Young Master Smeet
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I don't keep reading it as theory and practice at all, I don't understand your point or how you could arrive at such a question.Which claim are you stating is stupid (you quote a block paragraph with at least three or four claims in it)?As for trusting workers, you'll recall I criticised your one sided view of democracy as being voting, I'm arguing for democracy against you.
Aesthetics is vary real and very physical, not ideal at all. It is about human sensual relationship to their world. It's not one-sided contrasted with two sided, but incomplete with complete (many sided, rich). Yes, Charlie stands for philsophical monism (as has been mentioned before here), and 'new materialism' not abstract contemplative materialism (per These on Feurbach). Human criticism is matter. thought is material, culture is material, it is all part of one world. You can't get less ideal than Aesthetics.(I'd add you don't get much more positivist than Thesis II:
Quote:The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.)
LBird wrote:Whilst we, as a society, venerate scientists as having a 'special method', not comprehensible by the rest of society, we'll remain in their power.No one does that, least of all the scientists, they make their method and data very widely open, it's just that it takes time and effort to follow in detail. I'll agree that some media outlets (ruling class ideologists) do venerate the words of scientists, because they want to encourage obediance rather than critical thinking. On this board you'll probably find more scientific reading than among the average lay-person.
Lbird wrote:We’re clearly seeing the separation here on this thread into the two opposed ideological strands, represented by Engels and Marx.I'm not sure we're seeing that at all, this seems to be another instance of you interpollating your schematic construction of the debate onto it, rather than looking at the actual text. I'm also wary of the Engels bad Marx good alibi, it often strikes me as a single transferable get out of gaol free card. Charlie was fallible too, he had to major cockamamy views on evolution. Anyway, from Charlie hissel':
Charlie wrote:Fourier starts directly from the doctrines of French materialism. The Babouvistes were raw, uncivilised materialists,but also the more advanced Communism is based on French materialism. The latter, in the French garb, returned to its native country. Godwin and Bentham established their systems on the ethical philosophy of Helvetius, and Owen took it from Bentham and based upon it English Communism. Etienne Corbet, banished to England, brought those ideas back to France and became here the most commonplace representative of Communism. But also the more advanced of French Communists, such as Dezamy, Gay, & c., developed, like Robert Owen, the materialist doctrine into real humanism and the logical basis of Communism.(My bold)(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/english-materialism.htm)What Marx criticises is mechanical or one sided materialism, that doesn't account for aesthetics.
Those of us who dabble in English will note that Charlie does not call materialism idealism. The Subject of the sentence is 'natural science' and the use of 'rather' suggests 'idealistic' is an alternative. We can see this by inserting 'that is to say' in the place of 'rather'. 'That is to say' would suggest an equation and refinement between the two words, but the use of 'rather' suggests a difference and alternative status, a correction. We can also note that he does not use the word 'materialism' but the noun phrase 'abstractly material', and 'abstractly' belongs in the cognitive field of ideas already. Also note the use of the word 'tendency', that is to say, the states he describes are not always the case, but some times natural science veers off into idealism.The wider paragraph is, of course, referring to the estrangement of philosophy from natural science (which has had such a profound practical success in transforming life).I'd suggest the import of the passage is that the arrival of unalienated labour, under conscious human control, then the mental appreciation (or, rather, philosophy) of humans will catch up with and join their practical achievements.
SP,Ideology, to my mind, is the process of using ideas in order to establish minority rule by a class, so by definition, socialism, in which there is no ruling class, there is no ideology. Also, implicit in the above definition of ideology, is that it exists to obfuscate or distort the lived experience of the subordinate class, which means ideology is contrasted directly with truth.
