The Amish Achieved Communism - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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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
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/clark.html
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htm
The key concept which comes out of at the end of Donald’s enquiry is the concept of ‘extended mind’ – the combination of material artefacts and mnemonic and computational devices with the internal cognitive apparatus of human beings who have been raised in the practice of using them. Human physiology, behaviour and consciousness cannot be reproduced by individual human beings alone; we are reliant for our every action on the world of artefacts, with its own intricate inherent system of relations. Theory is the ideal form of the structure of material culture. Every thought, memory, problem solution or communication, is effected by the mobilisation of the internal mind of individuals, and the external mind contained within human culture. Taken together, the internal and external mind is called ‘extended mind’. This is what Hegel called Geist, an entity in which the division between subjectivity and objectivity is relative and not absolute.

Humans are animals which have learnt to build and mobilise an extended mind. This has proved to be a powerful adaption. Individuals in this species stand in quite a different relation to the world around them than the individuals of any other extant species. Understanding of the psyche of the modern individual depends on understanding the process of development of a human being growing up in such a culture...

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
The concept of social evolution constituted an important development beyond the world outlook of eighteenth-century materialism and allowed naturalism to extend to the whole sphere of man’s spiritual activities. In this respect the ‘old materialism’ was inadequate. The theories of mechanistic materialism concerning the appearance of mind, consciousness, values, and all distinctively human characteristics and achievements had no explanatory significance. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of these theories only played into the hands and indirectly supported the claims of the idealists who maintained that the ‘essence of man’ could not, demonstrably, be explained in terms of natural science and that man was thus clearly shown to be a spiritual and not a material being. Marx fully agreed with the view that mechanistic materialism did not contribute to the understanding of man’s action, of his cultural attainments and social development. Nothing can be accomplished if man is assumed to be merely the highest species in the animal evolution and if his behaviour is to be explained by the laws of biology and, ultimately, of physics and chemistry. This is the kind of materialism which Marx called ‘one-sided’ and of which he maliciously said that in order to overcome the incorporeal spirit it ‘was obliged to mortify its flesh and become ascetic’.[83]

The failure of mechanistic materialism was due to the fact that from its point of view the world was an external object to be observed and described. But men are not primarily observers. Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to search for knowledge, and in order to live they have to act to satisfy their primary needs.[84] Human nature has to conform to biological determination. There are certain sequences of activities, determined by human physiology and the physical characteristics of environment, which constitute the ultimate basis of all human motivation and which are indispensable for the survival of the individual and the species. Since they are incorporated in each system of organized behaviour, their vital importance was overlooked by most philosophers.

It is in his active life, above all, that man comes into contact with the external world, that is, with the natural and social environment into which he is born. The environment acts upon him through his sense organs and is acted upon and changed by his exertions. But if the environment which determines man’s behaviour is in turn constantly made and remade by man’s labour, each generation is a progeny of its ancestors both biologically and socially. The determination of man by prior circumstances is in fact the determination by the activity of preceding generations.

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
http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3.htm
Marx showed how the state, among other institutions, exemplified the estrangement of social life, the antagonism between the interest of the individual and that of the community, which is actually more basic than that between classes.

The state is based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests and private interests. [MECW Vol 3, p 198] [The community] takes on an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life. ... On the other hand, too, the practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the State. [MECW Vol 5, p 46]

So the state is a form of community, but an illusory form, in contrast to the real, human community: ‘In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.’
Marx wanted to discover the basis of the illusion which is involved in this ‘illusory community’ and, above all, how the illusion is to be dispelled and the true community released.

The bourgeois state, and its separation from its economic base, are shown by Marx to arise necessarily from the atomisation of individual life within that base. Estrangement and fetishism mean that the lives of individuals are controlled by powers which they themselves have made, but which lie outside themselves. Like money and capital, the political form simultaneously links people together by separating them:

The contradiction between the purpose and goodwill of the administration, on the one hand, and its means and possibilities, on the other hand, cannot be abolished by the state without the latter abolishing itself, for it is based on this contradictions. [MECW Vol 3, p 198]
This occurs when matters have changed in such a way that man as an isolated individual relates only to himself, but that the means of positing himself as an isolated individual have become precisely what gives him his general and communal character. ... In bourgeois society, eg, the worker stands there purely subjectively, without object [objectivlos]; but the thing which confronts him has become the true community, which he tries to make a meal of and which makes a meal of him. [Grundrisse]

In his controversies with Proudhon, with Stirner and with Bakunin, what was at stake was not so much their call to ‘abolish the state’, but their refusal to consider what was the basis of the state. Only when private ownership of the means of labour, and thus the alienated form of labour, disappeared, would the state dissolve into the community. The socialist revolution was simply the way this historical process would be organised. In view of the distorting experience of the Russian Revolution, I believe these ideas of Marx are among his most relevant for our time.

http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith5.htm
Rather than giving up in depair at these features of the uncontrollability of modern life, we have to see that they demonstrate the impossibility of going on this way. Since the state is an expression of our inhuman life, it is not merely a matter of changing its ‘class character’.

Can humans collectively govern themselves? When human productive powers have been freed from the social form of capital, the opposition between society and community can disappear. Relations between ‘social individuals’ will not be regulated by an unconscious, impersonal, machine-like power, but consciously by the ‘associated individuals’.

These are old questions for socialists. As we enter the new millennium, we know that they cannot be evaded, but we also have more experience on which to base our answers.

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
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/
The parable of Subjectivist Island leads one to think that human desires are formed privately, independent of society. But this has never been the case. Desires are taught, socially constructed, and can’t be understood independently of society. How do subjectivists respond? They say “Yes desires may be constructed but this is out of the scope of economics so we don’t have to consider it.” In fact, this is how modern economics deals with all criticism- it ignores it and says it’s the topic of another discipline. How convenient! It’s like saying that we don’t have to consider the fact that the earth is round because that’s beyond the scope of flat-earth theory.

In the real world, outside of the fantasies of bourgeois economics, subjects and objects have no meaning apart from their relations to each other. There is no such thing as a subjective individual floating in a vacuum. We develop our subjectivity through our relation to the objective world we inhabit. And the objective world can’t be understood apart from the actions of societies of individuals who transform this world, bending it to their will, giving it meaning. Subjects and objects always exist in a relation, deriving their meaning from this relation.

On Subjectivist Island it seems like subjects form their value judgements through passive contemplation before they act on them; judging happens first and then action. In the real world we can only understand our subjective preferences once we understand the active process by which people relate to and transform the world. People work on nature. We chop trees and make houses. We build cars and dig up oil to power them. In transforming the objective world we also transform ourselves. The modes by which we work upon the world determine our views of the world, the sort of values, needs and desires we have in this world and the manner in which we pursue those desires. These different modes of producing have changed throughout history, each mode producing very different sorts of societies with very different value systems. These different modes of relating to and transforming the world Marx calls “modes of production”. (5)

The products which consumers buy with this money are not just the random result of psychological preferences. In fact, most of our money goes to the purchase of very basic things we need in order to keep us alive as workers so that we can produce more value for capitalism each day: rent, food, clothes. (8) These are needs and desires dictated to us by capitalism, for the purpose of perpetuating capitalism, not the abstract psychological preferences of isolated individuals. (9)

But the bulk of the demand in society comes not from consumers but from capitalists. You and I buy toothbrushes and pay rent. Capitalists buy factories, assembly lines, natural resources, and private armies. This demand has nothing to do with the personal preferences of capitalists. (10) It has to do with the technical requirements of production, the amount of inputs it takes to make a widget at the SNLT. Some people think that capitalists enter production only in order to meet the demands of consumers. This is a myth. The advertising industry is the best refutation of this myth. Capitalists produce in order to make a profit. Then they go looking for markets. Most of the time they have to create the market by convincing people there is a need for their product. But capitalist firms also sell to each other, totally bypassing the need to find consumer markets. (11.)

This all gives us a very different picture of the subject-object relation than we get in bourgeois economics. Rather than a free society of empowered individuals who are free to act upon their abstract desires and take full-responsibility for their lot in life, Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production reveals a world in which individuals are at the mercy of the coercive laws of the market. The sorts of superficial freedoms they have to choose between coke and pepsi pale in comparison to the disciplining of our lives to SNLT and the pursuit of profit.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/
In abstracting away the social relations of capitalism marginalism must assume that these abstract individuals enter exchange with given needs and given resources. Where do these needs and resources come from? The marginalist answer is that this question is outside the sphere of economics- that it doesn’t matter to economic theory where these needs and resources come from. But what if our economic system actually reproduced these needs and resources? If we could show that capitalism produced the hedonistic consumer as well as the conditions of scarcity the consumer confronts then we could expose a disastrous feedback loop at the core of marginalism. It seems that when we just assume given needs and resources we are actually only pretending to abstract away from capitalist social relations. While on the surface marginalists appear to be talking about a universal individual in universal conditions, in actuality they are sneaking all of the social relations of capitalism in the back door. This is very similar to the Bukharin critique I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.

Marginalists would like to treat the unequal resource endowments of individuals as due to extra-economic factors, consigning these concerns to the fields of history and sociology. But these inequalities don’t just proceed exchange historically. They are actually reproduced by exchange. Capitalism generates a world in which individuals must maintain a certain standard of living in order to survive (try paying the bills without a phone, house, car, work clothes, haircuts, health-care, etc.) and must engage in wage-labor. And wage-labor actively reproduced the two social classes of capitalist and worker and their violently divergent relationships to the means of production. Without scarcity we couldn’t have wage labor. There would be no reason to work. Thus capitalism must constantly reproduce scarcity.


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
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri13.htm
I venture to prove for the whole council of philosophers – idealists as well as materialists – that the essence of the divergence of idealism and materialism in psychology lies precisely here, and that only Husserl’s and Feuerbach’s formulas give a consistent solution of the problem in the two possible variants and that the first is the formula of phenomenology and the second that of materialistic psychology. I venture, proceeding from this comparison, to cut the living tissue of psychology, cutting it as it were into two heterogeneous bodies which grew together by mistake. This is the only thing which corresponds with the objective order of things, and all debates, all disagreements, all confusion merely result from the absence of a clear and correct statement of the epistemological problem.

