blackjack21 wrote:The working class were able to organize across national frontiers due to literacy, which ironically was promoted by Protestant Christianity. Literacy and language is one reason leftists are so obsessed with language these days.
Well language is important in regards to thinking although thinking isn't reducible to language. And literacy has indeed been pivotal to communication between people and the development of abstract thinking.
Although there are those that are seen as progressive but offer no emancipatory avenue as they seem to entangled in language they lose sight of the world and people within it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htmOne of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htmudic feminism therefore needs to 'invent" a form of materialism that gestures to a world not directly present to the consciousness of the subject (as classic post-structuralism has done), but not entirely "constructed" in the medium of knowing (language) either.' It has simply become "unethical to think of such social oppressions as "sexism," "racism," and "homophobia" as purely "matters" of language and discourse. Ludic feminism is beginning to learn, in spite of itself, the lesson of Engels' Anti-Duhring: the fact that we understand reality through language does not mean that reality is made by language.
The dilemma of ludic feminism in theorising "materialism" is a familiar one. In his interrogation of Berkeley, Lenin points to this dilemma that runs through all forms of idealism: the epistemological unwillingness to make distinctions between 'ideas" and "things" (Materialism 130-300), which is, of course, brought about by class politics. Ludic feminism, like all forms of upper-middle class (idealist) philosophy, must hold on to "ideas" since it is by the agency of ideas that this class (as privileged mental workers) acquires it social privileges. Although posed as an epistemological question, the dilemma is finally a class question: how not to deny the world outside the consciousness of the subject but not to make that world the material cause of social practices either. Ludic feminism, like Berkelian idealism, cannot afford to explain things by the relations of production and labour. This then is the dilemma of ludic feminism: the denial of "materialism" leads Iodic feminism to a form of idealism that discredits any claims it might have to the struggle for social change; accepting materialism, on the other hand, implicates its own ludic practices in the practices of patriarchal-capitalism — the practices that have produced gender inequalities as differences that can be deployed to increase the rate of profit. This dilemma has lead feminism to an intolerable political crisis: a crisis that is, in fact, so acute it has raised questions about the viability of feminism as a theory and practice itself.
Palmyrene wrote:I'm not particularly sure what exactly about Proudhon is "eclectic". Proudhon was arguably less utopian as well, since it wasn't attached to specifically communist economic assumptions—not to mention the fact that Proudhon's anti-capitalism and anti-governmentalism were simply aspects of the same critique. The critique of wage-slavery had been expressed in the strongest sorts of terms as early as Orestes Brownson's 1840 essay on the laboring classes.
My impression of Marx possibly seeing him as eclectic is most pronounced in this
section:
I show furthermore how extremely deficient and at times even schoolboyish is his knowledge of “political economy” which he undertook to criticise, and that he and the utopians are hunting for a so-called “science” by means of which a formula for the “solution of the social question” is to be devised a priori, instead of deriving science from a critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation. My refutation shows in particular that Proudhon’s view of exchange-value, the basis of the whole theory, remains confused, incorrect and superficial, and that he even mistakes the utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory of value for the basis of a new science. With regard to his general point of view I have summarised my conclusions thus:
"Every economic relation has a good and a bad side; it is the one point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty. He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both political economy and communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath the economists, since, as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.
He wants to be the synthesis – he is a composite error.
He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism."
Broadly I take it that he doesn't see Proudhorn as critically engaging the concepts that are used a priori within the political economy. The problem with this is that it can lead to a kind of idealism in which one asserts concepts in a sort of eternal rather than historically contingent way.
To which I think this informs also part of their dispute over the nature of money in which money isn't the essential basis of capitalism as the nature of money is informed by the exchange-value of commodity production and trade.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/Marx developed his explanation of the value-form very carefully in order to counter the popular theories of Proudhon and his anarchist-mutualist followers who blamed money for distorting the natural laws of commodity production. Marx wanted to show that money, the universal equivalent, was just a developed form of the simple-form of value and that the form of value was an expression of the intrinsic value already existing in commodities. Thus, money is an inescapable part of any commodity-producing society. The social ills of capitalism are the result of the contradictions of the commodity form, not of some monetary distortion imposed on the natural order of things.
