he says here is consistent with the German Ideology & Marx' Theses on Feuerbach…
Yes, ultimately monism is monism, and a consistent idealist monism is effectively the same as materialism (so long as we are all just ideas living in the mind of God, or somesuch, and the dream world is consistant in its rules, exists exterior to the minds of individuals and cannot be altered by thought alone), but what I am not is a dualist, ideas and mind do not exist on some other plane, but are part and parcel of the same stuff as everything around us. That is, the crossing has no stripes.At a cognitive level, I do believe that what we call the self is largely an illusion to give linguistic expression and justification to the processes and lived biological experience of the meatbots. That is not to deny the role (entirely social in character) of the processes, discourses and algorithms that ideas are a pat of in unfurling that lived experience among socialised meatbots.That is, discussion, education and propaganda are part of the material conditions for creating socialism and socialist consciousness and understanding (without which socialism cannot happen). That doesn't just pop into the minds of workers out of the sky, but only through conscious discussion (although we do see the same ideas respawned independently, arising from the application of discussion among different sets of workers to their common conditions).
Ideas are material and are subject to causation, that's what I got from the German Ideology. And, as I've said what you alone in the world call Idealism-Materialism is just what I'd call materialism. Use the shorter name, save electrons.I'd accept the fact of the outcome of a vote of my peers, but I wouldn't necessarilly agree that what they said was the truth was so (and I'd reserve the right to campaign to overturn the vote, too). Also, you seem to be implicitly accepting my point about the minority of scientists being right against the majority. This seems to me to validate my point about the vote being unnecessary for finding truth.As I've noted before, by the material process of mathematics alone, Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter (this has been confirmed by evidence).Interestingly, this article (below)http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1014/061014-john-okeefeSeems to give some grist to the rationalist mill, since our brain structure does seem to provide some a priori structures to things like spatial positioning (also it's a further fillip to materialism, as we do seem to be chasing down a good healthy reductionism and proving that the meatbots do think with their grey goo).And, BTW, obviously in socialism the Nobel Prize would be voted on by the entire community and there wouldn't be a financial component.
No, last time I talked about tides cvoming in, I ws asking what would happen if a socialist commonwealth voted to stop the tides? i.e. I was trying to elicit from you a further explanation of what you are talking about through a concrete example, either you can point out the flaw in my quwestion, or take me through how the tides will stop. As you said, any practitioner of science must be able to explain it to an ordinary person…More to the point, i've also asked you whetehr we can all do the same experiment, the point of that question was that we cannot all do the same experiment, and that information must flow through society: I have never been to India, I don't know if it exists, but some people tell me so and I have no reason to distrust them.What I have said is that I, like my comrades, will make up my own mind based on evidence and testimony: you have to accept this is necessary, since new propositions must be put to the socialist commonwealth by a minority (prior to it becoming a majority through a vote), ele there can be no new knowldge. I'd accept the verdict of the vote, but campaign to overturn it if I thought it was wrong, as is the right of a minority in a democracy, n'est pas?
Quote:In this case, the members here are arguing that, even after a revolution, they won't accept that the class as a whole should determine the meaning of the 'material'. That is, your party members are arguing that they, either as individuals or as a party, have access to a means of generating social knowledge that is either not available to the mass of workers, or that the mass of workers can't be trusted with.Erm, no, they're arguing there will be no working class. As to what is material, the answer is everything. Including love, poetry and sex. No one is arguing that we have access to special knowledge, far from it (in my case, the exact opposite, I'm arguing it is through ongoing discussion that we come to know the world, and no vote can nor should stop that discussion).
OED wrote:Idealism: Philos. Any of various views according to which reality is ultimately in some sense mental or mind-dependent; any of various views according to which the objects of knowledge or perception are ideas (in various senses: see idea n.); more generally, any view opposed to some form of realism or materialism.Materialism: Philos. The theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications; (more narrowly) the theory or belief that mental phenomena are nothing more than, or are wholly caused by, the operation of material or physical agencies.Dualism:Philos. The doctrine that mind and matter exist as distinct entities; opposed to idealism and materialism.Lbird wrote:Any worker I'm speaking to in the future will be told that the SPGB does not want democratic methods to be adopted by the proletariat in its control of the means of production (which includes, obviously, science)And if you direct them to this discussion, they will see members of the party committed to democratic control of the means of production, and to the democratic organisation of science, and they will wonder why you are saying something that is untrue (even more, they might question how you know what the SP stands for, since by your own light, without a democratic vote, you cannot have any knowledge).I am indeed arguing for democracy within society and science. So it would be untrue for you to tell any workers that you meet the contrary. And I'm sure you would not want to say untrue things to the class.At a philosophical level, never mind the practical, one question you have run away from is what happens to truth prior to a vote. Necessarilly, the new propositions to be adopted will be moved by a minority (and how are they convinced to even begin proposing new theses?) that will become the majority. Democracy does not resolve the epistemological question, there must always be a point at which the minority is right against the majority.
SP,What the party poll said was, in effect, that conference is to be obeyed, Conference has since changed its instructions. Nothing untoward there. If the party poll had said "the form of name shall be the Fishcakes Party" then we'd need a party poll to change the name (or form of name), as it is it said "please abide by a conference decision". A little lawyerly, I know. Some people may care, many do not.
The party is made up of proletarians standing under a musty banner. We are members of the working, class, part of the working class movement, inextricably, and addressing ourelves to the working class as a whole. We organise ourselves separately from reformist movements for clarity of ideas, and to enable us to be an exclusively working class orientated organisation. I'm prepared to say we disagree with Chuck on this one. Our interests are not different from the working class' but certainly different from other working class parties that are not socialist.
But you don't. Whenever you're met with an objection, or a proposition, you just pick up the ball or resort to ad hominem. In fact, ad hominem is your default position, you ignore the words and play (what you imagine to be) the man.If everytime someone asks you what you mean by democracy and science you accuse them of being conservatives calling for practical examples, you don't help us understand what you're saying. AFAICS we simply don't understand what you're trying to say. tehre's clearly something useful there, but it's not coming across.AFAICS your 'Idealism-Materialism' neologism is just exactly what I understand by materialism, I just don't use the same, slightly otiose, name for it.
I have to say I have never actually read Engels on science, I'm basing my contribution to this debate almost entirely on The German Ideology and the description of materialism there, and Theses on Feuerbach (plus a bit of general philosophy I've picked up off the floor).I mean, also, I don't disagree with the philosophical principle of democratic organisation of science (indeed, that's what I've been arguing for), our disagreements are entirely practical (theory and practice anyone?) AFAICS.Personally, by the way, i have debated with free marketees, and found the process useful. The whole point of debate is to start from a point of disagreement. But then, you don't seem to believ in debate, do you?
