- 12 Nov 2018 17:02
#14962433
Someone on here once aptly described modern day scientists being like the the factory worker on a Henry T Ford production line for cars. They don’t know more than is necessary for their job a lot of the time. Many scientists are philosophically naive unlike many scientists in the early 20th century who were quite concerned with philosophical problems and implications of their work. The boon of such scientists is that they can offer raw data and facts that may open up a new understanding, but they cannot resolve philosophical problems via scientific experiments and methods.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/determinism.pdf
Many thinkers of the past still resonate with the same problems today and in fact many people because they’re ignorant of such thinkers and schools of thought typically repeat mistakes already solved. In fact one ends up learning much that has already been established in the past in order to even understand things in the present. THe forefront of knowledge has a history of problem solving and developed methods because of past difficulties.
Hell, still got analytical philosophers still trying to give a conception of a materialist based free will by considering the function of the human brain, man abstracted from his real activity.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/searle.pdf
Fortunately the likes of someone like David Chalmers is getting back onto the right track with something I see resonate with Hegel, the extended mind where consciousness is to be in relation to culture and artefacts. To understand ourselves we don’t just look at our evolutionary history and biology but also how we’ve developed socially.
Indeed, the motive for profit of the capitalist class is part of the revolutionary character of capitalism upon production which Marx praised. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Although this is where the issue of falling rate of profit arises where by improving production, the socially necessary labor time for a commodity is lowered and so to it’s value and thus such productive improvements can play part in a crisis of exchange values.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/crisis-theories-underconsumption/
Is tangential but since touched upon the topic, I enjoyed reading ‘Carchedi: “Return from the Grave” as an effective defense of the Marxian falling rate of profit theory.
https://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/finance-crisis/on-the-origins-of-the-crisis-beyond-finance/carchedireturnfromthegrave
Well presuming alienation has been undone, and labor does become fulfilling in itself, it’s likely that people will work as they want to towards human/social ends.
Because people are better motivated by social things than they are by money, it’s only in a poverty that money has much traction, at a certain point need to appeal to their human side, the side that takes pride in their work and what it does for others.
But capitalism will have needed to improve production the world over before communism is even possible, to completed its task of revolutionarizing every part of the world. See this now industrialized countries have lost their industry to other countries.
At that point, the natural necessity of labor is will have been reduced, even now we don’t work because of scarcity in resources necessarily but because we need to make money.
It’s not scarcity of use-values that stops companies from offering medicine to people who need it, or to have empty houses whilst so many are homeless. Hell, even during economic crisis, there are many useful things left to deteriorate because they are no longer profitable. Such scarcity as seen with poverty is in fact an artificial scarcity, not by natural necessity but by the function of institutions and capital.
Which isn’t that there are limits, but that there is such abundance amongst such poverty which has always been the case with capitalism. That we achieved production that produces more than necessary for survival by far.
I’m not sure Marx is exactly for a borderless world under capitalism as much as one can’t solve anything from border control in the same way protectionism vs free trade isn’t a means of solving essential problems of capitalism. The response is one of solidarity and internationalism which isn’t open borders but supporting people in their struggle the world over against the capitalist class which itself knows no national allegiance.
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/marx-on-immigration/
I’m less familiar with Marx’s sense of the state, but I have he impression that the states existence is seen to be based on class division that it’s a tool of one class’ domination over another. So that in a classless society, there wouldn’t be a need for a state.
But it does seem the failure of the USSR to achieve socialism does exemplify some concerns about the significance of the state.
I suspect an expression of how the state is based on people being atomized into individuals relates to liberal/human rights which are seen as anti-social in character, based on non-interference.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1
Presumably when people really relate to one another without it mediated with strange forms, the function of the state loses it’s place or something.
Indeed, there have been failed attempts.
I still think one finds great explanatory power of people in relation to the world and it’s functions.
Man is always part of society and to abstract society or people from one another is to make nonsense of both (structure vs agency).
My concern is that greed can not be made sense of, nor anything should the real pressures upon people are ignored and it’s treated as some metaphysical thing originate strictly within people.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/02/18.htm
Though admittedly I haven’t explicitly laid out a point of what drives greed but left it as a methodological point that it is to be explained by people’s relation to the world/society.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
And where do people get their desire? I would again make the general claim that human desires and needs can only be understood in relation to the world.