From this it follows that by only accepting from empirical psychology its formal acceptance of the mind, Frankfurt also accepts its whole epistemology and all its conclusions – he is forced to resort to phenomenology. It follows that by demanding a method for the study of the mind which corresponds to its qualitative nature, he is demanding a phenomenological method, although he does not realize it himself. His conception is the materialism of which Høffding [1908] is entirely justified in saying that it is “a miniature dualistic spiritualism.” Precisely “miniature,” i.e., with the attempt to reduce, quantitatively diminish the reality of the non-material mind, to leave 0.001 of influence for it. But the fundamental solution in no way depends on a quantitative statement of the question. It is one of two things: either god exists, or he does not; either the spirits of dead people manifest themselves, or they do not; either mental (spiritistic – for Watson) phenomena are non-material, or they are material. Answers which have the form “god exists, but he is very small,” or “the spirits of dead people do not manifest themselves, but tiny parts of them very rarely visit spiritists,” or “the mind is material, but distinct from all other matter,” are humorous. Lenin wrote of the “bogostroiteli” [”God-builders”] that they differ little from the “bogoiskateli” [”Godseekers”] [56]: what is important is to either accept or reject deviltry in general; to assume either a blue or a yellow devil does not make a big difference.

When one mixes up the epistemological problem with the ontological one by introducing into psychology not the whole argumentation but its final results, this leads to the distortion of both. In Russia the subjective is identified with the mental and later it is proved that the mental cannot be objective. Epistemological consciousness as part of the antinomy “subject-object” is confused with empirical, psychological consciousness and then it is asserted that consciousness cannot be material, that to assume this would be Machism. And as a result one ends up with neoplatonism, in the sense of infallible essences for which being and phenomenon coincide. They flee from idealism only to plunge into it headlong. They dread the identification of being with consciousness more than anything else and end up in psychology with their perfectly Husserlian identification. We must not mix up the relation between subject and object with the relation between mind and body, as Høffding [1908] splendidly explains. The distinction between mind [Geist] and matter is a distinction in the content of our knowledge. But the distinction between subject and object manifests itself independently from the content of our knowledge.

To which Vygotsky I think offers a solution and great analogy for consciousness.
Spoiler: show
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf
VYGOTSKY EXPLAINS this as follows.

Consider an object A (such as a table) which exists thanks to a natural process P, and the image of the table we see in a mirror α, thanks to a natural process π, involving light beams and reflective surfaces. The image α exists thanks to two objective processes, P and π. It would be absurd to identify A and α, to say the reflection of a table is a table. A is material and exists independently of α which is non-material. It would also be wrong to identify α with the optical processes which produce it, π. α is neither A nor π. Both A and π are real processes and α is their apparent, i.e., unreal result. The reflection does not exist, but both the table and the optical processes exist. The reflection of a table is identical neither with the real optical processes nor with the table itself.

Likewise in psychology, both the world outside the brain and the processes taking place in the brain, are objective, material processes, by definition, being outside of consciousness (the image), while on the other hand, consciousness is not material, it is a phantom. It is just as wrong to identify consciousness with the material processes which bring it about as it is to identify consciousness with the natural process it apprehends.

Just as a mirror cannot reflect image α, since a reflection presupposes a light source and α is not a light source, so introspection cannot apprehend its own thoughts. Introspection is itself an act of consciousness and a so-called state of the mind. It cannot step outside of itself to observe itself without that act of introspection.

Like the reflection, the thought is a phantom, a chimera, an illusion. But my consciousness is my illusion, and because I know that what I perceive is not the same as what exists outside of my consciousness, I can take action to verify my observations. I can look at things from different angles, I can compare with past experience, seek a second opinion, consult measuring devices, and so on, and by such means make my illusions truer and truer. There is not an absolute line separating truth from illusion. Every truth has an element of illusion and every illusion an element of truth. But one still has to know the difference, and the difference rests on the absolute difference between my consciousness and the material world outside of my consciousness.

Is that clear? The conclusion that consciousness is an illusion is useful because many adherents of physiological behaviourism will tell you that consciousness doesn’t exist, that it’s an illusion. They say this because having avoided the error mentioned above of identifying the image with the processes whereby it is produced, they find that there is no place where any image can be found. In the natural scientific sense consciousness does not exist, it is an illusion.

The thing is, that illusions exist. They exist as illusions, as phantoms, not in the same way as material things and processes exist. Consciousness is a real illusion; they are causes in relation to behaviour. So maybe this is a point where physiological behaviourists and cultural psychologists can have a conversation, and ask: “Well, how is that illusion created?” and “How is it that illusions guide behaviour?” and if people use these illusions to guide their behaviour, aren’t these illusions what we need to investigate? After all, it is sometime obvious what illusion a person is suffering from by observing their behaviour. A “real illusion,” and an illusion which has enough truth in it to allow people to live by it.

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.
#14962498
Ha, yes. I like your analogy on science comparing it to a production worker. I guess Science cannot answer all philosophical questions as an abstract or concept but only as an absolute. In other words it cannot answer the meaning but how that meaning comes about. After all, what is consciousness if it isn't the interactions of our senses to our surroundings and our mind creating the reality for us? But that is different to whether our world is idealism or materialism. That question is down to the philosopher. And from your sources I would suggest my opinion of consciousness is similar to yours BTW.

Nonetheless one thing I like about your posts Wellsy is that your sources for your opinion are very relevant and make things very clear in your thought processes.

After going though your post I am not going to tackle all of it as I think your arguments are very strong and I would only concur with everything you have written. But there are a few interesting things that you addressed where I wouldn't mind you clarifying. Firstly you say production needs to improve throughout the world before Communism can take over. So do you think Technocracy is the way forward? And if so, what do you think will happen to human progress when the need for advancement subsides? In other words can Communism advance or does society need to advance first to a point where there is no need to advance society further.

Second on Marx and his classless society. You say here that in a classless society we would not need a state? But what would run the means of production if not a state of some form? And can that state be a global entity or will culture result in many states? If it is the latter then borders are required in order to share the means of production among its residence. Only as a global entity is no borders required.

Third you imply Capitalism isn't primarily greedy as it based on the drive for profit which has a by product for inequality not greed - and Capitalists are also charitable. I agree with this. You also say greed cannot be made sense of. I would say it can. It is in our need to survive. However after reading your sources I am changing my view on greed. Humans by nature want to survive. If it is their best interest to work as a collective and share they will do that. It is just that because of the natural law, society has had hierarchy under every economic condition as that is natural to do so. That being the case what is the likelyhood of society changing when the power is and always has been with the bourgeois? Or is Marx correct when he says the workers must unite to enact change? I suspect so. But that just leads to another question which is when a proletariat leader does gain power, is it possible for any such person to look after the needs of the collective when history says they will inadvertently look after their own interests (greed) because revolutionary leaders are not known of their humane practices but their desire for power.
#14962640
B0ycey wrote:Ha, yes. I like your analogy on science comparing it to a production worker. I guess Science cannot answer all philosophical questions as an abstract or concept but only as an absolute. In other words it cannot answer the meaning but how that meaning comes about. After all, what is consciousness if it isn't the interactions of our senses to our surroundings and our mind creating the reality for us? But that is different to whether our world is idealism or materialism. That question is down to the philosopher. And from your sources I would suggest my opinion of consciousness is similar to yours BTW.

Nonetheless one thing I like about your posts Wellsy is that your sources for your opinion are very relevant and make things very clear in your thought processes.

After going though your post I am not going to tackle all of it as I think your arguments are very strong and I would only concur with everything you have written. But there are a few interesting things that you addressed where I wouldn't mind you clarifying. Firstly you say production needs to improve throughout the world before Communism can take over. So do you think Technocracy is the way forward? And if so, what do you think will happen to human progress when the need for advancement subsides? In other words can Communism advance or does society need to advance first to a point where there is no need to advance society further.

Second on Marx and his classless society. You say here that in a classless society we would not need a state? But what would run the means of production if not a state of some form? And can that state be a global entity or will culture result in many states? If it is the latter then borders are required in order to share the means of production among its residence. Only as a global entity is no borders required.

Third you imply Capitalism isn't primarily greedy as it based on the drive for profit which has a by product for inequality not greed - and Capitalists are also charitable. I agree with this. You also say greed cannot be made sense of. I would say it can. It is in our need to survive. However after reading your sources I am changing my view on greed. Humans by nature want to survive. If it is their best interest to work as a collective and share they will do that. It is just that because of the natural law, society has had hierarchy under every economic condition as that is natural to do so. That being the case what is the likelyhood of society changing when the power is and always has been with the bourgeois? Or is Marx correct when he says the workers must unite to enact change? I suspect so. But that just leads to another question which is when a proletariat leader does gain power, is it possible for any such person to look after the needs of the collective when history says they will inadvertently look after their own interests (greed) because revolutionary leaders are not known of their humane practices but their desire for power.



I take it that communists are distinct from technocrats in that the latter seem to fetishize technology in itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positii.htm
Bogdanov's philosophy is therefore like no other in holding on to those specific illusions of our century which have come to be called technocratic. The secret of these illusions is the idolisation of technology – technology of every type – from the technology of rocket design to the technology of dentistry, bomb-dropping or sound-recording. And with such an approach, the engineering and technological intelligentsia begin to resemble – both in their own eyes and in the eyes of others – a special caste of holy servants of this new divinity.

Bogdanov paints an inspired and poeticised portrait of these 'demi-gods' – the organisers and creators of progress – in his novel which is called Engineer Menny.

Yes, in writing his novel, Bogdanov tried to 'conceal' his Machism, expressing his views not in the language of theoretical essays, but in the language of artistic images. Only rarely is Machism offered here openly in words. But then what comes to the forefront is the propagation of the utopian conception about the role of engineers in the development of history and about the great advantages of their method of thinking over all other forms and methods of thinking.

The engineer Menny is endowed in the novel with all the characteristics of God-incarnate – completely in the spirit of the god-building tendencies of Russian Machism. This is the personified ideal of the super-engineer, the engineer-organiser. Bogdanov spares no colours in trying to portray the superhuman power of his brain, his superhuman will, and his absolute selflessness. But most of all, his organisational genius.

The sagacious Martian super-engineers understood what no one on Earth is able to understand. They understood that all so-called social problems are in actual fact, fundamentally, engineering and technological problems. And they should be solved by engineers, representatives of the scientific-technological elite, for only they are truly capable of investigating them in a qualified manner.