The implication of their difference being whether one had identified something essential to Capitalism such that if it were changed the problems inherent to it would dissipate as well.
https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/marxs-critique-of-socialist-labor-money-schemes-and-the-myth-of-council-communisms-proudhonism.htmlMarx’s most extended treatment of these reformers is in the Grundrisse, where Marx criticizes the Proudhonist Darimon and the Ricardian socialist John Gray. Those who proposed labor-money sought to eliminate harmful or unjust aspects of capitalism such as economic crises and unequal exchanges (such as the exchange between capital and labor). They imagined that a bank could identify prices with values through the use of labor-money—tokens representing a certain number of labor hours—and that this could do away with the anarchic fluctuation of supply and demand in a capitalist monetary economy. Marx accused them of utopianism: wanting to establish socialism on the basis of commodity production. The labor theory of value was seen by Proudhon, for example, as a sort of program for justice to be realized.36 Marx’s view was quite different: “I say … that commodity-production is necessarily, at a certain point, turned into ‘capitalist’ commodity-production, and that according to the law of value governing it, ‘surplus value’ is properly due to the capitalist, and not to the labourer.”37
A key point in Marx’s critique of the labor-money proposals is that while value expresses the social character of labor under capitalism, it can only do so through a market price that is distinct from value. The “time-chitters” erroneously believe, Marx writes, “that by annulling the nominal difference between real value and market value, between exchange value and price—that is, by expressing value in units of labour-time itself instead of in a given objectification of labour time, say gold and silver—that in so doing they also remove the real difference and contradiction between price and value.”38 Marx holds that this proposed solution does not strike at the root of the contradiction, namely the lack of social control over production.
The asserted misstep being the attempt to properly measure value in labour when price can only approximate the value of things and that they're often so separated at times that when the value of things is brought back to price it leads to sudden economic crisis.
In fact, it seems to me that Marx may well have criticize the very notion of trying to solve the gap of value and price by finding some superior means of approximating value because it may well be impossible and misguided to changing the very relations of capitalist production based on the contradiction of the commodity as both use-value and exchange-value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff4.htm#Pill12Such a line of attack utterly misconceives the nature of Marx’s value theory. It is both impossible and unnecessary to discover a measure of value which will make possible the equalisation of labour or the products of labour. It may be a simple point, but none the less profound, to insist that this equalisation of labour takes place objectively, spontaneously and indirectly – that is, independently of any participants within the capitalist system. It is in this real, objective process that value is measured. Out of the process of the production and circulation of commodities money (gold) arises. Gold is not some ‘external’ measure, standing outside the world of commodities. Nor was it ‘selected’ by conscious planning on the part of economists or politicians. This measure (gold) was historically selected, after long trial and error, in the sense that it was its physical-material properties which enabled gold to select itself as the most suitable money-commodity. The matter can be reformulated thus: it is not money that renders commodities commensurable; on the contrary, it is because all commodities as values are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values find their measure in one and the same commodity. By a social and historical process this commodity is converted into money. Unless the objective nature of these processes is grasped, then the significance of all Marx’s categories of political economy is lost. We have already spoken of the social character of the labour which creates value, summed up in Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Marx insists that the measure of value is not labour-time, but socially-necessary labour-time, that is labour-time required to produce a commodity at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces. And it is only when the producer of a product tries to sell this product on the market that he discovers its real, objective value (if any). During periods of capitalist slump the piles of unsold goods signify that the concrete labour embodied in them was socially unnecessary. Such labour cannot, through the market, be transformed into abstract labour and therefore creates no value. But the owner of capital can never discover this beforehand, even though he may be armed with the latest ‘market research’ techniques and may even have read Capital. The essence of capitalist production here is that he can only discover whether the labour incorporated into his products was socially necessary at the end of the process.
Our task is not, therefore, to seek some measuring rod for the processes of capitalist production. The very process is its own measure. Value does not measure commodities; commodities discover their own measure of value. The task of Marxism is to discover how this is done, to discover the laws and tendencies of this process, laws and tendencies which do not appear empirically on the surface of society but appear always in the form of crises
...
In short, instead of the vain search for some formal standard by I which to measure the magnitude of value, Marx set out to abstract the laws of the development of capitalism (‘law of motion’), that is to uncover the (highly contradictory) processes whereby this problem was actually resolved in practice.
Generally I find that Marx missed the entire point of Proudhon's theory despite reaching somewhat similar conclusions.
Which I think gets to a point of how well any person understands the position of one or the other. As it is quite common for people of different outlooks to assert that they aren't properly understood and thus the assertions of strawmanning and such.
Which is sometimes the case that there is a lack of critical insight on the part of the person criticizing but it can also be that one doesn't see the logical necessity of the critique because the position from which it considers the subject is different.
I cannot understand anything you're saying right now sorry.
Nominalism tends to reject abstract objects or the more extreme sort rejects universals, as not a real as individuals.
So for example, the referent of an actual empirical dog that you see is more real than the exemplary idea of a dog based on the general features of all dogs.