I think the below by Roger Penrose is interesting:
Penrose wrote:The agreement between theory and experiment here has been extraordinary. Astronomers have, for example, been monitoring the orbits of one double neutron star system – known as PSR 1913+16 – for around 40 years. The emission of Einstein's predicted gravitational waves from this system has been confirmed through a very gradual shortening of the stars' orbital period, and there has been an agreement between the signals received from space and the overall predictions of Einstein's theory to an astonishing 14 decimal places. At the other end of the size scale, there are multitudes of very precise observations that give innumerable confirmations of the accuracy of quantum theory and also of its generalisation to the quantum theory of relativistic fields, which gives us quantum electrodynamics. The magnetic moment of an electron, for example, has been precisely measured to some 11 decimal places, and the observed figures are matched precisely by the theoretical predictions of quantum electrodynamics.[…]Take, for another example, that most universal of physical influences, gravitation. It operates across the greatest reaches of space, but as early as the 17th century Newton had discovered that it was subject to a beautifully simple mathematical description. This was later found to remain accurate to a degree that is tens of thousands of times greater than the observational precision available to Newton. In the 20th century, Einstein gave us general relativity, providing insights at a yet deeper level. This theory involved considerably more mathematical sophistication than Newton's: Newton had needed to introduce the procedures of calculus in order to formulate his gravitational theory, but Einstein added the sophistication of differential geometry – and increased the agreement between theory and observation by a factor of around 10 million. It should be made clear that, in each case, the increased accuracy was not the result of a new theory being introduced only to make sense of vast amounts of new data. The extra precision was seen only after each theory had been produced, revealing accord between physical behaviour at its deepest level and a beautiful, sophisticated mathematical scheme.New Scientist [0262-4079] Weinberg Year: 2006 Volume: 192 Issue: 2578 Page: 32 -38Although you can see the Theorists Union in action there, after all, the feat of being able to measure to 14 decimal places is also astounding. Here, though, we have the distortion inherent in the system. They haven't confirmed Einstein to 15 decimal places (and that could mean millions of miles, in real terms).
Nicely avoided. Lets examine the assumptions here. 1)That there are a very wide number of areas of enquiry which we will need, in a socialist society, to explore.2) Not everyone will want to be scientists, or to explore certain topics of interest.3) Some scientific equipment takes time and training to learn how to use (some, like the CERN Collider take years of planning to use).4) It takes considerable time to read through raw data, sort it and turn it into useful information.So, lets look at socialism. Lets assume that we have reduced the working week to two days (a not wholely unrealistic assumption) and we have decided, collectively, that science work is not included in those two days (it can be people's hobby). We collectively decide to make resources available, in terms of libraries, communication technology, conference facilities, competitions, laboratories with equipment (and we provide that in abundance, abundance in this sense being that supply meets demand).Some anally retentive types will spend time simply collecting data, assiduously drawing every leaf they can find, or looking at the crystaline structure of rocks, classifying beetles.Their science, being necessarilly social, will be communicated to otehrs, others who have not done the experiement, studied the beetle, smushed the rock, they will produce data from which otehrs will draw inferrences, or find refutations of their own hypotheses (or confirmations), which will also be communicated, people would then make up their own minds, possibly using critical realism, which posits a real world upon which our investigations works, and whilst acknowledging the historicity of knowledge attained also does allow us to draw value judgements between scientific investigations. the real world will constrain the things we can say about it, no science can make the moon to be made of cheese (unless we decide to build and launch a cheese moon).That I what i think science for socialists looks like.
Gnome: There is no obligation on members to be hostile to all other parties, that is an obligation on the party and functionaries of the party. The only obligations of membership are to pay a voluntary contribution and not join or assist any other political organisation. A vote in a referendum or plebiscite is not supporting or assisting any other political organisation, but making a political decision as a member of the community. Let's not forget that voting no would be 'support' for a different political set up/nationalism.There is a difference between supporting a national liberation movement, and voting in a referendum. So we'd not expect our members to campaign for an independence referendum, and I would expect our mandated speakers to oppose nationalism, and give the class perspective (and urge a spoilt ballot).We've identified that there is no class issue at hand here, workers neither benefit nor lose from independence. Some might have strategic/tactical reasons for voting yes (creative chaos, destroying British military and diplomatic power on the world stage, a hatred of Berwick, etc.).