I have some skepticism of the supposed expert who sees themselves above others.
http://stdrogo.blogspot.com/2008/06/disciplined-minds-rowman-littlefield.html
First of all, although professionals may be liberal on this or that question of the day, they tend to be very conservative on a long-standing issue of much greater importance to society: democracy. Discuss politics with a liberal professional and you will not hear a word in favor of a more democratic distribution of power in society, perhaps because in the professional's view ignorant nonprofessionals make up the large majority of the population. Even the most liberal professionals tend towards authoritarianism in their social visions."

It’s unclear whether the elitism is inessential to common conceptions of technocracies.

I think there will always be problems that stimulate conflict and growth through solving it, communism won’t actually be heaven on earth, perfection without blemish. As such, there will always be change instead of stagnation ( ie death).
Spoiler: show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJIQfmWx3dI

It’s just class conflict will have presumably been done away with and the problems stemming from the conditions that underpin that conflict.

I haven’t answered for myself to what extent production needs to develop to the point that communism becomes plausible. But I suspect that it’s when the expansion of capital has successfully industrialized most of the world.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4
This "alienation" [caused by private property] can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an "intolerable" power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless", and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.



I am less sure on the state stuff or what Marx imagined communism to look like in this regard. But I’ve seen some assertions for decentralization based on his study of the Paris Commune.
http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3.htm
Those who accept the ‘Marxist’ version of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ may be surprised to hear that Marx favoured the Communard notion of decentralised government, in which

the rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the national delegation in Paris, each delegate to be revocable and bound by the mandat impératif [formal instruction of his constituents]. [Civil War in France]

In The Civil War in France, Marx is careful never to refer to the Commune as a state, but as a form of government which had tried to take over the functions of the state. Indeed, in an earlier draft of the ‘Address’, he put it like this:

The Commune – the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of die organised force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organised against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. [Civil War in France]

Considering what the Commune might have achieved, he speaks of

all France organised into self-working and self-governing communes ... the suffrage for the national representation not a matter of sleight-of-hand for an all-powerful government, but the deliberate expression of organised communes, the state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.
Such is the Commune – the political form of the social emancipation, of the liberation of labour from the usurpations (slave-holding) of the monopolists of the means of labour, created by the labourers themselves or forming the gift of nature. As the state machinery and parliamentarism are not the real life of the ruling classes, but only the organised general organs of their dominion, so the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action. [Civil War in France]

These words show why Marx never used the term ‘workers’ state’, later so widely employed by ‘Marxists’ to describe a particular form of centralised state power. When Bakunin asks, sarcastically, ‘There are about 40 million Germans. Does this mean that all 40 million will be members of the government?” Marx, in 1874, answers directly: ‘Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities. ... When class rule has disappeared, there will be no state in the present political sense.’

In his controversies with Proudhon, with Stirner and with Bakunin, what was at stake was not so much their call to ‘abolish the state’, but their refusal to consider what was the basis of the state. Only when private ownership of the means of labour, and thus the alienated form of labour, disappeared, would the state dissolve into the community. The socialist revolution was simply the way this historical process would be organised.

But to be honest I haven’t a clear thought on what Marx’s theorizing is meant to amount to as I don’t have a clear enough idea of the state to see how it is perhaps differentiated by certain governing functions.

Indeed, one doesn’t need to speak to the moral character of any individual to make sense of capitalist behaviours as their behaviour doesn’t originate from anything particularly nefarious or inherent to them, but them as people within certain relations (capitalist relations of production).
I have seen some points made by people arguing for the basis of greed being we desire things for our survival and that greed is just a matter in going too far with one’s wants at the expense of others. But when it comes to needs, as mentioned with Marx, we have created new needs than just biological instincts/drives. Which gets back to that M-C-M formula where the need of capitalists is to acquire more capital to invest and expand their capital, money becoming an end in itself.

I’m not sure what natural law represents in the class divisions of society other than perhaps the likely necessity of such class divisions in the development of production.
Indeed workers of the world must develop themselves into strong organizations if they’re to overturn what is already established.
Hmmm, your talk of leaders makes me think that future movements will be like the vanguard parties of Russia. But it’s unclear to me whether such a leader can emerge in today's political landscape of alliance politics.
Spoiler: show
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf
The radical politics of today operates on the terrain of alliance politics; this is the terrain which determines what actions are possible and what are not.

The anti-WTO protests are archetypical examples of alliance politics: a number of diverse organisations and individuals on their peripheries cooperate for several months to come together for a day or two to protest against a symbol of global capitalism, and then afterwards go their own way.

The participants do not call upon the WTO to do this or that (other than perhaps to disband), since the alliance does not have any consensus as to what the WTO ought to do. And in any case the alliance does not aspire to supplant the WTO or to engage with it. The symbolic target simply functions to represent what everyone is against, but by no means establishes anything that everyone is for.

Where different participating groups collaborate in organising the event, very strict protocols apply regulating the collaboration. Discussions are for the purpose of achieving the basic practical goals of the protest, who will be where when, or for providing relevant information. Selection of demands and slogans is carried out collectively where possible, though this is often not possible. On the radical wing of the alliance logic pushes demands to the left to such an extent that mutually irreconcilable demands are put, functioning more as an expression of ethical principles than elements of an agreed program.

The events are generally triumphs of organisation (at least until a change of plan is required). The whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts, let alone any of the parts taken separately, that any idea of it being a front for one or another of the participating currents is nonsense and anyone silly enough to pose as leader is bound to make an idiot of themselves. Consensus decision-making prevails throughout and all forms of hidden agenda, egotism or manipulation are verboten.

The more typical manifestation of alliance politics though is where a campaign is initiated to effect some change in the law or stop some local government initiative or whatever. The range of possibilities offered by the terrain of alliance politics is vast and far from exhausted. If the "gatekeepers" of local communities, for example, organisers of voluntary organisations and so on, were to devote only a small proportion of their energies to maintaining their network, then the potential to draw on the network for the purpose of alliance politics when needed would be enormous.

The only mistake, however, would be to cast such alliances as "movements" or worse still to try to organise them into a "front" or a "party". People are busy enough defending the local nature reserve or eradicating some disability or whatever, without dealing with someone trying to convert them to the new religion.

But of course people will try. All the participants in an alliance have their political beliefs and their own critique of contemporary society, whether or not they belong to a party or some social movement, so to exclude people from an alliance on the basis of their political affiliation undermines the whole basis for alliance politics. Unfortunately, the leftwing socialist parties more often than not so misunderstand the terrain of alliance politics and their participation can be so destructive that they are increasingly likely to be excluded from alliances.

The socialists have largely misrecognised the rise of alliance politics as a resurrection of social movements after a few decades of quiet or "retreat"; that is, they see the period of identity politics which came out of the social movements as a "down-turn", and the negation of identity politics into alliance politics as an "up-turn". Since the social movements of the 1960s were largely misrecognised as fronts which parties had to subvert or lead, their apparent reappearance in the 1990s and 2000s means that many left socialist parties see the succession of alliances as movements that they have a duty to split and co-opt.

The way these alliance campaigns happen today differs from the "fronts" of some decades or more ago. Those fronts would usually be initiated by a political party which sought both to further its own objectives and to extend its influence, setting up relationships with those joining the front, hopefully recruiting them. Work in the Front was party work, and while internal party work still had a distinct existence aside from work in the fronts, the two domains of activity were closely interconnected and mutually supporting.

The relationship also differs from that of the political parties and the social movements of the 1960s, where the participants were united by a very specific ideal. Big campaigns like the opposition to the Springbok tour in New Zealand, for example, manifested the kind of diversity of today's alliances, but whatever the diversity of the participants, all could formulate the rationale for their participation on much the same basis, in support of the unifying ideal, the objectification of which was sought.

The relationship between left political parties and the social movements was always complex of course. The social movements provided a genuine and essential opportunity for political currents to contribute to the debate over tactics and strategy and compete for leadership while their members collaborated in pursuit of the ideal. The left parties also faced the problem of social movements competing for the loyalty and energies of their members, which would otherwise be engaged in "party work". Alliance politics poses similar but different challenges. Insofar as it is distinct from participating in alliances at all, "party work" has become quite separate, even antagonistic and irrelevant to any form of politics.

The point is: the '80s and '90s were not a "downturn" but a change in the terrain, albeit terrain in which the gulf between the politics of equality and redistributive justice and the politics of recognition and representation opened to its widest.

Political organisations participating in an alliance ought to know that attempts to "take over" alliances or manipulate them cannot succeed, and they shouldn't try. This does not prevent alliance campaigns from functioning as a recruiting ground. Indeed, they are near to being the only recruiting ground available for political parties.

In the chapter called What's Next?, Klein gives an accurate exposition of the error of trying to transform the anti-WTO alliances into a party or movement:

"So how do you extract coherence from a movement filled with anarchists, ...? Maybe, as with the internet, the best approach is to learn to surf the structures that are emerging organically. Perhaps what is needed is not a single political party but better links among the affinity groups; perhaps rather than moving towards more centralisation, what is needed is further radical decentralisation.
"When critics say that the protesters lack vision, they are really objecting to a lack of an overarching revolutionary philosophy ... that they all agree on. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful. At the moment, the anti-corporate movement, the anti-corporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, eager for the opportunity to enlist activists as foot soldiers for their particular vision. …
"It is to this young movement's credit that it has as yet fended off all these agendas and has rejected everyone's generously donated manifesto, holding out for an acceptably democratic, representative process to take its resistance to the next stage. Perhaps it’s true challenge is not finding a vision but rather resisting the urge to settle on one too quickly. If it succeeds in warding off the teams of visionaries-in-waiting, there will be some short-term public relations problems. Serial protesting will turn some people off ... before it signs on to anyone's tenpoint plan, it deserves the chance to see if, out of its chaotic network of hubs and spokes, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge." [Fences and Windows]

And in fact, the real target of the mass alliance political protests is not the giant capitalist corporations - which in fact alliances are powerless to stop - but rather the ethical foundations upon which these corporations rest, and the struggles of resistance against these corporations may be the site from which a new ethic may emerge.