Stirner seems to takes the individual person as more real than the ideas that assertedly one is called to sacrifice themselves for.
Marx's conception of the individual seems different, as Stirner is still one sidedly abstract in his interpretation of the individual although not exactly as Feuerbach general abstract conception. But in taking the individual as primary/more real and beginning from the individual as a starting point, he makes incomprehensible the individual whose individuality originates within the social whole.
This is in part why I emphasize that Stirner despite the asserted radicalness of his individualism against any idea in which individuals are repressed under, that he doesn't seem any more revolutioanry than any liberal and seems to fit perfectly within it's tradition of opposing any general good which has a definite class interest and a social basis for such a view. His nominalism, his opposition of any general good which is seen as oppressive to the primacy of individual desire. He might assertedly not make property some divine relation as typical to many liberal theorists but his individualism doesn't seem any more than the selfishness of an individual that find social relations inherently oppressive (don't tread on me).
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdfThus, the social bases of liberalism are two-fold: the raising of property to the status of the primary social relation, and the loss of community, the loss of the capacity to appeal to or rely upon shared meaning beyond the satisfaction of individual desire.
MacIntyre uses an analysis of the use of place names in foreign countries to point out the difference between a place name for the inhabitants of an area where the name has multiple shared meanings and connotations, and the use of either same name in the context of a foreign language, or the use of a foreign name. For a foreigner, the place name is nothing but a reference pointing to a spatial location, having lost all the connotations and layers of meaning present when a native-speaker utters the name. He refers to this impoverished kind of meaning as “reference.” Nominalism is thus the characteristic epistemology of liberal society.
“the conception of pure reference, of reference as such, emerges as the artefact of a particular type of social and cultural order, one in which a minimum of shared beliefs and allegiances can be presupposed.” (p. 379)
This observation succinctly points to an interconnection between rationality and ethics, for by the customary use of words simply in the form of reference, all the objects referred to lose their social significance, and one creates the illusion of an “objective” world which can be talked of by means of “pure rationality”, in abstraction from the social relations which have, in fact, created and shaped the thing and given it its social significance. The sole remaining social relation mediating between people is therefore property. MacIntyre believes that English and the other international languages are now impoverished in this way.
Maintenance of the illusion of “objectivity” is essential, and MacIntyre sees the universities as playing a crucial role in the maintenance of this illusion. Since academics rely for their livelihood on disproving each other’s theories, the resulting interminable and esoteric debate continuously re-establishes the impossibility of consensus.
“In the course of history liberalism, which began as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the debate over such principles. An interminability which was from the standpoint of an earlier liberalism a grave defect to be remedied as soon as possible has become, in the eyes of some liberals at least, a kind of virtue”. (p. 335)
Far from this failure to find any firm ground undermining liberalism, MacIntyre believes that it reinforces it, because one of the fundamental bases for liberalism is the conviction that no comprehensive idea (to use Rawls’ term) can enjoy majority, let alone unanimous, support. This then justifies the ban on governments pursuing the general good.
“Any conception of the human good according to which, for example, it is the duty of government to educate the members of the community morally, ... will be proscribed. ... liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in doing so its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited.” (p. 336)
Such a ban on governments pursuing the social good of course serves a very definite social interest.
“The weight given to an individual preference in the market is a matter of the cost which the individual is able and willing to pay; only so far as an individual has the means to bargain with those who can supply what he or she needs does the individual have an effective voice. So also in the political and social realm it is the ability to bargain that is crucial. The preferences of some are accorded weight by others only insofar as the satisfaction of those preferences will lead to the satisfaction of their own preferences. Only those who have something to give get. The disadvantaged in a liberal society are those without the means to bargain.” (p. 336)
and consequently,
“The overriding good of liberalism is no more and no less than the continued sustenance of the liberal social and political order”. (p. 345)
In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.
It seems to me Stirner readily fits within this same criticism by Alisdair MacIntyre against liberalism. He is unreflective to the relation between his ideas and the conditions of Germany at the time, which is why earlier I stated his seems on par with the general criticism of the Young Hegelians who seem to practically treat their ideas as independent of the material world even as they supposedly profess a nominalism, they remain highly abstract and idealists who criticize ideas and make it about changing thinking.