Well Marx’s approach done away with the philosophical dualism of contemplative/mechanical materialism and active idealism in his conception of man as social and embedded within nature. I think given the right conditions mankind is inevitability spiritual but not necessarily religious. To me I see more in people’s relation to one another than I do in a unseen and alien God. There is an ascetic tendency in organized religion that has often served to make people passive to their needs. Although in the present circumstance people find life to be without inherent meaning, feel themselves as atomized individuals overwhelmed by themselves posed against the world. Many people don’t feel themselves as belonging.
Also think I perhaps avoided using greed as a concept as it doesn’t explain the necessity of a capitalist needing to make profit. As an individual they could be incredibly generous and charitable, so very nice, a paragon of virtue but this would be irrelevant to the necessity of their role as a capitalist. Their kindness would not bend economics, stop them from needing to make a profit, to outcompete other capitalists
So you do see the distinction between mind and matter ontologically but I’m wondering how you explain consciousness. Because whilst I think there is an evolutionary basis to consciousness, we are biological beings, I think there is a reductive side to attempts to explain consciousness through appeals to the biological. That many whilst not denying the mind, seem to try to diminish it because they can’t properly reconcile methodologically study of consciousness based on the side of the subjective or through objective processes.
To which Vygotsky I think offers a solution and great analogy for consciousness.
And whilst Vygotsky is speaking of old thinkers, the problems he discusses essentially remains the same. We still confusing the mind-matter ontological distinction with the epistemological issue of the subject-object relation. People still referring to consciousness as an emergent illusion of physical processes.
And so I worry that by saying link it with evolution, it’s unclear that you’re saying more than anyone who would refer to our biological faculties underpinning consciousness which is important knowledge but isn’t sufficient to understand consciousness. It would repeat the mistake of leaving the active side to idealism, where man is passive/contemplative and driven by biological instincts, and the social is merely the environment that alters this biological mechanisms.
But I do like that you emphasize human needs that is significant even for Marx of how we come to perceive and experience the world, but then in changing it have changed ourselves so much so there are social laws which aren’t reducible to biological ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
I would qualify that it’s value is independent of any one individual's belief, that the ideality/value of money as the supreme commodity is very real.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
It is the case that many things that aren’t empirical entities existing in space and time fall under the philosophical definition of matter as everything which exists outside of consciousness and not strictly within it. Such that these things can be said to have objective existence.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
[/QUOTE]My consciousness is not a form of matter, because the very meaning of the word ‘matter’ is that it is not just in our mind, but exists outside our consciousness. So it would be self-contradictory for me to say that my consciousness is material. But there is a sense in which I can say that your consciousness is material, since it is outside of my consciousness. Your consciousness is not given to me immediately, but on the contrary, like the force of gravity and the ambient temperature, I have to infer it from observation. If I were to extend the category which marks my thought off from the material world, to include your thought, then I am in effect, reifying thought and making it into some kind of ‘stuff’ with an objective existence side-by-side with matter.[/QUOTE]
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf
The value of money isn’t embedded within it as a physical object, it’s value isn’t derived from it being a particular thing such as gold or whatever. But the ideality of things are inscribed upon physical objects whilst not really apart of it. It is human consciousness recognizing the social relations of that thing. Which gets back to Hegel’s view that to isolate/abstract a thing from it’s real world relations is to make it a empty sign that names a thing, as opposed to an actual concept of what a thing is, it’s essence.
B0ycey wrote:Yes and no. Philosophy to me is still about asking difficult questions and trying to find a logical conclusion to these questions. But the advancement of science is the new philosophy. Not the enlightened Western Philosophers. So if you want to find answers to any philosophical question you are better researching the present rather than the past. Although as I say Marx is different. Everything he said the Capitalists will do to maintain their system they are doing. Although I do believe he does underestimate the reset values of Capitalism to reform itself and start a fresh.
Someone on here once aptly described modern day scientists being like the the factory worker on a Henry T Ford production line for cars. They don’t know more than is necessary for their job a lot of the time. Many scientists are philosophically naive unlike many scientists in the early 20th century who were quite concerned with philosophical problems and implications of their work. The boon of such scientists is that they can offer raw data and facts that may open up a new understanding, but they cannot resolve philosophical problems via scientific experiments and methods.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/determinism.pdf
So when Vygotsky (1932) claimed in his brilliant chapter, “Self-Control,”
“we can resolve essentially purely philosophical problems by means of a psychological experiment,”
he was mistaken. Psychological experiments cannot resolve purely philosophical problems, though psychological experiment can sometimes expose false solutions to philosophical problems, false because they trespass on the domain of empirical natural science.