True to your sentiment that a new ethical basis is needed for a sustainable change, the political landscape may well just offer that.
And I’m presuming that should one actually have dissolved the law of value (dominance of exchange value) in production, then one will have presumably destroyed the basis of classes and it becomes difficult for there to be a power over a people’s as the organization of production is more directly in the hands of communities of people.
#14962815
Wellsy wrote:I take it that communists are distinct from technocrats in that the latter seem to fetishize technology in itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positii.htm


This is true. Although Technocracy is the modern day industrialisation and would achieve the means of production without the headache of surplus labor. Not that it is necessary for Communism of course. In many ways perhaps humanity needs a degree of manual labor to survive. Unless we want to become the blubbering mess we see in Wall-E.

I think there will always be problems that stimulate conflict and growth through solving it, communism won’t actually be heaven on earth, perfection without blemish. As such, there will always be change instead of stagnation ( ie death).
Spoiler: show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJIQfmWx3dI


Actually I think you are right. Dialectical Materialism doesn't just stop when Communism is achieved. Progress is inevitable whatever economic platform we use and as such so contradictions will arise. But the rate of change will stagnate under Communism because the desire for profit is eliminated and replaced with necessity. Nonetheless you could argue that Western life is already sufficient anyway to not require change and that any advancement would instead be focused on our desire to learn and not progress.

I am less sure on the state stuff or what Marx imagined communism to look like in this regard. But I’ve seen some assertions for decentralization based on his study of the Paris Commune.
http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3.htm

But to be honest I haven’t a clear thought on what Marx’s theorizing is meant to amount to as I don’t have a clear enough idea of the state to see how it is perhaps differentiated by certain governing functions.


You are not the only one who is unsure by what Marx imagined Communism to look like. I doubt Marx was sure actually. Although I never knew he was pro centralised government - but I am not surprised that he was autonomous and to achieve concensus he wanted a democratic system of delegates nonetheless. This should interest One Degree as he can't stop shutting up about autonomy.

Indeed, one doesn’t need to speak to the moral character of any individual to make sense of capitalist behaviours as their behaviour doesn’t originate from anything particularly nefarious or inherent to them, but them as people within certain relations (capitalist relations of production).
I have seen some points made by people arguing for the basis of greed being we desire things for our survival and that greed is just a matter in going too far with one’s wants at the expense of others. But when it comes to needs, as mentioned with Marx, we have created new needs than just biological instincts/drives. Which gets back to that M-C-M formula where the need of capitalists is to acquire more capital to invest and expand their capital, money becoming an end in itself.


I quite like you analysis here Wellsy. The understanding I get from it is that as M-C-M is not natural but a behaviour that advances someone's wealth in society, we have the ability to adapt to our surroundings accordingly. As that is true and that it is also true that society is a human invention and the practices we adhere to within it are also not natural then humans have the ability to change their nature for the desire of change not greed. And that would mean Communism is possible.

True to your sentiment that a new ethical basis is needed for a sustainable change, the political landscape may well just offer that.
And I’m presuming that should one actually have dissolved the law of value (dominance of exchange value) in production, then one will have presumably destroyed the basis of classes and it becomes difficult for there to be a power over a people’s as the organization of production is more directly in the hands of communities of people.


I think a code of ethics is what is needed for Communism just on the fact it is ethical. But I am more interested in your last sentence. Do you think Capitalism will destroy itself or does it need revolution? Because if it destroys itself, wealth and power will disappear and society will become more equal by the fact we all have nothing. But in revolution wealth and power doesn't disappear it changes hands. To me it seems like Communism can only succeed if states are forced to change their economic structure rather than revolutionary leaders having to create a new state from scratch. Just a thought.
#14963239
B0ycey wrote:This is true. Although Technocracy is the modern day industrialisation and would achieve the means of production without the headache of surplus labor. Not that it is necessary for Communism of course. In many ways perhaps humanity needs a degree of manual labor to survive. Unless we want to become the blubbering mess we see in Wall-E.

This piece might be relevant in regards to emphasizing against a technocratic group the point that work is crucial to what it is to be human and not something to be done away with entirely because it’s alienated under capitalism.
Spoiler: show
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/law-of-value-6-socially-necessary-labor-time/
This seems to be the big question whenever we critique capitalism. Surely labor will always take time and we must have a way of coordinating labor to produce all of the goods society needs. Surely this labor must not just produce immediate goods but also surplus goods, as well as invest in long-term projects like infrastructure and machines that will make work better in the future. So we can’t say that we want to produce a society without work, without time, without surplus product, or without machines. (4)
...
4. No doubt many viewers are familiar with the ramblings of the “Zeitgeist Movement”. These folks believe that technology can liberate us from all work, establishing a labor-free, money-free paradise where robots do everything for us. These folks also believe, in some form or another, than the liberating potential of machines is being kept from society by the conspiring powers of bankers and other elites tied to “the money system”. As much as I share their desire for a society with out money, bankers, elites, over-work, etc, I am very critical of many of their explanations of the way capitalism works (they don’t use the word capitalist much actually) and the solutions these critiques point them towards. Chief amongst these complaints of mine is their notion of work. They have essentially projected the capitalist experience of work onto the entire experience of work for all time and space, implying that the universal nature of work is evil, something to be avoided.

In contrast Marx sees work as the very substance of society, the thing that binds us together as it shapes our social life. The organization of our work effects how we understand our selves individually and collectively. I think that radicals need to recast the nature of work in a potentially liberating way.

Similarly the Zeitgeist folks are entirely saturated by the contradictory experience of machines in a capitalist society. On the one hand machines fascinate us with their amazing, seemingly-liberatory potential. On the other hand the reality of the machine is that it is a tool for control of the labor process at the expense of the worker and that the consequences of technology are often socially, environmentally biologically, and psychologically degrading.

The Zeitgeist folks make the assumption, then, that if we just had more machines then the problem would be solved. They share the bourgeois romance of the machine as liberator. Without going into an argument as to the ability of machines to replace all human labor, I would question what we would do without some sort of social labor. What would be the point of anything? As well, I wonder that if machines could really do everything that people could do, including much of our creative labor as the Zeitgeist folks claim, would they not be conscious entities of some sort capable of refusing work, of withholding labor, of claiming some sort of juridical rights in society? I believe that in posing alternatives to capitalism we should aim to heal the separation of conception and execution in the capitalist labor process, not to carry that separation to a further level of alienation.


Actually I think you are right. Dialectical Materialism doesn't just stop when Communism is achieved. Progress is inevitable whatever economic platform we use and as such so contradictions will arise. But the rate of change will stagnate under Communism because the desire for profit is eliminated and replaced with necessity. Nonetheless you could argue that Western life is already sufficient anyway to not require change and that any advancement would instead be focused on our desire to learn and not progress.

Indeed!
I actually wonder whether it will stagnate in that I feel that the forced production to produce profit both undermines and is a fetter to some developments.
People currently do their best work when they’re more free to pursue what they want to do, because people often want to do what’s good, taking pride in their work. When it comes to money, the goal is to pay someone enough that they don’t have to think about it, basically they can live comfortable and securely without fear of financial crises.
There are many motives, at such a high state of production and development, it may well be that other motives best serve humanity after having done away with capitalism’s poverty and having at the base of everything, a price.
Certain things are already found with how people function in capitalism, what better motivates and under what conditions people prosper. And financial insecurity, paying a little bit extra is only better for better output for simple tasks, but not the complicated labour needed in much of a modern economy.


Having to deal with a lot of the shit that comes with people making a profit might even make many things efficient. For example, having moved to America, I am disgusted and annoyed with having to fuck around with multiple insurance companies depending on the area of health compared to back home in Australia with medicare/universal health care.
Everyone trying to take their piece as middle men and so on seems to be more of a hassle than help. Makes me wonder in what ways the necessity of profit fetters the potential of what we can do. Just like how factories and places of employment/work lay idle due to financial crisis (crisis of exchange value, not use-value), or how much work simply isn’t done that is needed because it doesn’t make money.

You are not the only one who is unsure by what Marx imagined Communism to look like. I doubt Marx was sure actually. Although I never knew he was pro centralised government - but I am not surprised that he was autonomous and to achieve concensus he wanted a democratic system of delegates nonetheless. This should interest One Degree as he can't stop shutting up about autonomy.

Indeed, but I’m not quite sure Marx’s vision realizes his sense of communities or city states. But I guess that’s up to the particulars of the means and the ends.
Marx does seem a bit unsure in that I’ve seen it asserted that Marx actually waited for a historical example like the Paris Commune before theorizing further, in that he wasn’t constructing a perfect image but theorizing from what was happening empirically. https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/criterion-truth.htm
The thing is, I think, that for Marx, with his proto-Activity Theory presented in the Theses, the truth is itself a property of Activity. That is not the same as saying that activity proves the truth of a proposition, as if you can have a theory, and then try it out, and be proved wrong or right. Marx waited till the Paris Commune before he clarified a number of questions which were left open in the Communist Manifesto. Marx did not try to reason this out in his head. He did not make a proposal and see if it worked, but rather followed the movement of the working class and tried to give voice to it. The section of “Method of Political Economy” in the Grundrisse most clearly explains this difficult point contra Hegel.

Many things have to be solved in practice before they’re clear theoretically, ideals remain at best possibilities which may not easily end up their ideal end but yet a realized end.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/means-ends.htm
The overall process is one in which the subject tries to realise itself; the existing object is the means, and the result is not the End which was foreshadowed in the new concept, but the Realized End, which differs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the original End which motivated the subject. The End turns into the Realized End, and the object is now the Realized End, and this changed object is now what the subject utilizes as the means to a reformulated End. The Realized End is the objectification of the Subject, and the process continues until there is no difference between subject and object.


I quite like you analysis here Wellsy. The understanding I get from it is that as M-C-M is not natural but a behaviour that advances someone's wealth in society, we have the ability to adapt to our surroundings accordingly. As that is true and that it is also true that society is a human invention and the practices we adhere to within it are also not natural then humans have the ability to change their nature for the desire of change not greed. And that would mean Communism is possible.

We adapt to our surroundings but we aren’t passive to it, but change it and it is in being able to change it that we can create ourselves.
[url]ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm[/url]
But Feuerbach failed to go beyond the point reached by Helvetius. He too conceived of man as a purely passive recipient of stimuli supplied by nature and as the product of education, circumstances, and influences of nature acting upon him; he forgot that ‘it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating’.[34] Man changes not only in response to the influence of nature upon him, but also in reacting upon nature in his struggle for existence. Changing nature he changes the environment and changing the conditions of life, he changes himself.