Marx is critical of this conception of the individual as primary under capitalism as it is ideologically one sided (abstract in a poor and inessential way)
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfThe distinction between the two ways of conceptualizing human individuals can be understood in large part as a distinction between methodological idealism and methodological materialism in understanding human social existence. Abstract individualism, Marx writes, suffers from the fact that it proceeds from the self-conception of bourgeois actors, taking for granted their selfunderstanding as essentially autonomous persons whose ability to satisfy their egoistic interests is limited by the existence of other, competitive and equally autonomous individuals. However, from a materialist point of view, it is clear to see that these bourgeois atoms exist only in thought; in reality, human individuality can only emerge and develop in and through society, which is not merely some necessary evil erected and tolerated in order to keep the competing atoms at bay. Rather, it is the necessary condition for the development of human beings who exist not merely as what Marx later calls “herd animals” or as exemplars of the species, but rather as real, concrete individuals who interact with the natural and social world in increasingly diverse ways. In any case, I would certainly disagree with the claim made by Nicholas Churchich in his book, Marxism and morality: a critical examination of Marxist ethics: “in The German Ideology [Marx] definitely argues for the primacy and supremacy of collectivism. Like Rousseau, he starts with individualism but ends with the sacrifice of the individual to the collective and of private interests to the interests of the whole”48.
To understand how Marx's conception of man isn't merely an abstract general of the collective, one has to understand the concrete universal which isn't based on abstracting the same features of a thing but in identifying the
particular thing which explains all other particulars (in Hegel, the Abstract Notion).
This is an idea that I believe flows through any substantive Marxist.
See, here the distinction made here between the social and collective by Lev Vygotsky.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htmIt is obvious that we are dealing here with differential psychology in the precise acceptance of that term. What, then, is the subject of collective psychology as such? There is a simple answer to this question: Everything within us is social, but this does not imply that all the properties of the psyche of an individual are inherent in all the other members of this group as well. Only a certain part of the individual psychology can be regarded as belonging to a given group, and this portion of individual psychology and its collective manifestations is studied by collective psychology when it looks into the psychology of the army, the church, and so on.
Thus, instead of distinguishing between social and individual psychology, we must distinguish between social and collective psychology.
But one can't identify the real existing nature of things by simply abstracting away differences and this is why nominalism has some truth to it that abstract generals aren't reflective of anything real although they are necessary to conceptual thinking.
Because groups of people aren't identified in this manner and as such one doesn't have a real concept of a thing but a complex, a pseudo-concept.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIn Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.
This
piecein particular makes criticisms of abstract generals and explains how a concrete universal is necessary to identify the essence/nature of humans rather than to simply import unconsciously the ideas of one's time and place.
Distinctly pertinent here is not only the sociological, but also the logical principle underlying Marx’s line of reasoning. If translated into logical language, it would mean the following: universal definitions expressing the essence of a genus, whether human or any other, cannot be effectively searched for amidst abstract, common “features,” such as every particular specimen of the genus possesses.
The “essence” of human nature in general – and of the human nature of each particular human being – cannot be revealed, except through a science-based, critical analysis of the “entire totality,” the “entire ensemble” of the socio-historic relationships of man to man, through a case-study approach and apprehension of the regularities which have and are actually governing the process of origination and evolution of human society as a whole, and of a particular individual.
Stirner's individualism takes on such an absolute character that it denies the truth of other positions, but individualism as with many concepts has validity only up to a point and he doesn't see the partial truth to be synthesized between different points.
https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/hegels-logic/foreword.htmAnd finally, the advocate of People Power and public opinion, who has no confidence in ideology or parties and institutions, can be said to take as their rule: “The Individual is Absolute.”
Every movement has these characters in their ranks and their role is almost obligatory. All of these claims have an element of truth. But if followed one-sidedly obviously they lead nowhere, because they are all abstract; but they are the three essential modes of existence of an idea.
It in the end renders thought incomprehensible which is necessarily filled with generalizations rather than perception only of empirical individuals.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegels_Psychology.pdfA number of points need to be made about thinking. Firstly, all thoughts are generalisations. The relation of thinking to lived experience and perception is mediated by the psyche and consciousness, in which forms of representation of individual entities may be said to be formed. But in thinking we think only universals; universals come to the individual through particularisation. So the ancient problem of how it is possible to think universals is misplaced. We think in universals, so the challenge is rather how we come to think of individuals.
If Stirner was any good of a Hegelian who would've been able to appropriuate some of the rich content in Hegel about the mediated relationship between individual and universal via the particular.
I recommend you read Proudhon's What Is Property? and understand the concept of collective force.
I may well do that, at this point I'm focused on a study of concepts and have largely been hands off of the political economy side of things in the communist tradition in part because I think theres a lot of ontological and epistemological stuff I need to clarify to understand parts of Hegel as they pertain to Marx's method. At the moment I'm looking into details as to how Hegel's approach to thought/logic allowed him to consider the subject-object relation in a way that overcame the one sided duality of concepts as either only subjective or objective based on things as a unity of subject/object.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By QatzelOk
- By late
- By Deutschmania