SP, at the risk of verging off topic: no I don't consider socialism to be an ideology. I consider it to be the reutation of ideology. One of the problems with the concept of ideology, is that if it is eternal, and everyone is wrapped up in it, then how can some people claim to see out of it? It seems a ready made gift for Leninist vanguards (and, indeed, did become an issue when the vanguards seized power, and found themselves fighting the workers, the vanguard were free of ideology, and needed to rule against and over the workers blinded by it). The point of socialism is to free us from the distortions of power (and the need to maintain power) and instead live our lives in conscious accord with our own experience.Lbird: back to topic. Let me ask this. In socialism, in your democratic model, we'll still need technical experts to oeprate delcate experimental equipment, to conduct experiements and survey correctly: we can't all do the experiements and collate the data. So what we'll be voting on would be the 'selected facts'. Since we're rational people, we'll come to the conclusion the 'selected facts' demand: so won't we still be enslaved to the "enlightened" scientists? After all, we all know how appointed staff can end up controlling their oversight committees. Won't the vote, which will make all of us complicit in their facts in actuality make it harder to oppose and dispute with the scientists?
Alan, the party is the tool of the class, not the otehr way round, whilst we try and educate and inform workers of their interests, in referendums and plebiscites they make up their own mind on a given issue, and vote as they see fit on a case by case basis. The party campaigns as they instruct, not vice versa. The only obligation on membership is not to belong to any other political organisation.
SocialistPunk wrote:Ideology is in essence a word that refers to human ideas and concepts in a way that forms a joined up thinking, such as a world view or belief system, usually with a goal in mind. This is the meaning of the word ideology to most people. I say most people because philosophers do not behave as most people do, they seem to see the world in an ever more complex spiral of hidden meaning and can wax lyrical about the most banal everyday words adding multiple meanings and a myriad of contexts.Or, the word has been moved from its original uses, to simply mean any set of ideas, itself an ideological move to robn the word of meaning and to protect ideologists. Common sense is ideology, so you generally have to step away from copmmon meanings of words. If ideology is a system of ideas, then we need some other term for the process of the imposition of class dominance i the domain of ideas.
"…we know reality because it's before our eyes …"Our*ahem*Our.But what you're saying isn't really any much different from the standard hypothesis-experiement-knowledge schema of standard science (they just don't delve very far into where the hypothesis comes from, but we can say it stems from either experience or theory). Through knocking rocks to dust, experiementally, we've found and observed crystaline structures, chromatic signatures, fossils (yes) and we've had to account for them and learn about them at each stage. What you are saying is not radical, not over throwing the domiant ideas of science, or changting anything. All you're doing is knocking down empiricism, which nobody really holds any more.The scientific debate, ruthless criticism of all that exists, is open ended.
LBird wrote:YMS wrote:Answer, it doesn't matter, so long as the same shade/wavelength is consistently called the same thing by both of us.So, the answer is a popular vote?
No, the answer is ongoing dialogue and discussion.
Lbird wrote:Will you abide by a vote, YMS, or return to the elitist insistence, constantly made by you on this thread, that your individual senses (which you also deny are socially-produced) are a better judge of 'reality' than a democratic vote?I have never denied that individual senses are socially produced, you'll not be able to find a single instance of such a statement, you'll only find your own erroneous interpollations. I've simply said that I believe a vote would be a hinderance to the social production of knoeldge, and undemocratic. Why do you p[ersist in wanting to curtail democracy?
Lbird wrote:Have you now accepted that 'truth' is a social product, and not a 'copy of reality' which allegedly can be determined by an elitist method, which is not available to the proletariat?Have you recanted your religious claims, YMS?Yes, I've also stopped beating my wife. That is, I never, I mean, I haven't…Anyway, nonsense aside. What I wanted to point out today was that Lbird first premise is flawed, practitioners of science, even simple advocates of induction, fdon't even claim to discover the truth, theyy all acknowledge that their discoveries are contingent and may be overturned by "ruthless criticism of all that exists", by the ongoing collaborative process that is science. That is, science is a proletarian product.
I mentioned the non-ideological methiod, the first premise being that reality itself sets limits on truth claims, not that truth claims copy or spring from reality. To take the old prblem of minds. If I see green, how do I know that you aren't seeing the colour I call red? Answer, it doesn't matter, so long as the same shade/wavelength is consistently called the same thing by both of us.
I don;'t see the problem with what thopse members are saying. AFAIK we haven't agreed action line on the referendum, and iot's been noted over recent years that we can and will vote according to how we perceive class interests in referendums and plebiscites. Memebrs are not mandated. I can't recall, I think I may have voted yes in the AV referendum. I have to confess, seeing the big guns of the establishment being briought to bear would make me think about voting yes to tweak their noses.