But we do not choose what conditions we are ‘thrown into’, we must work from what we’ve got.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.


The capitalist adapts to his position as a capitalist to the necessities of the economy, as it stands with the world that everyone feels compelled by the market forces, we’re dominated by things and this is even quite clear for nation states. The capitalist no matter how kind, if they wish to remain a capitalist must compete within the market. The idea being we are subjected to the social laws of our creation unless we change them so that we’re subject to new/different onces. Historically, people have thought they could avoid essential characteristics of a capitalist economy that have since repeated themselves through the centuries.
At present, the view of the economy for some is that it is incomprehensible and uncontrollable.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/value.htm
The complexity people have discovered a new grave-digger for capitalism: the very complexity which makes the world economy of today qualitatively more "intelligent" than any dictator or bureaucracy or any computer program, in other words, more powerful than any "planned economy" (in the sense that Lenin described in State & Revolution), is not only essentially unpredictable and uncontrollable but inherently prone to catastrophe. The forces of production, the accumulated products of our own labour, have grown beyond the power of even our understanding let only our control and threaten to destroy humanity altogether.

The measure of the usefulness of human labour, value, a social construction which began life as a measure of how human beings spend their time, became a measure of the usefulness of things, has lost all contact with human labour or needs, but dominates our lives.

As always, value arises only through the medium of exchange. A thing which is not put up for exchange has no value in the sense of economics. The fact that there is increasingly little relation between value and usefulness or human happiness or anything else, is a fact; a fact which can be deplored but cannot be redefined. The real fiction which is value can only be transformed by eradicating the conditions upon which it rests - production for exchange.

Recognising that value is a social construct, we have to socially construct a new system of production-consumption relations in which human time is consciously allocated in accordance with a person's need to live humanly, without the aid of commodity exchange, without concern for efficiency or profit margins; at the same time, we must eschew the notion of centralised planning which is a step backwards, but unleash the full potential of complexity of 4,000,000,000 human wills acting under their own creative direction towards collective ends. This means terminating exchange-value altogether: to each according to her needs, from each according to her ability.

It is a daunting task, but it is the only task worth doing. I don't know just now how that can be done, but I believe this defines the problem to be solved, for the moment.

No amount of understanding solves any problem, it needs to be solved in actuality, in practice, but of course action needs to be guided by some conscious understanding or it is blind.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.


I think a code of ethics is what is needed for Communism just on the fact it is ethical. But I am more interested in your last sentence. Do you think Capitalism will destroy itself or does it need revolution? Because if it destroys itself, wealth and power will disappear and society will become more equal by the fact we all have nothing. But in revolution wealth and power doesn't disappear it changes hands. To me it seems like Communism can only succeed if states are forced to change their economic structure rather than revolutionary leaders having to create a new state from scratch. Just a thought.

No it needs a revolution of some sort according to Marx. The proletariat are the subjects of his work who must organize to bring about the new kind of world. There is no inevitability to capitalism destroying itself somehow and resulting in something new except through people’s actions. At most crisis of capitalism only spur people to do something, they may well destroy themselves and each other than successfully change things. It is chaos with much risk but hopefully with opportunity.
Indeed, those in power are often in best position to adapt to new conditions/circumstances historically, thus retaining wealth and power.
But I do think it the case that the economics is what is crucial to creating communism, as altering the state doesn’t solve anything as the state isn’t the root problem.

I haven’t been able to study it beyond most superficial glances of terminology but my stance at the moment sees appeal in this fella’s line of thought.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/indirectly-social-labor/
The distinction between this humanist reading and the circulationist reading still may seem trivial. After all, SNLT only exists because we produce for exchange. Exchange plays a vital role in the process of regulating labor in a capitalist economy where private labors happen in relative isolation from each other. However the distinction becomes more crucial once we consider the nature of labor in the state-planned economies of the USSR. Soviet economists claimed to operate under the law of value, to produce commodities, similarly to capitalism. However they also claimed that they were doing so consciously, using the law of value to their advantage, as a conscious tool of state planning. This meant, according to Soviet economists, that while other categories of capitalist production may have been at play, labor was directly social. It was directly social because it was planned by people, not blind economic forces. This was meant to prove the socialist nature of their state-planning.10

But if we understand indirectly social labor to be the result of socially necessary labor time then it does not matter whether this labor’s social nature is realized by a market or by a plan. What gives it its indirectly social nature is the fact that one hour of my work is not worth as much as another’s. Labors are not treated equally. Instead a process of social averaging takes place which rewards some labors and punishes others. The mechanism which realizes or reinforces this does not alter matters. This argument has been used to argue that the USSR was actually a state-capitalist society, not a communist society. Such a claim requires an empirical analysis of the organization of the USSR, something outside the topic of this book. [cite mh and ticktin] What is important for our purposes here is to show the relevance and importance of the category of indirectly social labor. It is clearly a central concept to grapple with if we are to know how not to repeat the mistakes of the USSR as well as know how to build a real communist society in the future.

The idea of directly social labor, the dissolution of disciplining labor by socially necessary labor time and such seem important concepts in what is needed to achieve socialism and communism.
#14963322
@B0ycey
I don’t shut up about autonomy because repetition is what actually gets people to gradually consider an idea. Say it once and no one hears you. Only by hearing it repeatedly do they get irritated enough to refute it and therefore must consider it’s merits.
How does it go, “dismiss it as heresy, attack it, accept it as self evident” :)
#14967962
I don't think that the Amish were communists. They were somewhat progressive for a few reasons. They rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church. They banned advertising, and resisted imperialism. But the Amish didn't have the proper sense of reality. They believed in things that had no factual proof, such as an existence of a god, or an afterlife. And the Amish promoted some values that capitalist and feudalist societies used to control societies. Here are some of those values:

Family - The Amish were family oriented, they believed that being born into a big family was a "blessing from god." The Amish promoted traditional gender roles; masculine men and submissive women. "Faithful" wives and leading husbands and fathers were the Amish standard. They did celebrations, which causes some local drama. The Amish respected marriage.

Religion - The Amish were very much into religion, and used that to cope with uncertainty.

Currency - The Amish never aimed to abolish currency or the concept of value, but rather promoted simple living (which by modern standards is similar to poverty). There were even some Amish people who were wealthier, many of whom owned Family oriented enterprises such as small farms or furniture companies.

If the Amish were socialists, they would only relate to Christian Socialism. Christian Socialism has little in common with realist and materialist socialism. Christian socialism was the forerunner of realist socialism. Anyone who was a true socialist prior to the industrial revolution would need to use Christianity as a tool to defend their socialist ways of thinking and realizing. Christian beliefs such as "The love of money is the root of all evil" or other values that some Christians promoted like "money doesn't buy love" were used by socialists because socialist thought on a massive scale at the time before the industrial revolution was not only hard to understand for most uneducated slaves, farmers, peasants, and workers, but was also unacceptable, and in some countries, it would mean a death sentence. So socialists at the time would use Christian Socialism to get by, because steps that were too big at the time (such as denouncing family, promoting feminism and masturbation, or being an atheist) could get one executed.
#14976127
@B0ycey
I am currently (slightly) frustrated that I don't have the knowledge in order to effectively argue, in a nuanced way, what we discussed once in the Amish thread in regards to greed being a problem for the possibility of communism. I don't feel I satisfactorily answered the dilemma in part because I don't know how to conceptualize the predicament.
I fall into a trap of sounding like I'm explaining away greed as if it only originated within Capitalism or something. Where the concept of Greed is difficult to explain because it feels merely posited without rational explanation of how one comes to feel/express and then eventually realize greed in practice.
So far my thoughts have been to not argue against the existence of greed but it's realization (that it is actualized into anything in the real world rather than mere fantasy).
Where private property is the basis of a egotistical self-interest, the objective basis of it, as it develops through history upon a sense of having.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man – intelligence and the physical capacity for work – from the powers derived from society – exchange and division of labour, which mutually condition one another. But the necessary premise of exchange is private property. Skarbek here expresses in an objective form what Smith, Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they designate egoism and self-interest as the basis of exchange, and buying and selling as the essential and adequate form of exchange.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm#081
Man produces only in order to have – this is the basic presupposition of private property. The aim of production is having. And not only does production have this kind of useful aim; it has also a selfish aim; man produces only in order to possess for himself; the object he produces is the objectification of his immediate, selfish need. For man himself – in a savage, barbaric condition – therefore, the amount of his production is determined by the extent of his immediate need, the content of which is directly the object produced.

Under these conditions, therefore, man produces no more than he immediately requires. The limit of his need forms the limit of his production. Thus demand and supply exactly coincide. The extent of his production is measured by his need. In this case no exchange takes place, or exchange is reduced to the exchange of his labour for the product of his labour, and this exchange is the latent form, the germ, of real exchange.

As soon as exchange takes place, a surplus is produced beyond the immediate limit of possession. But this surplus production does not mean rising above selfish need. On the contrary, it is only an indirect way of satisfying a need which finds its objectification not in this production but in the production of someone else. Production has become a means of gaining a living, labour to gain a living. Whereas under the first state of affairs, therefore, need is the measure of production, under the second state of affairs production, or rather ownership of the product, is the measure of how far needs can be satisfied.

I have produced for myself and not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me. In itself, the result of my production has as little connection with you as the result of your production has directly with me. That is to say, our production is not man's production for man as a man, i.e., it is not social production. Neither of us, therefore, as a man stands in a relation of enjoyment to the other's product. As men, we do not exist as far as our respective products are concerned. Hence our exchange, too, cannot be the mediating process by which it is confirmed that my product is [for] you, because it is an objectification of your own nature, your need. For it is not man's nature that forms the link between the products we make for one another. Exchange can only set in motion, only confirm, the character of the relation which each of us has in regard to his own product, and therefore to the product of the other. Each of us sees in his product only the objectification of his own selfish need, and therefore in the product of the other the objectification of a different selfish need, independent of him and alien to him.