Many thinkers of the past still resonate with the same problems today and in fact many people because they’re ignorant of such thinkers and schools of thought typically repeat mistakes already solved. In fact one ends up learning much that has already been established in the past in order to even understand things in the present. THe forefront of knowledge has a history of problem solving and developed methods because of past difficulties.
Hell, still got analytical philosophers still trying to give a conception of a materialist based free will by considering the function of the human brain, man abstracted from his real activity.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/searle.pdf
Fortunately the likes of someone like David Chalmers is getting back onto the right track with something I see resonate with Hegel, the extended mind where consciousness is to be in relation to culture and artefacts. To understand ourselves we don’t just look at our evolutionary history and biology but also how we’ve developed socially.
Spoiler: show
This is a great statement about the Amish. But I would like to add to this if I may. Capitalism enhances progress due to the desire for profit - and we have progressed far since Victorian times. The lack of progress from the Amish in terms of technological advancement could be argued to be due to their values not their capital gain. What Communism needs is the desire to progress while at the same time maintaining social conditions of Capitalism and the end of private property. And that is not easy unless you have a political establishment whose state is high in commodity and production that is also willing to enact economic change.
Indeed, the motive for profit of the capitalist class is part of the revolutionary character of capitalism upon production which Marx praised. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
Although this is where the issue of falling rate of profit arises where by improving production, the socially necessary labor time for a commodity is lowered and so to it’s value and thus such productive improvements can play part in a crisis of exchange values.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/crisis-theories-underconsumption/
Capitalist overproduction is overproduction of exchange values, not overproduction of use values. A crisis of overproduction of exchange values breaks out when there is still very much an underproduction of use values, especially use values that the workers themselves need.
Is tangential but since touched upon the topic, I enjoyed reading ‘Carchedi: “Return from the Grave” as an effective defense of the Marxian falling rate of profit theory.
https://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/finance-crisis/on-the-origins-of-the-crisis-beyond-finance/carchedireturnfromthegrave
Well presuming alienation has been undone, and labor does become fulfilling in itself, it’s likely that people will work as they want to towards human/social ends.
Because people are better motivated by social things than they are by money, it’s only in a poverty that money has much traction, at a certain point need to appeal to their human side, the side that takes pride in their work and what it does for others.
But capitalism will have needed to improve production the world over before communism is even possible, to completed its task of revolutionarizing every part of the world. See this now industrialized countries have lost their industry to other countries.
At that point, the natural necessity of labor is will have been reduced, even now we don’t work because of scarcity in resources necessarily but because we need to make money.
It’s not scarcity of use-values that stops companies from offering medicine to people who need it, or to have empty houses whilst so many are homeless. Hell, even during economic crisis, there are many useful things left to deteriorate because they are no longer profitable. Such scarcity as seen with poverty is in fact an artificial scarcity, not by natural necessity but by the function of institutions and capital.
Which isn’t that there are limits, but that there is such abundance amongst such poverty which has always been the case with capitalism. That we achieved production that produces more than necessary for survival by far.
The flow of labor is what is flawed in Marx’s borderless world. When labor is high the bourgeois have the advantage. But he was expelled from all of Europe for his radical views so wanted to maintain that belief (in my opinion) so reinvented it to have a meaning. He believed the world's workers should unite and what should come after is withering of states. But there is no advantage in my opinion of the proletariat in doing this.
I’m not sure Marx is exactly for a borderless world under capitalism as much as one can’t solve anything from border control in the same way protectionism vs free trade isn’t a means of solving essential problems of capitalism. The response is one of solidarity and internationalism which isn’t open borders but supporting people in their struggle the world over against the capitalist class which itself knows no national allegiance.
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/marx-on-immigration/
Marx did not elaborate on his reasons for writing that Irish immigration reduced English workers’ wages. He implied that the cause was an oversupply of manual laborers, but his other statements indicate that he considered English xenophobia and the resulting antagonism among workers an even greater problem. The important point, however, is that he was not blaming lower wages on the immigrants themselves; for him the culprits were the colonial system that drove Irish workers to England, and the exploitation of these workers once they arrived.
…
In his 1870 letter, Marx described what he then considered the overriding priority for labor organizing in England: “to make the English workers realize that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.” His closing words of advice to Meyer and Vogt were similar: “You have wide field in America for work along the same lines. A coalition of the German workers with the Irish workers (and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it) is the greatest achievement you could bring about now.” This internationalist and class-based perspective has lost none of its good sense in the century and a half since it was written.
I’m less familiar with Marx’s sense of the state, but I have he impression that the states existence is seen to be based on class division that it’s a tool of one class’ domination over another. So that in a classless society, there wouldn’t be a need for a state.
But it does seem the failure of the USSR to achieve socialism does exemplify some concerns about the significance of the state.
Spoiler: show
I suspect an expression of how the state is based on people being atomized into individuals relates to liberal/human rights which are seen as anti-social in character, based on non-interference.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1
Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feudalism and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour, which we will explore below.
Presumably when people really relate to one another without it mediated with strange forms, the function of the state loses it’s place or something.
This is an important statement actually. And we will find out if humans are inherently greedy/elitist when Capitalism ends. Because if they are, I cannot see a future for Communism. Just failed attempts.
Indeed, there have been failed attempts.
I still think one finds great explanatory power of people in relation to the world and it’s functions.
Man is always part of society and to abstract society or people from one another is to make nonsense of both (structure vs agency).
My concern is that greed can not be made sense of, nor anything should the real pressures upon people are ignored and it’s treated as some metaphysical thing originate strictly within people.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/02/18.htm
Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself!
Though admittedly I haven’t explicitly laid out a point of what drives greed but left it as a methodological point that it is to be explained by people’s relation to the world/society.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
Man is not an entity of a higher order, an immortal spirit in a carnal tomb, confronting nature as its judge and arbiter, and trying to reach perfection against the opposition of the blind and elemental forces of nature. The concept of a merciless struggle against nature or of a romantic unity with nature are, according to Marx, entirely inappropriate for the description of the actual relationship between nature and man.[144] There is no human nature independent of society and there is no man distinct from social men whose ever-changing characteristics are determined by the entire structure of society. Man acquires novel characteristics, for he is not only shaped by his natural and social environment but also changes and transforms this environment through his responsive action. To maintain his existence man acts on the external world and by his action changes his own nature. Since man’s action is not individual but social, all human action is to be explained in terms of the social conditions in which it takes place. The distinctive characteristics of individuals, acquired in the course of social evolution, should be conceived as moulded by a particular form of social organization and related to its structural differentiation at any given time.
I concur with all of this. A very strong statement. Although to have a social basis you have to eliminate the desire for material possession. And that isn't easy if humans are naturally greedy.
And where do people get their desire? I would again make the general claim that human desires and needs can only be understood in relation to the world.
Spoiler: show
There maybe a methodological issue with greed. Evolution. But I believe to find the solution to create Communism you need to understanding how to make us Idealists and not materialists. Religion is one way to do this. So perhaps going down this road is the right course of action for you if you are looking for answers.
Well Marx’s approach done away with the philosophical dualism of contemplative/mechanical materialism and active idealism in his conception of man as social and embedded within nature. I think given the right conditions mankind is inevitability spiritual but not necessarily religious. To me I see more in people’s relation to one another than I do in a unseen and alien God. There is an ascetic tendency in organized religion that has often served to make people passive to their needs. Although in the present circumstance people find life to be without inherent meaning, feel themselves as atomized individuals overwhelmed by themselves posed against the world. Many people don’t feel themselves as belonging.
Also think I perhaps avoided using greed as a concept as it doesn’t explain the necessity of a capitalist needing to make profit. As an individual they could be incredibly generous and charitable, so very nice, a paragon of virtue but this would be irrelevant to the necessity of their role as a capitalist. Their kindness would not bend economics, stop them from needing to make a profit, to outcompete other capitalists
Consciousness does interest me Wellsy. But I don't link material processes with consciousness but evolution and our desire and needs to survive. If you can think of how consciousness is important to production I am all for listening.
So you do see the distinction between mind and matter ontologically but I’m wondering how you explain consciousness. Because whilst I think there is an evolutionary basis to consciousness, we are biological beings, I think there is a reductive side to attempts to explain consciousness through appeals to the biological. That many whilst not denying the mind, seem to try to diminish it because they can’t properly reconcile methodologically study of consciousness based on the side of the subjective or through objective processes.
Spoiler: show
To which Vygotsky I think offers a solution and great analogy for consciousness.
Spoiler: show
And whilst Vygotsky is speaking of old thinkers, the problems he discusses essentially remains the same. We still confusing the mind-matter ontological distinction with the epistemological issue of the subject-object relation. People still referring to consciousness as an emergent illusion of physical processes.
And so I worry that by saying link it with evolution, it’s unclear that you’re saying more than anyone who would refer to our biological faculties underpinning consciousness which is important knowledge but isn’t sufficient to understand consciousness. It would repeat the mistake of leaving the active side to idealism, where man is passive/contemplative and driven by biological instincts, and the social is merely the environment that alters this biological mechanisms.