As a man you have, of course, a human relation to my product: you have need of my product. Hence it exists for you as an object of your desire and your will. But your need, your desire, your will, are powerless as regards my product. That means, therefore, that your human nature, which accordingly is bound to stand in intimate relation to my human production, is not your power over this production, your possession of it, for it is not the specific character, not the power, of man's nature that is recognised in my production. They [your need, your desire, etc.] constitute rather the tie which makes you dependent on me, because they put you in a position of dependence on my product. Far from being the means which would give you power over my production, they are instead the means for giving me power over you.

When I produce more of an object than I myself can directly use, my surplus production is cunningly calculated for your need. It is only in appearance that I produce a surplus of this object. In reality I produce a different object, the object of your production, which I intend to exchange against this surplus, an exchange which in my mind I have already completed. The social relation in which I stand to you, my labour for your need, is therefore also a mere semblance, and our complementing each other is likewise a mere semblance, the basis of which is mutual plundering. The intention of plundering, of deception, is necessarily present in the background, for since our exchange is a selfish one, on your side as on mine, and since the selfishness of each seeks to get the better of that of the other, we necessarily seek to deceive each other. It is true though, that the power which I attribute to my object over yours requires your recognition in order to become a real power. Our mutual recognition of the respective powers of our objects, however, is a struggle, and in a struggle the victor is the one who has more energy, force, insight, or adroitness. If I have sufficient physical force, I plunder you directly. If physical force cannot be used, we try to impose on each other by bluff, and the more adroit overreaches the other. For the totality of the relationship, it is a matter of chance who overreaches whom. The ideal, intended overreaching takes place on both sides, i.e., each in his own judgment has overreached the other.

Historically though private property was still in a sense dominated by it being communal, where it truly becomes private under capitalism, which is also when the idea of the individual subject also tends to emerge and develop as an abstract concept.
Where I can point to the inability for a concept of personal greed in certain social formations because of the necessity of communal life dominating any individual.
The idea being that greed as an idea and desire or what ever doesn't get erased, but is unable to be realized within a communist society and is thwarted in itself development due to the nature of social relations compared to capitalist social relations which make it a necessity against one's desire to be so.

To which I think Marx might be useful in trying to explain some parts of this relationship between private property in its modern sense of belonging privately to a particular person, a sense of having an object. Because historically, things are accepted uncritically in the empirical fashion of political economists rather than explained in their origins and thus their connection to one another.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws – i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy – competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate – for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.


But in regards to human nature, what I initially attempted to do was to explain how external relations and their influence ends up being asserted as subjective/psychological drive of human beings in general when the needs and desires of human beings can not be made sense of abstracted from their activity within the real world and thus the limits and tendencies set upon mankind from those relations.
The selfishness inherent to the nature of private property as summarized by Marx in his comments on James Mill, is posited as man eternal.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm
The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor. It, therefore, goes without saying that only that political economy which recognized labor as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no longer regarded private property as nothing more than a condition external to man, can be regarded as both a product of the real energy and movement of private property (it is the independent movement of private property become conscious of itself, it is modern industry as self), a product of modern industry, and a factor which has accelerated and glorified the energy and development of this industry and transformed it into a power belonging to consciousness. Therefore, the supporters of the monetary and mercantile system, who look upon private property as a purely objective being for man, appear as fetish-worshippers, as Catholics, to this enlightened political economy, which has revealed – within the system of private property – the subjective essence of wealth. Engels was, therefore, right to call Adam Smith the Luther of political economy [in Engels 1843 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy]. Just as Luther recognized religion and faith as the essence of the external world and, in consequence, confronted Catholic paganism; just as he transcended religion external religiosity by making religiosity the inner essence of man; just as he negated the idea of priests as something separate and apart from the layman by transferring the priest into the heart of the layman; so wealth as something outside man, and independent of him – and, therefore, only to be acquired acquired and maintained externally – is abolished [aufgehoben]. i.e., its external and mindless objectivity is abolished inasmuch as private property is embodied in man himself and man himself is recognized as its essence – but this brings man himself into the province of religion. So, although political economy, whose principle is labor, appears to recognize man, it is, in fact, nothing more than the denial of man carried through to its logical conclusion: for man himself no longer stands in a relation of external tension to the external essence of private property – he himself has become the tense essence of private property. What was formerly being-external-to-oneself, man's material externalization, has now become the act of alienation – i.e., alienation through selling [Verausserung]. This political economy, therefore, starts out by seeming to recognize man, his independence, his spontaneous activity, etc. Since it transfers private property into the very being of man, it can no longer be conditioned by local or national features of private property as something existing outside it.

The point being that under different relations and new activity, humanity differs because mans labor and relation to the world which he labors upon is different. Marx's sense of communism is based on a humanized nature, whilst in capitalism man is reduced to animal and loses his human sensibility, with every human sense to be instead replaced by the sense of having.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm#44CC6
Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed].

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.


So I'm not sure how much I advance the matter but I did hope that this might try and clarify my thinking on it and might be interesting to you.

And this post was all stimulated because really I just wanted to share a quote that resonated with my earlier attempt to explain that capitalist's aren't necessarily driven by greed as much as necessity of the mode of production. When I read it I immediately thought of our discussion.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling5.htm#Pill7
It is important in this respect to stress that for Marx capital is not merely expanding value, but self-expanding value. The constant drive to expand value (‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!) arises not from something ‘external’ to capital, such as the ‘disposition’ or motives of the capitalist. It arises from something intrinsic to the very nature of capital itself. From the point of view of the owner of capital he is driven along by competition. But this is only the appearance of things, albeit a necessary one. For in capital are revealed in outward form the immanent laws of capital (‘competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external and coercive laws’, as Marx at one point says). It is for this reason that throughout his work Marx sees the capitalist as the personification of capital.

He is a capitalist, and remains so, only in so far as his behaviour is subordinated to the objective, independently existing laws of capital. And this subordination never arises from conscious plan or desire - it is a force which imposes itself upon the capitalist through laws which operate necessarily behind his back. Of course the capitalist always starts out with ‘aims’, but these aims are determined entirely by the objective nature of capital. The capitalist ‘starts’ with a sum of money, M. Naturally, as a ‘practical’ man he never examines this starting point. He never examines the historical and social conditions which alone enable him to turn this money into capital. But notwithstanding this, he remains a prisoner of these conditions. He remains a capitalist only to the extent that his aims are in accordance with the needs of definite social relations.
#14976137
Wellsy wrote:@B0ycey
I am currently (slightly) frustrated that I don't have the knowledge in order to effectively argue, in a nuanced way, what we discussed once in the Amish thread in regards to greed being a problem for the possibility of communism. I don't feel I satisfactorily answered the dilemma in part because I don't know how to conceptualize the predicament.
I fall into a trap of sounding like I'm explaining away greed as if it only originated within Capitalism or something. Where the concept of Greed is difficult to explain because it feels merely posited without rational explanation of how one comes to feel/express and then eventually realize greed in practice.


You need to look into the study of praxology to perhaps understand why greed is a factor in the things we do - and by default why it could be a problem with the creation of Communism.

Also, self interest according to Adams creates progress and enhances personal wealth - which is also a consideration in why greed is a factor in advanced societies. And he has a point. If you take self interest away then where does wealth and progress come from? Why would anyone serve a system that does not provide gratification? Nonetheless you are not wrong in believing Capitalism has enhanced our greed behaviour. It has to. Its function relies on it.

So far my thoughts have been to not argue against the existence of greed but it's realization (that it is actualized into anything in the real world rather than mere fantasy).
Where private property is the basis of a egotistical self-interest, the objective basis of it, as it develops through history upon a sense of having.

Historically though private property was still in a sense dominated by it being communal, where it truly becomes private under capitalism, which is also when the idea of the individual subject also tends to emerge and develop as an abstract concept.
Where I can point to the inability for a concept of personal greed in certain social formations because of the necessity of communal life dominating any individual.
The idea being that greed as an idea and desire or what ever doesn't get erased, but is unable to be realized within a communist society and is thwarted in itself development due to the nature of social relations compared to capitalist social relations which make it a necessity against one's desire to be so.


I think you have a point and I agree with you here. Humans are just like any other creature and they will adapt to their surroundings and always look after their self interest first. So if it is best to look after the collective interest to maintain their own interest they will do that. Under capitalism there is not much will to do that and so private property is a thing. If we were to work as social creatures and share our possessions then it gives Communism a chance. Nonetheless it must be a factor that a high number of people will need to give up what they have gained first against their current self interest (you could forcably remove I guess), for the best of the group and that any form of hierarchy within a socialist system you create first would need to avoid any form of corruption for Communism to have a chance of existing as well. And these are traits that are factors found within humanities desire for greed today that need to be over thrown tomorrow btw.

To which I think Marx might be useful in trying to explain some parts of this relationship between private property in its modern sense of belonging privately to a particular person, a sense of having an object. Because historically, things are accepted uncritically in the empirical fashion of political economists rather than explained in their origins and thus their connection to one another.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm


Well I agree with Marx. Doesn't everyone want the sense of having? The problem I see today is that whilst Capitalism provides sufficiently for the majority of Western people they will accept the inequality of the system to maintain what they have as it is in their interest to do so. In other words, it is not in their self interest to over throw a system that they in some form profit from. When that is no longer true they will over throw the system. But then what? Will Napoleon provide for the nation that gave him the farm or just turn into another farmer? Will he go against his own self interest for the good of the collective or will he take the collectives interest over his? History says he will look after is own self interest over that of the collective. But for Communism to work he needs to look after the collectives interest over his own.

But in regards to human nature, what I initially attempted to do was to explain how external relations and their influence ends up being asserted as subjective/psychological drive of human beings in general when the needs and desires of human beings can not be made sense of abstracted from their activity within the real world and thus the limits and tendencies set upon mankind from those relations.
The selfishness inherent to the nature of private property as summarized by Marx in his comments on James Mill, is posited as man eternal.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm

The point being that under different relations and new activity, humanity differs because mans labor and relation to the world which he labors upon is different. Marx's sense of communism is based on a humanized nature, whilst in capitalism man is reduced to animal and loses his human sensibility, with every human sense to be instead replaced by the sense of having.


So I'm not sure how much I advance the matter but I did hope that this might try and clarify my thinking on it and might be interesting to you.

And this post was all stimulated because really I just wanted to share a quote that resonated with my earlier attempt to explain that capitalist's aren't necessarily driven by greed as much as necessity of the mode of production. When I read it I immediately thought of our discussion.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling5.htm#Pill7


I always enjoy and is interested in your input and clarity of thinking Wellsy. But as Capitalism works to gain profit, I cannot concur that it is not a system that is primarily driven by greed.

Nonetheless I do think that Communism is natural and perhaps based on humanized nature. That is, capitalism isn't natural and without it as a concept that we invented, humans by default would create a society that is more communal and based on shared interest (and shared procession) like most of the rest of the animal Kingdom. But today it is a concept. And we function under it. So if I look at dialectical-materialism and make a guess to where we are heading I can only see two outcomes. We either go authoritarian or go communist. Unfortunately I think that authoritarian is more likely just be reflecting on history. But if humanity stands united against authority if it heads away from their own interests, there is no reason to believe that communism cannot be achieved I guess.
#14976261
B0ycey wrote:I do think that Communism is natural and perhaps based on humanized nature.
Tribal societies are indeed more egalitarian than modern societies (out of necessity, mind you). I'm not sure I follow your "humanized nature" bit, because it implies that "dehumanized nature" is somehow the default mode in a capitalist operating system. This doesn't make any sense, because nature is an abstract concept, and it's defined by ones quality of birth. Where and when you enter human society creates ones definition of nature.

Marx politicized the definition of nature when he claimed industrial man is an alienated man. He also demonized socialization (nurture) by claiming that man's environment gives man his attributes and that the ruling class shape social parameters and paradigms. All of which is ultimately a moral judgement, and it is a paradox in Marxism, because Marxists supposedly rely on moral relativism and disavow objective morality. I say they rely on moral relativism, because the so called proletariat of the labor force is somehow a socially progressive moral force or hero in a leftist socioeconomic philosophy. It is the proletariat that produces goods & services, so why shouldn't he or she own the fruit of his or her labor? I get it, BUT, it's a moral judgement after-all.

The machinations of Communism fail to recognize objective-economic-morality and that's partly why it has in principle theory failed to become a reality. The dogmatic tenacity of Marxism is at odds with objective reality because it's a reactionary belief system based on false ideals and contorted political maxims. It lives only in name, because Marxism, like other isms, is mostly a word game.

Hence why people like the Amish appear more resilient to the capitalist world. They're fully aware that their communal society is built upon objective-moral economics. Gender roles aside, I think this thread recognized the potential in what the Amish achieved.

That is, capitalism isn't natural and without it as a concept that we invented, humans by default would create a society that is more communal and based on shared interest (and shared procession) like most of the rest of the animal Kingdom. But today it is a concept. And we function under it.
It's not Capitalism, it's the use and manipulation of currency which has bamboozled the exchange of labor. Currency is a technology, and all technologies rewire social organization. This occurs because technology changes the way we communicate in and with the world. Capitalism is a concept, yes, it's a perceptional-descriptive container that can store experiences and human behavior in a single word. If someone left an isolated tribe and decided to engage in capitalist behavior, only to return to the tribe with goods to sell, would the tribe deem such behavior as unnatural or capitalistic? No, the tribe wouldn't use the words unnatural or capitalistic because both concepts are linguistic signifiers based on the interaction of man and his environment and how that interaction has evolved over time. The meaning of the goods sold to the tribe would not resemble any modern definition of the word capitalism or unnatural. It's ontological phenomena.

See, the way you label an entire system of human behavior, as something unnatural, is fallacious because it does not properly address the natural chronology of human behavior. Capital is a numerical system we use to augment & organize complex social networks (towns, cities, nations, etc) which have evolved around natural human behavior.

Technological innovations change the human milieu. Again, this why the Amish are resilient, they realize that technology is a potent social force.

So if I look at dialectical-materialism and make a guess to where we are heading I can only see two outcomes. We either go authoritarian or go communist. Unfortunately I think that authoritarian is more likely just be reflecting on history. But if humanity stands united against authority if it heads away from their own interests, there is no reason to believe that communism cannot be achieved I guess.
Complex social networks want an efficient and efficacious pattern of group behavior and therefore the future of civilization will be scientifically authoritarian, because technology supersedes autonomy. The state as a super-organism must use cybernetics to monitor and steer its nervous system. Freedom becomes the illusion of choice (especially when ignorance is bliss), manufactured by big data and driven by information feedback loops. Agency becomes a matter of international security. Alas, the global super-state becomes an engineering problem perpetuated by the prime dialectic- problem-solution. The problem-solution dialectic is an active overlay interface which shall continuously observe, learn from, and manage, the figure-ground interplay of all human activities.




The Marx hangup is most likely a pathological obsession, rooted in a maladjusted personality. I'm sure this of interest to behavioral psychologists. ;)
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 29 Dec 2018 21:38, edited 3 times in total.
#14976272
I wrote my reply to Wellsy at 4 in the morning RT. I was tired and using his language. Although you might have made a coherent post with some great points, it needs to be said the points are not linked to greed but in regards to a concept of "what is reality" at first glance.

RhetoricThug wrote:Tribal societies are indeed more egalitarian than modern societies. I'm not sure I follow your "humanized nature" bit, because it implies that "dehumanized nature" is somehow the default mode in a capitalist operating system. This doesn't make any sense, because nature is an abstract concept, and it's defined by ones quality of birth.


True. But if nature is all things natural, then all things that are not natural are artificial. Capitalism is a system of production to create things for profit. You will not find it in nature as it is a human concept. So if humanised nature is natural to human requirement as humans are biological, then any society that is not natural is dehumanized nature due to the fact it doesn't require biological necessity.

Where and when you enter human society creates ones definition of nature. Marx politicized nature when he claimed industrial man is an alienated man. He also demonized socialization (nurture) by claiming that man's environment gives man his "nature." It's ultimately a moral judgement, which is paradox in Marxism, because it relies on moral relativism. I say it relies on moral relativism, because the so called proletariat of the labor force is somehow a socially progressive moral force in a leftist socioeconomic philosophy. It is the proletariat that produces, so why shouldn't he own the fruit of his labor? I get it, BUT, it's a moral judgement after-all. The machinations of Communism fail to recognize it's system of objective economic morality.


I prefer using Marx for economic reasoning than any other. To understand a social contract and to distinguish that from the state of nature I usually consider Locke. The state of nature doesn't have morals, ethics or laws. It does not consider any human need at all. It is both cruel and rewarding. This is nature. The social contract provides protections humans would not have at any other time with rules they agree to participate by if they want to remain part of society. It creates laws and helps produce morals. And today society includes capitalism and we all abide by those economic rules. So capitalism should never be considered part of nature as you shouldn't change the definition of nature.

Hence why people like the Amish appear more resilient to the capitalist world. They're fully aware that their communal society is built upon objective-moral economics. Gender roles aside, I think this thread recognized the potential in what the Amish achieved.


We agree. But didn't we also agree they achieved what they did because they removed themselves from capitalism?

It's not Capitalism, it's the use of currency which has bamboozled the exchange of labor. Currency is a technology, and all technologies rewire social organization. This occurs because technology changes the way we communicate in and with the world. Capitalism is a concept, yes, it's a perceptional container that can store experiences and human behavior in a single word. If someone left an isolated tribe and decided to engage in capitalist behavior, only to return to the tribe with goods to sell, would the tribe deem such behavior as unnatural or capitalistic? No, because both concepts are abstractions. Technological innovation is the only thing can change a human milieu.


I would say Currency is not technology but a concept for exchange that is in essence worthless unless you accept it has worth. A tribe you leave might exchange goods with goods (as both have practical value) at your return but if it has never even seen the Dollar, they aren't likely to trade in paper they have no understanding of. As this is so, how can currency have any value outside the concept of Capitalism which has to be artifical as the tribe does not have any understanding of it?

See, the way you label an entire system of human behavior, as something unnatural, is fallacious, because it does not properly address the natural chronology of human behavior. Capital is a numerical system we use to augment organize complex social networks (towns, cities, nations, etc) which evolved around natural human behavior.


Human behaviour, whatever that might be -even under unnatural practices, has to be natural as humans are biological. But that behaviour doesn’t need to be in a natural setting and as such would alter depending on whether the setting is natural or artificial. For example, is it natural for dogs to wear a lead to walk outside because they don't resist when their owners puts them on to take them outside? No. Because their behaviour adapts to their unnatural surroundings and it is in their interests to not resist in their current setting.

Again, this why the Amish are resilient, they realize that technology is a potent social force.

Complex social networks want an efficient and efficacious pattern of group behavior and therefore the future of civilization will be scientifically authoritarian, because technology supersedes autonomy. The state as a super-organism must use cybernetics to monitor and steer its nervous system. Freedom becomes the illusion of choice (especially when ignorance is bliss), manufactured by big data and driven by information feedback loops. Agency becomes a matter of international security. Alas, the global super-state becomes an engineering problem perpetuated by the prime dialectic- problem-solution. The problem-solution dialectic is an active overlay interface which shall continuously observe, learn from, and manage, the figure-ground interplay of all human activities.


I doubt the Amish thought past preserving their society rather than what might come in the future when they isolated themselves from the practices of the outside world.

Although in regards to whether the future is scientifically authoritarian or not will depend on where the base and the superstructure leads it. As we are becoming more dependent on technology in our lives every day I would suggest Technocracy is our future. But humans do seem to choose to accept technology rather than have it thrust upon them I am afraid. Are we both not using the Internet after all? Although if you are afraid of Big Brother, as we humans have natural needs and not digital ones, you can exclude yourself from the technocrat social contract, become an outlaw and free your chains at any point. You do have choices, but they are not easy. And they might not be the same as the concensus either.
#14976296
B0ycey wrote:True. But if nature is all things natural, then all things that are not natural are artificial. Capitalism is a system of production to create things for profit. You will not find it in nature as it is a human concept. So if humanised nature is natural to human requirement as humans are biological, then any society that is not natural is dehumanized nature due to the fact it doesn't require biological necessity.
It would be easier to say "to select is to distort." We select things in nature, and the selection process produces an unnatural environment. On the flip-side, perhaps society is an extension of biological necessity.

A beaver dam is the rearrangement of natural substances. Likewise, society is the rearrangement of natural substances. Ecological equilibrium be damned, how can you be sure that particular human activities are unnatural? The term artificial simply means handicraft, B0ycey.

Also, profit is generated through the use and manipulation of currency.


The state of nature doesn't have morals, ethics or laws. It does not consider any human need at all. It is both cruel and rewarding. This is nature.
The state of nature does have laws. Bio-chemical-physical laws. It does have a supply and demand, a predator prey ratio. The whole state of nature is an information loop. Furthermore, nature has a genetic code of conduct, and evolutionary development does consider the activity of figures (organisms) in its ground (environment).

As for private property, some animals mark their territory.

The social contract provides protections humans would not have at any other time with rules they agree to participate by if they want to remain part of society. It creates laws and helps produce morals. And today society includes capitalism and we all abide by those economic rules. So capitalism should never be considered part of nature as you shouldn't change the definition of nature.
The definition of Nature, as something separate from man, didn't exist before Greek thinkers (as far as historical records show) conjured up or abstracted its definition. Such a definition came from the visual bias of the eye. It is the one sense that can overpower the other senses and thus the reasoning process as well. The scientific mind is rooted in the eye, hence the first scientists or Western philosophers had to detach themselves from nature and treat it as something outside themselves in order to observe and study it. Tribal man didn't conceptualize nature (obviously society fosters scientific and philosophical inquiry. Tribal man has no time for the question of time, let alone the question of what is nature.), because BEING was a total field of experience. Everything in this field of awareness constituted nature.

The written word as a technology, crafted new patterns of awareness. It gave rise to the compartmentalization of phenomena, and fragmented or dislocated things from their respective time and place of experience. Capitalism is derivative, and it's a highly mechanized processor of nature. Currency is just a numerical component of the written word. Such technologies reorganize the way humanity perceives reality.



We agree. But didn't we also agree they achieved what they did because they removed themselves from capitalism?
No. They succeeded by adopting a Luddite attitude. Again, technology drives social change. An empire is only as powerful as it's latest tool.



I would say Currency is not technology but a concept for exchange that is in essence worthless unless you accept it has worth.
It's a technology.

A tribe you leave might exchange goods with goods (as both have practical value) at your return but if it has never even seen the Dollar, they aren't likely to trade in paper they have no understanding of.
That's because barter is tangible and currency revolves around an intangible monetary system. They might use the paper dollar for kindling, because their perception of reality hasn't been "educated" conditioned or mechanized by modern concepts/technologies.

As this is so, how can currency have any value outside the concept of Capitalism which has to be artifical as the tribe does not have any understanding of it?
This is like asking a tribe if electricity has any value outside the light bulb.

Human behaviour, whatever that might be -even under unnatural practices, has to be natural as humans are biological. But that behaviour doesn’t need to be in a natural setting and as such would alter depending on whether the setting is natural or artificial. For example, is it natural for dogs to wear a lead to walk outside because they don't resist when their owners puts them on to take them outside? No. Because their behaviour adapts to their unnatural surroundings and it is in their interests to not resist in their current setting.
Sure, domestication can be beneficial. Humans can adapt to a condition and adopt perceptions of their conditions.



I doubt the Amish thought past preserving their society rather than what might come in the future when they isolated themselves from the practices of the outside world.
Well, Amish is just one sect, but I get what you're saying. Even if they had considered the future, the behavior of those surrounding em is not necessarily predictable. Did they anticipate sharing a road with motor vehicles?

Although in regards to whether the future is scientifically authoritarian or not will depend on where the base and the superstructure leads it. As we are becoming more dependent on technology in our lives every day I would suggest Technocracy is our future. But humans do seem to choose to accept technology rather than have it thrust upon them I am afraid.
Yes, it's incremental nudging. Tech is always an option initially, but market forces, propaganda, and competition make it inevitably common-place.

Are we both not using the Internet after all?
Yep, it's a cybernetic wet dream. :lol:

Although if you are afraid of Big Brother, as we humans have natural needs and not digital ones, you can exclude yourself from the technocrat social contract, become an outlaw and free your chains at any point. You do have choices, but they are not easy. And they might not be the same as the concensus either.
I'm not afraid of Big Brother, because what's the value of BB outside the computer?
#14976301
RhetoricThug wrote:It would be easier to say "to select is to distort." We select things in nature, and the selection process produces an unnatural environment. On the flip-side, perhaps society is an extension of biological necessity.

A beaver dam is the rearrangement of natural substances. Likewise, society is the rearrangement of natural substances. Ecological equilibrium be damned, how can you be sure that particular human activities are unnatural? The term artificial simply means handicraft, B0ycey.


I believe by definition it means man made actually. But I can see your point. A beaver will alter it surroundings to fulfil its natural requirements. So I will accept your point. But in regards to capitalism it is not like a dam. Without it humanity will still survive - unlike the beaver who requires the dam to do so. Perhaps the difference for whether something should be considered natural is the instinct for necessity... or in your words "extention of biological necessity".

The state of nature does have laws. Bio-chemical-physical laws. It does have a supply and demand, a predator prey ratio.


You have a point here actually, but I consider laws restrictions rather than outcomes. In nature there are no restrictions so there can be no laws. But if you consider laws to be expected outcomes then the results are your laws and your point is valid.

The whole state of nature is an information loop. Furthermore, nature has a genetic code of conduct, and evolutionary development does consider the activity of figures (organisms) in its ground (environment).


Evolution is merely outcome. Nature doesn't consider anything. If the organism happens to have the best conditions to survive it does. And if not, it dies. There is no external force unless you accept a diety. Nonetheless what is this information loop you talk of so frequently? Are you moving your point to what is consciousness - and what we as individuals understand the information we are given through our senses to create a mental image we understand to be sequenced? If so, our mental image does not alter reality but merely creates it for us to something our mind can understand. We do not change the rules and as such nature remains unforgiving.

The definition of Nature, as something separate from man, didn't exist before Greek thinkers (as far as historical records show) conjured up or abstracted its definition. Such a definition came from the visual geometry of the eye. It is the one sense that can overpower the other senses and thus the reasoning process as well. Tribal and preliterate man didn't conceptualize nature, because BEING was a total field of experience. Everything in this field of awareness constituted nature. The written word as a technology, crafted new patterns of awareness. It gave rise to the compartmentalization of phenomena, and fragmented or dislocated things from their respective time and place of experience. Capitalism is derivative, and it's a highly mechanized processor of nature. Currency is just a numerical component of the written word. Such technologies reorganize the way humanity perceives reality.


Unlike you I don't consider a system or concept a technology. If anything it is a function or an idea. But I don't think semantics is your point here. I can't fathom it actually, but I will try. Are you saying that technology is artificial but everything else is natural? And by default that includes capitalism. Is so why is the creation of a human concept any different to an advanced man made object in terms of what should be considered natural? Perhaps to prevent confusion it is better to maintain actually definitions rather than alter them for unnecessary confusion.

No. They succeeded by adopting a Luddite attitude. Again, technology drives social change. An empire is only as powerful as it's latest tool.


This is true. But by maintaining a fixed base social change cannot alter the superstructure. In other words by restricting capitalism the base remains fixed. Perhaps the Luddite attitude did this as well. But being that capitalism promotes profit and advancement I would suggest excluding its influence was better at keeping their social structure fixed than just reducing their technogical options as creation is natural and profit is not.

It's a technology.

That's because barter is tangible and currency revolves around an intangible monetary system. They might use the paper dollar for kindling, because their perception of reality hasn't been "educated" conditioned or mechanized by modern concepts/technologies.

This is like asking a tribe if electricity has any value outside the light bulb.


Lets for argument sakes say I accept your notion that currency is a technology, what does it matter? Like electricity, currency only has worth if you accept it has worth. Electricity is worthless unless you can harness it and have the means to use it. This is true for currency as well in regards to it needing to be harnessed in a capitalist model. Outside it, it is completely worthless.

Well, Amish is just one sect, but I get what you're saying. Even if they had considered the future, the behavior of those surrounding em is not necessarily predictable. Did they anticipate sharing a road with motor vehicles?


True. So is the restriction of outside influences the key to their success? I would suggest so. Or it is ethical rules they adhere to.

Yes, it's incremental nudging. Tech is always an option initially, but market forces, propaganda, and competition make it inevitably common-place.


But that doesn't stop it being a choice. It is not a biological need so cannot be a requirement of life. External forces might make people think you should keep technology and advance it, but only personal morals judgement will dictate whether those external sources are right. And people are making those judgements every day FYI. The fact you and I have not turned away from technology yet means that we have chosen to accept it regardless of our opinons of it. But if we ever turn it off then our moral judgement changes. And as such it is a choice.

I'm not afraid of Big Brother, because what's the value of BB outside the computer?


Exactly.
#14976310
How can something exist if it is unnatural? Everything is created from nature and becomes part of nature. Are many trees in the US unnatural because they originated in Asia and were brought here by man? Is the wood used in a house no longer natural?
What could be more natural than an idea from man such as currency. Man would have to be unnatural to create unnatural things. It really is no different than a beaver creating a dam.
If you believe in evolution then the idea of ‘natural man’, is randomly selecting one point in our evolution and saying that is who we are. Why not say anything other than when we were one cell is unnatural? I think the idea of ‘natural man’ is a myth.
#14976405
B0ycey wrote::eh:

Has anyone discussed the term unnatural? You must have confused it with artifical. :lol:

Your musings should have been in a different thread. They have no relivance here. :lol:


You brought up ‘nature’ and Rhetoric thug replied to it. You can not have ‘natural’ without ‘unnatural’. Calling it ‘artificial’ does not change the fact the opposite is ‘unnatural’. Otherwise, what is the point of bringing up ‘natural’?
#14976407
One Degree wrote:You brought up ‘nature’ and Rhetoric thug replied to it. You can not have ‘natural’ without ‘unnatural’. Calling it ‘artificial’ does not change the fact the opposite is ‘unnatural’. Otherwise, what is the point of bringing up ‘natural’?



Well you can because I brought up artificial.

:roll:

Artificial specifies "Man Made" and was more relevant to my point.
#14976409
B0ycey wrote:Well you can because I brought up artificial.

:roll:

Artificial specifies "Man Made" and was more relevant to my point.


Is ‘artificial’ natural?
#14976413
B0ycey wrote:No, but neither is say aeroplane or many other words.

:lol:

It means in layman terms "man made".


So, you are arguing ‘artificial’ is neither natural nor unnatural?

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