But I do like that you emphasize human needs that is significant even for Marx of how we come to perceive and experience the world, but then in changing it have changed ourselves so much so there are social laws which aren’t reducible to biological ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
This. Exactly. Money only has value because we believe it has value. Change the system of production and you lose the value of money.
I would qualify that it’s value is independent of any one individual's belief, that the ideality/value of money as the supreme commodity is very real.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Capital Marx defines the form of value in general as “purely ideal” not on the grounds that it exists only “in the consciousness”, only in the head of the commodity-owner, but on quite opposite grounds. The price or the money form of value, like any form of value in general, is IDEAL because it is totally distinct from the palpable, corporeal form of commodity in which it is presented, we read in the chapter on “Money”. [Capital, Vol. I, pp. 98-99.]
In other words, the form of value is IDEAL, although it exists outside human consciousness and independently of it.
…
But here we are immediately confronted with the trickiness of this distinction, which is fully provided for by the Hegelian school and its conception of the “materialisation”, the “alienation”, the “reification” of universal notions. As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”.
For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination.
This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.
…
So the reader for whom the term “ideal” is a synonym for the “immanent in the consciousness”, “existing only in the consciousness”, “only in people’s ideas”, only in their “imagination” will misunderstand the idea expressed by Marx because in this case it turns out that even Capital – which is nothing else but a value-form of the organisation of the productive forces, a form of the functioning of the means of production – also exists only in the consciousness, only in people’s subjective imagination, and “not in reality”.
…
According to Marx, the ideality of the form of value consists not, of course, in the fact that this form represents a mental phenomenon existing only in the brain of the commodity-owner or theoretician, but in the fact that the corporeal palpable form of the thing (for example, a coat) is only a form of expression of quite a different “thing” (linen, as a value) with which it has nothing in common. The value of the linen is represented, expressed, “embodied” in the form of a coat, and the form of the coat is the “ideal or represented form” of the value of the linen.
It is the case that many things that aren’t empirical entities existing in space and time fall under the philosophical definition of matter as everything which exists outside of consciousness and not strictly within it. Such that these things can be said to have objective existence.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
[/QUOTE]My consciousness is not a form of matter, because the very meaning of the word ‘matter’ is that it is not just in our mind, but exists outside our consciousness. So it would be self-contradictory for me to say that my consciousness is material. But there is a sense in which I can say that your consciousness is material, since it is outside of my consciousness. Your consciousness is not given to me immediately, but on the contrary, like the force of gravity and the ambient temperature, I have to infer it from observation. If I were to extend the category which marks my thought off from the material world, to include your thought, then I am in effect, reifying thought and making it into some kind of ‘stuff’ with an objective existence side-by-side with matter.[/QUOTE]
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf
In The German Ideology, Marx wrote “My relation to my environment is my consciousness,” but then crossed it out. But this is a very succinct way of putting it. Marx puts it in the first person; he does not say “a person’s relation to their environment is their consciousness,” because he must treat anyone else’s consciousness scientifically, in the knowledge that another person’s consciousness must be inferred from their behaviour and whatever we know about their physiological condition. But his own consciousness occupies a special position because everything he knows passes through his consciousness, including his scientific investigations. The point is that the special ontological status occupied by consciousness only applies in the first person. Descartes’ mistake was to extend a perfectly valid question he asked of himself, to consciousness in general.
THIS IS what transformed “consciousness” into a problematic substance. Your consciousness is part of the material world, and is reducible to the totality of the state of your organism and its environment, all of which is accessible to scientific investigation.
BUT my consciousness, I cannot investigate scientifically. As Feuerbach put it quite correctly: “what for me is a mental, non-material, suprasensory act, is in itself a material, sensory act.”
The value of money isn’t embedded within it as a physical object, it’s value isn’t derived from it being a particular thing such as gold or whatever. But the ideality of things are inscribed upon physical objects whilst not really apart of it. It is human consciousness recognizing the social relations of that thing. Which gets back to Hegel’s view that to isolate/abstract a thing from it’s real world relations is to make it a empty sign that names a thing, as opposed to an actual concept of what a thing is, it’s essence.
Like you I have a limited influence to religion. I will have to research more on Marx and class consciousness/struggle to see why he eliminates the need for religion to create Communism. But in my opinion for Communism to work you need a code of ethics. And religion can do that for you.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics