Noam Chomsky

[incogweedo]

Who else thinks that noam chomsky is one of the greatest philosophers of all time?

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I do not, but perhaps you might care to elaborate on why you think he is, and why anyone else should think he is.

[ChrisK]

I don't either. But I am open to discussion with you.

[Zanthorus]

I'm also kind of mystified as to what exactly would make Chomsky "one of the greatest philosophers of all time".

[Palingenisis]

I'm also kind of mystified as to what exactly would make Chomsky "one of the greatest philosophers of all time".

What pisses me off about him is that he presents all these facts but doesnt plunge beyond the appearances to the structures behind them...Also there is no sense of being at war with him, a lot his going ons strike me as a moral appeal to the enemy...Which is something they dont understand.

But he is no philospher.

[syndicat]

What pisses me off about him is that he presents all these facts but doesnt plunge beyond the appearances to the structures behind them...Also there is no sense of being at war with him, a lot his going ons strike me as a moral appeal to the enemy...Which is something they dont understand.

But he is no philospher.

what you mean I have no idea. he's not a "philosopher" in the technical academic sense that he's a linguist and not part of a "philosophy" department, tho he does occasionally address what would be regarded as "philosophical" issues in regard to "cognitive science" (which is an area of multi-disciplinary cooperation between "philosophers" and people in social sciences, which linguistics could be considered to be).

he's most well-known tho for his political writing which isn't specifically "philosophical" as far as I can tell.

he's particularly well known as a critic of imperialism and U.S. foreign policy in particular. he also developed a thesis about the corporate media with Eddie Herman in their book "Manufacturing Consent."

he's also well known for being extremely well informed abuot the things he writes about, particularly stuff related to international relations and the more political and military aspects of imperialism (he doesn't write as much about economics).

he calls himself an "anarcho-syndicalist sympathizer" but I don't know what that means since he rarely writes anything about the labor movement or worker struggles.

Some people criticize him for advising voting for the "lesser evil" sometimes, but I don't see that as a serious criticism unless he were to advocate some sort of electoral strategy for change, which he doesn't.

[Dean]

I think hes wonderful, but not so much in terms of philosophy. He has a great analytical and down-to-earth mindset.

[ChrisK]

The only real example I've seen of Chomsky's philosophy is his debate with Foucault on human nature. To be honest, Foucault won the debate, which sucks because I really don't like postmodernism. So Chomsky does seem to be quite subpar in terms of philosophy.

[Dean]

The only real example I've seen of Chomsky's philosophy is his debate with Foucault on human nature. To be honest, Foucault won the debate, which sucks because I really don't like postmodernism. So Chomsky does seem to be quite subpar in terms of philosophy.

Nah, you can't win a debate if you're wrong ;-)

[ChrisK]

Nah, you can't win a debate if you're wrong ;-)

Having been a debater I beg to differ. I won many a debate with the "your plan to feed Africans will start a nuclear war with china" agrument.

[GreenCommunism]

he calls himself an "anarcho-syndicalist sympathizer" but I don't know what that means since he rarely writes anything about the labor movement or worker struggles.

i thought he was really an anarchist but i guess he isn't. he says authority is sometime necessary when justified such as a child and a parent. but in nowdays world unjustified authority is rampant.

[Zanthorus]

Chomsky is most certainly not like any "anarchist" I've ever met. I saw one video with him talking about his criticisms of the US anarchist movement and he said something like "abolishing the state? That's not a strategy. I mean sure if you have a rich network of co-operatives, spanning most of america or maybe even the globe then we can talk about abolishing the state. Until then it's not a strategy."!!!!

I mean seriously? We have to have a global network of co-operatives before abolishing the state? That's about a thousand times stupider than the strategy of even the most authoritarian of stalinogothic lifestylists.

Speaking of which, Chomsky on Marxism makes me want to eat my own ears. He plays the classic card of the "young humanist Marx" and the "cranky authoritarian old Marx" and also that evil baby eating intellectual Lenin who crushed the workers and paved the way for Stalin. And then he tries to make Left-Communism out to be basically anarchism in Marxist clothing.

[Meridian]

Chomsky is most certainly not like any "anarchist" I've ever met. I saw one video with him talking about his criticisms of the US anarchist movement and he said something like "abolishing the state? That's not a strategy. I mean sure if you have a rich network of co-operatives, spanning most of america or maybe even the globe then we can talk about abolishing the state. Until then it's not a strategy."!!!!

I mean seriously? We have to have a global network of co-operatives before abolishing the state? That's about a thousand times stupider than the strategy of even the most authoritarian of stalinogothic lifestylists.
He is right about "crushing the state" not being a viable strategy, though. It is a goal, not a strategy. The strategy right now can not be "crush the state"; that would be a viable strategy once conditions were right for it. So, the strategy now should be to make conditions right for it.

[syndicat]

well, a strategy of trying to replace capitalism by forming coops isn't anarcho-syndicalism but Proudhonism. It's a form of anarchist reformism, and implies a support for market socialism. For anarcho-syndicalism, it is through mass social movements, particularly the labor movement, that libertarian socialism is to be built, including getting rid of the state and replacing it with popular power.

[TheSamsquatch]

I've always been fascinated by Chomsky and have actually learned a lot from him. He's by far one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

[Zanthorus]

well, a strategy of trying to replace capitalism by forming coops isn't anarcho-syndicalism but Proudhonism.

If you'll re-read my post, that's sort of what I said :glare:

[HEAD ICE]

To be fair, Chomsky was responding to a question by a right wing libertarian "anarcho"-capitalist named Roderick Long who wasn't really asking a question but tryint to do a "gotcha" with Noam. And Noam is correct: "abolish the state" is not a strategy

I don't consider Noam Chomsky to be much of a philosopher, he of course is an influential linguist and his contribution to politics has to be his media analysis and criticisms of US foreign policy, not so much on "anarchism" or "Marxism."

[Old Man Diogenes]

i thought he was really an anarchist but i guess he isn't. he says authority is sometime necessary when justified such as a child and a parent. but in nowdays world unjustified authority is rampant.

The particular example I believe he uses is if a child was to run out in front of a car an act of authority by the parent would be to pull them out of the way, but that's justified as I'm sure anyone in their right mind would agree. I'm not a particular supporter of Chomsky, though I learned a lot of about radical leftism through him. He seems to sympathize but not actively pursue Anarchism, though he does a lot of talks about what Libertarian socialism (which he often uses synonymously with Anarchism) is and isn't. And on the very same interview I believe you're referring to, he says that Libertarian socialists seek to disestablish structures of unjustified authority.

[eyedrop]

he calls himself an "anarcho-syndicalist sympathizer" but I don't know what that means since he rarely writes anything about the labor movement or worker struggles.I read a 3-4 books of him in my formative years, without knowing he identified any kind of anarchist or was any kind of radical at all.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

His account of language is not only Idealist, it's ridiculous.

http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/noam_chomsky/

More on Chomsky here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page_13_03.htm

Use the search tool when the page appears.

[Tyrlop]

Chomsky is most certainly not like any "anarchist" I've ever met. I saw one video with him talking about his criticisms of the US anarchist movement and he said something like "abolishing the state? That's not a strategy. I mean sure if you have a rich network of co-operatives, spanning most of america or maybe even the globe then we can talk about abolishing the state. Until then it's not a strategy."!!!!

I mean seriously? We have to have a global network of co-operatives before abolishing the state? That's about a thousand times stupider than the strategy of even the most authoritarian of stalinogothic lifestylists.

Speaking of which, Chomsky on Marxism makes me want to eat my own ears. He plays the classic card of the "young humanist Marx" and the "cranky authoritarian old Marx" and also that evil baby eating intellectual Lenin who crushed the workers and paved the way for Stalin. And then he tries to make Left-Communism out to be basically anarchism in Marxist clothing.
can you point out why this isn't the truth comrade?

[Proletarian Ultra]

can you point out why this isn't the truth comrade?

A network of cooperatives spanning the globe strong enough to overthrow the capitalist state is not something the capitalist state would tolerate. Either they would be crushed before they could threaten the state, or if they could threaten the state, the state would already have been effectively overthrown anyway.

Signed,

Authoritarian Stalinogothic Lifestylist. :lol:

[Red]

I find it completely perfect that Noam Chomsky has a quiet, calm demeanor. Especially compared to most of his opposition. He may not be a philosopher, and he may not expand on his ideas to correct everything he speaks about, but he does get people thinking by introducing them to ideas and history that get ignored otherwise.

He's on the left at least.

[JDHURF]

The only real example I've seen of Chomsky's philosophy is his debate with Foucault on human nature. To be honest, Foucault won the debate, which sucks because I really don't like postmodernism. So Chomsky does seem to be quite subpar in terms of philosophy.
Your conclusion regarding Chomsky’s work in philosophy is, by your own admission, absurd for lack of background. If all you know of it comes from Chomsky’s several decades old discussion with Foucault, then quite obviously you have no credible basis from which to issue any criticism. Although, even here, I find it difficult to believe that you have actually reviewed the full-length, printed discussion in its entirety considering that any fair-minded, unbiased reading of it fairly unambiguously demonstrates Chomsky’s mastery over the topics and Foucault’s concessions to Chomsky’s expositions, his agreements with Chomsky and, conspicuously, his recusing of himself due to several factors, among them time.


As for philosophy in general Noam Chomsky represents a tradition of libertarian rationalism that, as far as I know, has been surpassed by nothing. Here I believe the three of us - you, Chomsky and myself - would all agree, based upon your self-professed disdain for postmodernism.

[Foldered]

I think hes wonderful, but not so much in terms of philosophy. He has a great analytical and down-to-earth mindset.
This is how I feel about him. He's intelligent, accessible, and very down-to-earth.
And like others have said, he doesn't actually do much work with regard to philosophy, exactly; the debate with Foucault is probably the best example. Unless you count his linguistics works as philosophical.

I do love the man though, he's so charming.

[ChrisK]

Your conclusion regarding Chomsky’s work in philosophy is, by your own admission, absurd for lack of background. If all you know of it comes from Chomsky’s several decades old discussion with Foucault, then quite obviously you have no credible basis from which to issue any criticism. Although, even here, I find it difficult to believe that you have actually reviewed the full-length, printed discussion in its entirety considering that any fair-minded, unbiased reading of it fairly unambiguously demonstrates Chomsky’s mastery over the topics and Foucault’s concessions to Chomsky’s expositions, his agreements with Chomsky and, conspicuously, his recusing of himself due to several factors, among them time.

You mind posting articles or essay's he's written on philosophy so I can expand my knowledge?

Actually, your the first person I've ever read who says the Chomsky won that debate and that includes the Chomsky user group. I think the debate was much closer than others do, but I think Foucault won the day. You also ought know that I consider postmodern philosophers to be poor at their job, so if Chomsky lost to them he must be subpar.


As for philosophy in general Noam Chomsky represents a tradition of libertarian rationalism that, as far as I know, has been surpassed by nothing. Here I believe the three of us - you, Chomsky and myself - would all agree, based upon your self-professed disdain for postmodernism.

Wittgenstein surpassed it before Chomsky even wrote about Libertarian Rationalism.

[JDHURF]

You mind posting articles or essay's he's written on philosophy so I can expand my knowledge?
There’s just so many. A good compendium that serves well as a starting point here is his “Language and Politics”: http://books.google.com/books?id=1lCwP-RNExkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=chomsky+language+and+politics&hl=en&ei=kb0dTMrWOoH48Abu09iPDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false


Actually, your the first person I've ever read who says the Chomsky won that debate and that includes the Chomsky user group. I think the debate was much closer than others do, but I think Foucault won the day. You also ought know that I consider postmodern philosophers to be poor at their job, so if Chomsky lost to them he must be subpar.
In what way was the debate close? How did Foucault have an edge over Chomsky? The only real dispute between them that emerges – there’s a lot of agreement and discussion about similar topics from similar though different perspectives – is near the end and I believe any fair-minded observer would have to conclude that Chomsky makes the more compelling case (about justice and so on).

Wittgenstein surpassed it before Chomsky even wrote about Libertarian Rationalism.
Russell, Chomsky and Wittgenstein are all on the same page. They all accept in general analytic philosophy. Perhaps you could clarify how Wittgenstein’s work negates Chomsky’s. However, if all you are saying is that it is more systematic and rigorous a philosophy worked out and expressed in writing, I won’t dispute that.

[this is an invasion]

can you point out why this isn't the truth comrade?

For one, dual power structures cannot exist. They will either be crushed by capitalism, or recuperated into capitalism.

Also, my problem with that statement is not so much that he thinks there needs to be a dual power structure, but that he's not even active in trying to create a "rich network of co-operatives." He seems more interested in siding with the Democrats.

[Zanthorus]

Russell, Chomsky and Wittgenstein are all on the same page. They all accept in general analytic philosophy. Perhaps you could clarify how Wittgenstein’s work negates Chomsky’s. However, if all you are saying is that it is more systematic and rigorous a philosophy worked out and expressed in writing, I won’t dispute that.

You seem to be thinking of the early Wittgenstein. That was when he and Russell were in agreement. The later Wittgenstein wasn't even a part of analytic philosophy really since he rejected philosophical problems as pseudo-problems. Russell was not very fond of the late Wittgenstein's work. I doubt Chomsky would be on the same page as Wittgenstein either since Wittgenstein's idea of language as developed by society through human interaction contradicts Chomsky's idea that there are rules of language which are innate to human beings.

[syndicat]

I doubt Chomsky would be on the same page as Wittgenstein either since Wittgenstein's idea of language as developed by society through human interaction contradicts Chomsky's idea that there are rules of language which are innate to human beings.

maybe. but maybe not. Humans are evolved biological beings. Our "nature", whatever it is, was fashioned out of millenia of evolutionary processes. Now, included in this is our ability to communicate using sentences that have a kind of internal structure, such as the division between subject (noun-phrase) and predicate (verb-phrase), and the fact that any sentence can be negated. Because the sentence production capacity is an inherited biological trait, it is in fact "innate."

It was obviously highly adaptive for our distant ancestors to be able to describe states of affairs to each other and discuss possible courses of action. So, we can imagine a scenario tens of thousands of years ago where a hunter returns to his band and says P, where this describes a place where animals are present that they could hunt for food. If he has correctly represented the real situation, and the tribe go there and end their famine and have a feast, then it has helped the survival of the band.

[IcarusAngel]

You seem to be thinking of the early Wittgenstein. That was when he and Russell were in agreement. The later Wittgenstein wasn't even a part of analytic philosophy really since he rejected philosophical problems as pseudo-problems. Russell was not very fond of the late Wittgenstein's work. I doubt Chomsky would be on the same page as Wittgenstein either since Wittgenstein's idea of language as developed by society through human interaction contradicts Chomsky's idea that there are rules of language which are innate to human beings.

Please refrain from commenting on Russell's mathematics, Chomsky's linguistic works, Wittgenstein, and analytic philosophy in general until you have read a book about the subject.

[IcarusAngel]

If Chomsky is not a philosopher, these (http://www.erraticimpact.com/names_index.htm) philosopher (http://webs.csu.edu/%7Eamakedon/CSU/ELCAF/courses/ListOfPhilosophers.html) lists (http://www.zeroland.co.nz/philosophers.html) are (http://www.jinfo.org/Philosophers.html) mistaken (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language).

He's also on the Marxist website, under philosophy, with some essays on the philosophy of language.

Chomsky studied mathematics and philosophy while in college. He made friendships with Putman, Quine, Goodman, etc. He was trained in linguistics by Harris, who was one of the best linguistics at the time (replaced by Chomsky). His work in mathematics is still one of the most famous theorems in combinatorics and has been applied in CS. He's often even studied in a discrete mathematics course, as is Russell.

There exists such a thing as a "philosophy of language" as there is a philosophy of mathematics etc. A philosophy of mathematics might be whether numbers exist etc. A philosophy of language would indeed by something like universal grammar. In fact this is an old philosophical question, as philosophers such as Locke and Behavioral psychologists taught that the mind was a "blank slate" and that language was a learned reaction. For example, if I see somebody on the street that I know, the situation brings up the same old words that I always have used since we learn language only by repetition. This was actually taught by Watson and the behaviorists, and has been discredited. This was also challenged by Russell in his book "Outline of Philosophy" (there is indeed a similarity between Russell's work on language and Chomsky's etc.).

[Meridian]

Please refrain from commenting on Russell's mathematics, Chomsky's linguistic works, Wittgenstein, and analytic philosophy in general until you have read a book about the subject.
What are you talking about? Zanthorus seems to be completely correct.

[syndicat]

You seem to be thinking of the early Wittgenstein. That was when he and Russell were in agreement. The later Wittgenstein wasn't even a part of analytic philosophy really since he rejected philosophical problems as pseudo-problems. Russell was not very fond of the late Wittgenstein's work. I doubt Chomsky would be on the same page as Wittgenstein either since Wittgenstein's idea of language as developed by society through human interaction contradicts Chomsky's idea that there are rules of language which are innate to human beings.

I've already commented about the bit about language. but it's also not correct to say that wittgenstein was not part of analytic philosophy. in fact he was one of the major influences on analytic philosophy, both in his earlier and later work. later analytic philosophy was characterized by what is called "the linguistic turn" and the various post-World War 2 Oxford philosophers and Wittgenstein all contributed to this.

the earlier analytic philosophy was more tied to the hard sciences and use of formal logic. In the USA after World War 2 this scientific and formal logic orientation tended to be more characteristic of American philosophy whereas the obsession with "linguistic analysis" and "ordinary language" became dominant in England.

after the '60s, the attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction and apriorism led to the "naturalistic turn" and multi-disciplinary "cognitive science" but this tended to be more pominent in the USA, again, falling out of the earlier scientific and formal orientation. "ordinary language philosophy" was more of a British than American phenomenon.

[Dean]

A network of cooperatives spanning the globe strong enough to overthrow the capitalist state is not something the capitalist state would tolerate. Either they would be crushed before they could threaten the state, or if they could threaten the state, the state would already have been effectively overthrown anyway.

Signed,

Authoritarian Stalinogothic Lifestylist. :lol:

I don't really think the point was ever that you can't have opposition or contradiction to the state apparatus before you acquire a global cooperative network.

The point was simply that "abolishing the state is not a strategy." And its not.

First off, abolishing the state can only occur as a conclusive symptom of a revolution. The bottom line is that abolition only occurs in the context of a complete liquidation of the system. In the same way, abolitionists in the pre-war US were not using "abolition of slavery" as a strategy, but instead appealing for it and working against slavery.

You don't abolish the state, capitalism, slavery or imperialism as a revolutionary strategy. It's a final goal.

I think a lot of revolutionaries want a clear procession of material conditions to provide for the revolutionary change they envision. But I don't think that's feasible or worthwhile. The bottom line is that communists should appeal for more personal, more human control over our lives. That basically sums up the entire communist position, especially in reference to alienation. And I don't think Chomsky disagrees with that notion, either.

[ChrisK]

There’s just so many. A good compendium that serves well as a starting point here is his “Language and Politics”: http://books.google.com/books?id=1lCwP-RNExkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=chomsky+language+and+politics&hl=en&ei=kb0dTMrWOoH48Abu09iPDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false


You should check out Rosa's post on the subject of Chomsky's linguistics. Chris Knight's article and her own are both excellent critiques.


In what way was the debate close? How did Foucault have an edge over Chomsky? The only real dispute between them that emerges – there’s a lot of agreement and discussion about similar topics from similar though different perspectives – is near the end and I believe any fair-minded observer would have to conclude that Chomsky makes the more compelling case (about justice and so on).

I was talking about the human nature aspect of that debate specifically. You are correct that they agreed on much, but what we find is that during the few exchanges, Foucault has a greater command of the subject itself.


Russell, Chomsky and Wittgenstein are all on the same page. They all accept in general analytic philosophy. Perhaps you could clarify how Wittgenstein’s work negates Chomsky’s. However, if all you are saying is that it is more systematic and rigorous a philosophy worked out and expressed in writing, I won’t dispute that.

Analytic philosophy is not one thing. I was speaking of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. His later philosophy came as a rejection of all philosophical problems as having been created through misuses of language. Thus, it is the counter to all philosophies, Chomsky's and others.

[syndicat]

Analytic philosophy is not one thing. I was speaking of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. His later philosophy came as a rejection of all philosophical problems as having been created through misuses of language. Thus, it is the counter to all philosophies, Chomsky's and others.

the problem with that claim is that then you'd need to define what a "philosophical problem" is. good luck with that one.

[ZeroNowhere]

You'd have to define a 'game' first, though.

[ChrisK]

the problem with that claim is that then you'd need to define what a "philosophical problem" is. good luck with that one.

Wouldn't you have to define this by examples?

[syndicat]

i don't know what it would be to "define by examples." that's not what a definition is.

also it's not clear to me that "abuse of language" is an accurate description of all things would fall to "philosophers" to discuss. for example in all the sciences there is the distinction in practice between attributing traits to things or positing traits of various sorts or trying to explain traits of various kinds, versus the various particular things that have those traits. one could then ask the question, Okay, but what is it to be a trait? what is the nature of the distinction between traits and particular things that aren't traits but have traits? I think i've described a "philosophical problem" but in so doing I don't think i have "abused" language. it's called a "philosophical problem" only because it's a distinction common to all the sciences and is not thus taken up in any particular science. so it's a kind of leftover question, and these often end up being taken up by people called "philosophers."

[automattick]

I've always been fascinated by Chomsky and have actually learned a lot from him. He's by far one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

Yes, I have as well. He does have these Proudhonist moments where he begins to cite the U.N. as some moral authority of keeping neoliberalism in check; to me that's a bit of a fallacy, the UN exists to promote consensus-based neoliberalism, but I digress.

I think in general he extreme dedication to demystifying US foreign policy and its rhetoric is enormous and all of us are indebted to his work. While I'm not an anarchist, I've always enjoyed his discussion on Leninism.

[ChrisK]

i don't know what it would be to "define by examples." that's not what a definition is.

I mean pointing to thinks like free will vs determinism, monism vs dualism, realism vs nominalism, etc.

If you mean a lexical definition then yes using examples would not work. But I am thinking of how we can show someone the meaning of a word by showing them examples of what that word indicates.

For example, someone who barely speaks English and I do not speak their language asks me what "food" is. To show them I point to a banana, pie, steak and crackers. That way they know what the meaning of food is.


also it's not clear to me that "abuse of language" is an accurate description of all things would fall to "philosophers" to discuss. for example in all the sciences there is the distinction in practice between attributing traits to things or positing traits of various sorts or trying to explain traits of various kinds, versus the various particular things that have those traits. one could then ask the question, Okay, but what is it to be a trait? what is the nature of the distinction between traits and particular things that aren't traits but have traits? I think i've described a "philosophical problem" but in so doing I don't think i have "abused" language. it's called a "philosophical problem" only because it's a distinction common to all the sciences and is not thus taken up in any particular science. so it's a kind of leftover question, and these often end up being taken up by people called "philosophers."

I would tend to agree with you here. Though I am not as well read on the subject as you, I find that the philosophies of science, social science, math and language, all have impact and are not all based on the misuse of language.

Though, I bet you some other ideas.

BTW, completely different topic, but would you consider Quine one of your influences?

[syndicat]

Quine was too much of a positivist for my taste, but his injunction to "naturalize" philosophy is something i eventually came around to, and also abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distction, and abandonment of apriori "conceptual analysis." but it was really Millikan who had the most influence on my move in this direction, and she follows Wilfrid Sellars along with various other influences including Wittgenstein and Quine.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Ably replied to by Grice and Strawson in 'In Defence of a Dogma'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Syndicat:


the problem with that claim is that then you'd need to define what a "philosophical problem" is. good luck with that one.

Why do we need a definiton, anyway?

[JDHURF]

You should check out Rosa's post on the subject of Chomsky's linguistics. Chris Knight's article and her own are both excellent critiques.

If by Rosa you mean Rosa Lichtenstein, then no thanks. I and every other well-informed, serious leftist are in a consensus: she’s an uneducated, pseudo-philosophical fraud and I’m not yet sure about the actual content of her socialism (perhaps she’s a leftist, it’s undecided at this point).

I’ve already illustrated that she doesn’t have the best grasp on linguistics here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/human-naturei-t68061/index3.html

Evidently Rosa is superb at quoting at length the work of professionals rather than actually writing her own thoughts and arguments and believes that this suffices as a serious discussion in a forum between herself and others. She’s something a bit more than a joke.

Here’s some external disputes with other socialists she’s had:

http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/rosa.htm

I must warn you, if you degenerate this discussion into the endless hysteria and copy/paste maze conjured by Rosa I will have nothing to do with it. I’m sure you and I can have a perfectly reasonable discussion ourselves with our own unique, individual thoughts and arguments.


I was talking about the human nature aspect of that debate specifically. You are correct that they agreed on much, but what we find is that during the few exchanges, Foucault has a greater command of the subject itself


Show me where this happens. On the specific question of human nature they simply disagree and Foucault surely doesn’t illustrate any “greater command” over this topic than Chomsky, quite the contrary. Foucault’s domain is, as he himself specifies, not in the science of human biology and human nature, conspicuously, but rather in the history of madness and power and oppression and so on. With the topic of human nature Chomsky expressed a scientifically informed philosophical, if you will, understanding of human nature that gives full breadth to its complex, diverse manifestations (an epigenetic concept well before such a concept had become the dominant, accepted theory within the related scientific fields). Foucault, on the other hand, doesn’t actually put forward anything of substance, it’s quite difficult not to notice if you have actually studied these subjects.

It’s worth nothing that the substance of what Chomsky said in that discussion about human nature is now the view well established and accepted within the related scientific fields researching the topics and it is dully worth noting that Foucault’s name doesn’t even register.


Analytic philosophy is not one thing. I was speaking of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. His later philosophy came as a rejection of all philosophical problems as having been created through misuses of language. Thus, it is the counter to all philosophies, Chomsky's and others.


If Wittgenstein really believed and wrote and argued that “all philosophical problems” – such as the nature of being, the problem of something from nothing, the dichotomy of determinism and free will – if he thought all of this could be resolved simply through a correct use of language than he was wrong in a most elementary sense. Although, I certainly don’t know this to be the case, perhaps you could cite his arguments relevant to this.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hurfinator:


If by Rosa you mean Rosa Lichtenstein, then no thanks. I and every other well-informed, serious leftist are in a consensus: she’s an uneducated, pseudo-philosophical fraud and I’m not yet sure about the actual content of her socialism (perhaps she’s a leftist, it’s undecided at this point).

I’ve already illustrated that she doesn’t have the best grasp on linguistics here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/human-naturei-t68061/index3.html

In fact, all you did was ignore what I posted and made a few irrelevant comments, which you now compound by substituting personal abuse for argument (as usual!).

Here is what a recent theorist has conclused about Chomsky (again, for you to ignore):


"If there is a single structure of language which is inscribed in our genetic inheritance, and if all social or cultural differences are, from [the] standpoint of language, irrelevant, [this follows]: each member of the human species is identical as regards the faculty of language, because language is inscribed in her brain. Language must therefore be studied in the individual: we are no longer dealing with a system that is external to individual speakers and independent of them..., but with a set of individuals endowed with the same capacities; and language, at least as conceived by the science of language, has nothing to do with social existence. In other words, the logical consequence of Chomskyan naturalism is methodological individualism, which is characteristic of liberal thinking in economics and politics.

"And there is [another] consequence. It is clear that language, derived from a mutation that constituted the human species, has no history, or only the quasi-frozen history of the evolution of the species over the very long term and by leaps: human language has no history in the strict sense, since it cannot have changed since its appearance at the dawn of humanity. Any historical phenomenon, any linguistic change is superficial, and irrelevant for the scientific study of the language faculty. Or, rather, there is linguistic change, but only at the level of the individual whose competence passes from an innate 'initial state' to a 'steady state', once parameters have been triggered by the linguistic environment.

"The transition from infancy in the etymological sense to articulate language is therefore not effected by learning (or only at a superficial level); and the sole temporality of language is the retrospective time of recollection. The child who acquires (but does not learn) speech is like the slave in the Meno: he remembers what he had always known, but did not yet know that he knew. Chomsky's position at least possesses the merit of coherence in its idealism." [Lecercle (2006), pp.21-22.]

Lecercle, J-J. (2006), A Marxist Philosophy Of Language, translated by Gregory Elliott (EJ Brill).

In my next comment, I'll post an article by Chris Knight on this Idealist, Neo-Cartesian (i.e, Chomsky).

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

“If Marx were alive today, he would reject a good deal of the corpus of work that we call Marxism.”[1] Noam Chomsky’s words recall Marx’s own rueful verdict, as recorded by Engels: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”[2]

“Now, as for dialectical materialism,” Chomsky went on, “in my view this is a rather obscure notion … It is clear that people do use the word ‘dialectic’ as if they understood it, but I personally have never understood it. In fact, my own feeling is that it is a kind of ritual term which people use when they are talking about situations of conflict and so on. Personally, I do not find it a very useful idea.”[3]

Chomsky continued: “As for my own methods of investigation, I do not really have any. The only method of investigation is to look hard at a serious problem and try to get some ideas as to what might be the explanation for it, meanwhile keeping an open mind about all sorts of other possibilities. Well, that is not a method. It is just being reasonable, and so far as I know, that is the only way to deal with any problem, whether it is a problem in your work as a quantum physicist or whatever.”[4]

Chomsky was addressing a radicalised audience in Managua, Nicaragua, seven years after a popular insurrection in that city had overthrown the United States-backed Somoza dictatorship.[5] Supportive of the speaker’s socialist politics, his listeners were struggling to reconcile the public figure they knew with that more distant Chomsky respected for his apparently incomprehensible linguistics. “What is the relationship between linguistics and politics?” someone asked.

Chomsky tried to explain: “Well, do these two concepts have anything to do with one another? They may. It could be that there’s a connection between the creative aspect of language use … and the idea of a distinctively human need for productive and creative work (including intellectual work) under one’s own control - that is, control of producers over production - which is the essence of Marxist thought, among other intellectual traditions. So there may be a connection between these two things. They’re conceptually rather similar …”[6]

His two interests may connect up, Chomsky conceded. But equally they may not. Where Marx is concerned, there is no connection at all. Even if “we try to extract ideas from Marx’s thought that are valuable for our enquiries today”, as Chomsky explained, “we will find very little, I think, that has any bearing at all on the study of language, so in this sense his ideas neither hamper nor facilitate this study.”[7]

Two temptations

Few in that audience felt entirely satisfied and the arguments have rumbled on. A decade later, Chomsky was about to deliver a lecture in Delhi. Setting aside the usual niceties, his host - a certain professor Agnihotri of Delhi University - introduced the visiting speaker with a challenge. He was bewildered that a person “so deeply touched by human suffering” could ignore the roots of both happiness and suffering in his scientific work. Noam Chomsky, continued the professor, insisted on viewing language as a “purely biological cognitive system” unconnected with “sociological power-games”. But isn’t language a key tool used by the powerful to deceive, exploit and oppress? How can Chomsky turn a blind eye to such things in his linguistic research?[8]

“I am torn between two temptations,” Chomsky replied in rising to speak: “One is to talk about the interesting set of questions that were just raised. The other is to talk about the topic that I was asked to talk about, which is a rather different one.”[9] He had come prepared to talk about the design features of language, a purely scientific question.

“I’d like to talk about the questions that professor Agnihotri just raised, but perhaps it would be best to put that off until the discussion,” Chomsky ventured. Commotion in the hall. A section of the audience were protesting: “No.” “Can you hear me? Probably you can’t hear me,” Chomsky is recorded as saying. The rumblings continued. “If you say ‘no’, then you can,” he ruled. Still, he decided to delay no longer in answering the professor’s question:

“The short answer to the question of the relation between the two topics is that, yes, I am interested in both. One concerns language as a biological organ - it is pretty clear that it is - and this, I think, gives quite a lot of insight into the essential nature of human beings. The other topic concerns human life and its problems and the use of language as a technique of exploitation and so on. But in that second domain there is nothing known of any depth, to my knowledge. People may pretend that there is and they may make it look complicated; that is the job of intellectuals. But the fact of the matter is that what is understood is pretty much on the surface and is easily available anyway.”[10]

The message was clear: linguistics - the subject Chomsky had been invited to discuss - is complicated and necessarily so, its findings not easily accessible to all. In this field, you need science. Politics is different. Here, deep understanding is impossible; things on this level are just too complicated. All you can do is try to be honest in describing what is happening, a task within everyone’s reach. So it is confusing to discuss science and politics in the same lecture, in the same kind of language or in the same way. Both topics are certainly important, but let us keep them apart.

Many in that Delhi audience still seemed puzzled. Why was Chomsky so ambivalent? Was he, perhaps, holding something back? His two temptations seemed to pull him in opposite directions. He would invoke Rousseau, Marx and other great revolutionary thinkers as sources of political inspiration. Yet would any of these figures have shared his difficulties in connecting politics with science? Rousseau’s 1762 treatise, The social contract, was both scholarly and incendiary. Marx intended his Capital to change the world. Is science itself not revolutionary? Why should the pursuit of truth - scientific truth about language, for example - require different methods or pull in a different direction from the pursuit of social equality and justice?

Contested Meanings

Since Chomsky in his Delhi lecture declined to elaborate, the footnotes to the printed text refer us to his earlier book, Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use. As an ordinary citizen, it is here explained, Chomsky is much concerned with the political use of language. He notes, for example, that following the 1962 American invasion of South Vietnam the vocabulary used by the invaders covered up their crime to an astonishing extent - so much so that it was impossible to talk publicly about the invasion, whether in opposition or support. If you mentioned it either way, no-one would even know what you were talking about: the very concept had been deleted from the public mind.

“For the past 22 years,” as Chomsky explained (speaking in this case in 1984), “I have been searching in vain to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina - without success. There is no such event in history …

“Within the mainstream, there is no-one who can call an invasion ‘an invasion’ or even perceive the fact; it is unimaginable that any American journalist would have publicly called upon the South Vietnamese to resist the American invasion. Such a person would not have been sent to a psychiatric hospital, but he would surely not have retained his professional position and standing. Even today, those who refer to the US invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, intensified in 1965, are regarded with disbelief: perhaps they are confused, or perhaps quite mad.”[11]

Chomsky cites this and other examples to illustrate what he terms “Orwell’s problem” - “the problem of explaining how we can know so little, given that we have so much evidence”.

The reason we know so very little, according to Chomsky, is simple. The state is “Orwellian” in that it constantly tells us lies. More accurately, those in positions of authority use words to mean the exact opposite of their dictionary meaning. In a deliberate echo of Orwell’s 1984, Chomsky explains: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. The terms of political discourse typically have two meanings. One is the dictionary meaning and the other is a meaning that is useful for serving power - the doctrinal meaning.

“Take democracy. According to the common-sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different - it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites.

“Or take free enterprise, a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich. In fact, in acceptable usage, just about any phrase containing the word ‘free’ is likely to mean something like the opposite of its actual meaning.”[12]

Chomsky takes his condemnation of such practices to be just common sense. It may be descriptively accurate, but this kind of thing is not science. For the truly scientific linguist, everything works on such a different level as to be essentially unrelated. For the scientist, the interesting problem is not Orwell’s at all - it is Plato’s.

From Chomsky’s perspective, Orwell’s problem is important, but only in human or political terms. It is not scientifically challenging. The uses of language are far too variable and complex to have anything to do with science. Scientific linguistics addresses Plato’s utterly different challenge - “the problem of explaining how we can know so much, given that we have such limited evidence”.[13] Since we are born with language, from this Platonic perspective, we know things which no amount of propaganda can suppress.

Note how ‘Orwell’ and ‘Plato’ in this picture invert one another’s core assumptions. Chomsky’s quarrel with Orwell’s 1984 is that it is too pessimistic - the novelist does not sufficiently acknowledge the human instinct to see through and resist the propaganda of the state. Chomsky endorses Plato in a spirit of optimism: there are truths which just cannot be erased from the mind. Chomsky has dedicated his professional life to the task of safeguarding the disconnect between Orwell and Plato, thesis and antithesis, politics and science. If they tug him in opposite directions, it is because in his view it is vital to keep them apart. The assumptions on each side have nothing in common. Exploring mind and language through Orwell’s conceptual framework - essentially a Marxist one - allows no escape from politics. Only by adopting Plato’s wholly different philosophical approach, Chomsky informs us, can we study mind and language within the framework of science.

Plato's problem

Science, for Chomsky, is the study of nature. In the case of human nature, this means turning from Orwell’s problem to Plato’s. Chomsky explains: “In The Meno Socrates demonstrates that an untutored slave boy knows the principles of geometry by leading him, through a series of questions, to the discovery of theorems of geometry. This experiment raises a problem that is still with us: How was the slave boy able to find truths of geometry without instruction or information?”[14]

To Plato, it seemed clear that the boy’s knowledge must have been remembered from some earlier existence. Subject to terminological change, Chomsky agrees: “How can we interpret this proposal in modern terms? A modern variant would be that certain aspects of our knowledge and understanding are innate, part of our biological endowment, genetically determined, on a par with the elements of our common nature that cause us to grow arms and legs rather than wings. This version of the classical doctrine is, I think, essentially correct.”[15]

Plato’s problem, continues Chomsky, “arises in a striking form in the study of language, and something like the answer just suggested seems to be the right one”. How is it that a child beginning to speak appears to us so creative and clever? Is it receiving lessons from some mysterious source? Why does more grammar come out from its head than could possibly have gone in? The right answer, says Chomsky, is that the child is not learning from experience at all. Rather it is growing up in accordance with its nature, like a nestling developing wings. The child knows the basics already, its task being to recall that knowledge from an ‘earlier existence’ - in modern terms, from its genes.[16]

A bold speculation

Prior to Chomsky’s intervention in the 1950s, American linguistics was heavily under the influence of behaviourism. The core doctrine was that behaviour is all that matters - ‘mind’, being unobservable, is a fanciful notion which scientists should ignore. In the United States, the leading representative of this school insisted that a child acquires language by learning it from adult teachers, much as a laboratory rat learns its way around a maze.

Chomsky replied: “It is simply not true that children can learn language only through ‘meticulous care’ on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement, though it may be that such care is often the custom in academic families. It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn a second language in the streets, from other children, with amazing rapidity, and that his speech may be completely fluent and correct to the last allophone, while the subtleties that become second nature to the child may elude his parents despite high motivation and continued practice.”[17]

The lines are from a 1959 book review, arguably the most influential one in history. Human children, objected Chomsky, are not rats. Children come into the world equipped already with the basics of language: “The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity.”[18]

How might the system work? In 1959, Chomsky seemed open to all sorts of possibilities, including “reinforcement”, “casual observation”, “natural inquisitiveness”, “a strong tendency to imitate” and various other things. The relevant mechanisms, Chomsky continued, “may be largely innate, or may develop through some sort of learning or through maturation of the nervous system.” However, “It is clear,” he concluded, “that what is necessary in such a case is research, not dogmatic and perfectly arbitrary claims ...”[19]

Despite such apparent open-mindedness, however, Chomsky was already drawn toward one particular hypothesis: “As long as we are speculating, we may consider the possibility that the brain has evolved to the point where, given an input of observed Chinese sentences, it produces (by an induction of apparently fantastic complexity and suddenness) the rules of Chinese grammar, and given an input of observed English sentences, it produces (by, perhaps, exactly the same process of induction) the rules of English grammar ... If clearly recognised as such, this speculation is neither unreasonable nor fantastic; nor, for that matter, is it beyond the bounds of possible study.”[20]

According to this speculation, there is no gradual process - no uphill struggle, as the child solves the learning problems it encounters in incremental steps. Instead, the child homes in on a single solution with “fantastic complexity and suddenness”. First, it has no mastery. Then, in an instant, its mastery of language is complete. Chomsky has remained committed to this extraordinary speculation throughout his life.

The uses of enchantment

Chomsky favours his speculation not because it is true, but because it is science. Science, for Chomsky, has nothing to do with data collection or description. Instead, you reach for ‘deep’ explanation by means of obvious ‘fables’. The instantaneous acquisition idea cannot literally be true. But, scientifically speaking, it is as if it were true. It is a fairy story - but a good one, a useful one. Fairy tales simplify the world and that is the whole point. Chomsky does not quite use the word ‘metaphor’ in this context, but he might have done. A metaphor is a false statement - but an acceptable one because it is patently false.[21] Like any metaphor, Chomsky’s fable is false on one level, but true on another - true on the ‘deep’ level which counts.

Chomsky is celebrated for his fables, and they add up to an astonishing - some might say, infuriating - picture of the world. Here are some of the more notorious ones:

•A child acquires language not incrementally, but in an instant.
•Language was bestowed on the human species by a cosmic ray shower.
•The new biological capacity was perfect, as if installed by a divine architect.
•All word meanings (past, present and future) were fixed in the genome at this time.
•The first human to speak, being alone in the universe, communicated only with herself.
Now, these statements cannot possibly be true. Taken literally, they are absurd. But, according to Chomsky, that is not a problem: all scientific models, he says, are contradicted by the evidence. Science is not supposed to be true in the way that political journalism, a good novel or a detailed empirical description might be true. “Science is a very strange activity,” as he puts it. “It only works for simple problems.”[22] First, you produce a model, a fairy tale. Then you explore its explanatory power, following it wherever it might lead. You may encounter pressure to add qualifications and complications to accommodate various facts - details quite irrelevant to your abstract model. To do science you must resist such pressure. Where the evidence obstructs logic and simplicity, just stick to the fairy tale.

Mastering language in an instant

With this in mind, let us examine Chomsky’s core ideas. We will start with the one about instantaneous language acquisition. Chomsky accepts that this cannot possibly be true: no child ever mastered language in an instant. But the abstraction is valid for the purposes of science.

As he explains, “The serious empirical question is how much distortion is introduced by the abstraction. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, it seems that little if any distortion is introduced: it is as if the language appears instantaneously, by selection of the options available in the initial state. Despite great variation in experience, outcomes seem to be remarkably similar, with shared interpretations, often of extreme delicacy, for linguistic expressions of kinds that have little resemblance to anything experienced. That is not what we would expect if the abstraction to instantaneous acquisition introduced severe distortions.”[23]

Essentially, this is Plato’s idea: the slave boy grasps the principles of geometry by recalling them from a previous life. The human child likewise grasps the principles of language, in this case by drawing on the ancestral knowledge it has inherited through its genes. Chomsky does not need to trail through the empirical evidence for this. It is probably there, he assures us. Indeed, the evidence is probably overwhelming. But it does not really matter. He is simply outlining the logical consequences of his hypothesis. If the child knows everything already, temporal processes and developmental stages are just not relevant.

Critics, of course, might suspect trickery here. Isn’t Chomsky abolishing precisely the weeks, months and years which his opponents might consider necessary for learning to succeed? Isn’t he thereby excluding by fiat the role played by learning and experience? But this is Chomsky’s point. He is allowed to legislate in this way - as any creative mind is allowed. For him, the challenge is not to internalise vast quantities of evidence about humans or other animals. What matters is whether the fable works. From the moment Chomsky joined the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, his remit had been abstract and theoretical. The challenge was to design for military purposes a computational device - some kind of “language machine”.[24]

It was a mechanical object, not a living creature. It did not have to be actually manufactured: the design just had to be formalised somehow and written down. There was absolutely no reason why the mechanism should have to mature, progress through stages, learn from experience or in any other way mirror what happens in the real world. Chomsky’s remit was more limited and for that reason confronted him with a correspondingly simpler question. Could he assume, from the very outset, that there was not sufficient information coming from the environment anyway for his special mechanism to acquire language from an external source? If so, it made sense to ignore developmental stages and collapse the so-called ‘acquisition process’ into an instant.

The mutant

According to Chomsky, language was first bestowed on humanity by a cosmic ray shower. The radiation somehow frazzled the brain of an ancestor to produce the language organ - in an instant. Again, not a very likely story, but who cares? The question is whether it is a useful simplification - whether it works. If you are employed by MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics to design a device for the United States military, who needs the details of human evolutionary history? It is all quite irrelevant to the task in hand, hence no part of the fable you need.

According to Chomsky, the device is biological. On the other hand, it is nothing like what a biologist would expect. No matter where we look in the living world, “there is simply nothing with interesting similarities, which means that the language faculty appears to be biologically isolated in a curious and unexpected sense”.

Chomsky continues: “To tell a fairy story about it, it is almost as if there was some higher primate wandering around a long time ago and some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganised the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain.”[25]

He hastens to stress that this is “not to be taken literally”; it is just “a story”. “But,” he insists, “it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language.” Evolutionists are telling fairy tales all the time - Lamarckian ones, Darwinian ones, who cares? According to the task in hand, you just have to pick the story you need.

Chomsky imagines the pre-linguistic primate “wandering around” in complete social isolation: “It lacks the language organ, but it has something like our brain and other organs, including sensorimotor systems sufficiently close to ours, and also a conceptual-intentional system sufficiently close to ours so that it can think about the world more or less the way we do, in so far as that is possible without language. But it doesn’t have language and cannot articulate such thoughts - even to itself.”

A burst of radiation then suddenly “installs” the necessary device. The risk now is that the mechanism might not work. It might be internally well designed, yet who knows whether it will fit properly into the rest of the recipient’s brain? Maybe it won’t! Chomsky wonders whether some such misfortune might explain why gorillas cannot speak. Did they get hit by perfectly good cosmic rays, but without the new bits of their brains being legible to the old?

“In fact it is conceivable,” he writes, “it is an empirical possibility, though extremely unlikely, that higher primates, say, gorillas or whatever, actually have something like a human language faculty but they just have no access to it.”

In the human case, by some lucky accident, our brains do have access to the new capacity. The module does nicely fit. The brain can ‘read’ the informational output produced. The symbol sequences are ‘legible’.

But precisely how legible? How good is the fit along the interface? Does the overall design appear clumsy and messy? Or is it strangely and mysteriously perfect?

A divine architecht

A biologist, says Chomsky, might expect just a clumsy mess: “That wouldn’t be surprising in the least. That is what biological systems usually are; they are bad solutions to certain design problems that are posed by nature - the best solutions that evolution could achieve under existing circumstances, but perhaps a clumsy and messy solution.”[26]

But is the design of language really such a mess? To understand what Chomsky is driving at, recall the situation at which we have arrived:

“The language faculty is part of the overall architecture of the mind/brain, interacting with other components: the sensorimotor apparatus and the systems that enter into thought, imagination and other mental processes, and their expression and interpretation. The language faculty interfaces with other components of the mind/brain.”[27]

But how good a fit do we now have, assuming we need to connect both sides? In Chomsky’s words: “How perfectly does language satisfy the general conditions imposed at the interface? If a divine architect were faced with the problem of designing something to satisfy these conditions, would actual human language be one of the candidates, or close to it?”

Yes, answers Chomsky. It all fits together perfectly: “Recent work suggests that language is surprisingly ‘perfect’ in this sense, satisfying in a near-optimal way some rather general conditions imposed at the interface.”

Note that Chomsky is not suggesting language really was installed by a divine architect. That would be going too far. He is simply saying the story seems to work.

'Carburettor' and 'jumbo jet'

When the language organ was installed, it did not just contain the basics of grammar. It also featured a mental lexicon. All the nameable concepts which could ever be triggered or imagined - all the word meanings contained in all the world’s languages, past, present and future - were encoded in our genes as a result of those cosmic rays:

“There is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed.”[28]

How do we know? Well, it is the same argument as before: such things are too complex to be explained in any other way. “They have extremely complex properties when you look at them,” observes Chomsky. From this it follows “that they’ve got to basically be there and then they get kind of triggered and you find out what sounds are associated with them”.

A lexical item - the English word ‘house’, for example - is a sound pattern associated with a concept. Every child comes into the world knowing what a house is, so it does not have to learn this as it grows up. It just has to connect its house concept with the locally appropriate sound. As Chomsky puts it, “There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept ‘house’ and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature.”[29]

The same applies to ‘climb’, ‘chase’, ‘tree’ and ‘book’. The child, then, does not have much learning to do. It just has to know which sound is associated locally with a meaning it already knows.

Of course, Chomsky is not restricting his theory to ‘climb’, ‘chase’, ‘tree’ and ‘book’. In principle, the idea must extend across the board. What about, say, ‘carburettor’? Or ‘bureaucrat’? Or ‘quantum potential’? It would be a messy theory which had to draw a line between innate meanings and socially constructed ones. Where exactly should we draw the line?

Chomsky thinks ‘book’ is a natural concept, but is that really true? Do hunter-gatherers need books? Did every child born during the Late Pleistocene come into the world knowing what a book was? If we include ‘book’, then why not include ‘carburettor’, ‘bureaucrat’ and so forth? It would make sense not to pick and choose. But then, as the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out, to have given us an innate stock of notions which includes ‘carburettor’, ‘bureaucrat’, ‘quantum potential’ and so forth, “evolution would have had to be able to anticipate all the contingencies of future physical and cultural environments. Obviously it didn’t and couldn’t do this.”[30] The story surely breaks down at this point.

To the astonishment of everyone, Chomsky replied by following his theory to its logical extreme:

“Acquisition of lexical items poses what is sometimes called ‘Plato’s problem’ in a very sharp form. As anyone who has tried to construct a dictionary or to work in descriptive semantics is aware, it is a very difficult matter to describe the meaning of a word, and such meanings have great intricacy and involve the most remarkable assumptions, even in the case of very simple concepts, such as what counts as a nameable thing. At peak periods of language acquisition, children are acquiring (‘learning’) many words a day, perhaps a dozen or more, meaning that that they are acquiring words on very few exposures, even just one. This would appear to indicate that the concepts are already available, with much or all of their intricacy and structure predetermined, and that the child’s task is to assign labels to concepts, as might be done with limited evidence, given sufficiently rich innate structure.”[31]

After elaborating this idea with respect to relatively ‘simple’ words such as ‘table’, he continued:

“Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as ‘carburettor’ and ‘bureaucrat’, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the case for the terms of ordinary discourse. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.”[32]

When Chomsky says such things, it is hard to know what to think. How far is he prepared to take his fairy tales? “Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle - he just never had occasion to use them!” the philosopher Dan Dennett commented, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point. Perhaps “Aristotle had an innate airplane concept,” Dennett continues, “but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet? What about the concept of an Apex fare Boston-London round trip?”[33]

The first human to speak

According to Chomsky, the ancestral hominin who got hit by those cosmic rays at once started expressing her thoughts with correct grammar. Critics tend to be amazed at this idea: why would an isolated mutant produce any output at all? Why use perfect grammar if there is no-one around who could possibly understand? Chomsky sticks resolutely to his fable:

“Actually you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language, and in fact it would even have adaptive advantage. If one person suddenly got the language faculty, that person would have great advantages; the person could think, could articulate to itself its thoughts, could plan, could sharpen, and develop thinking as we do in inner speech, which has a big effect on our lives. Inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself, and it can be useful for all kinds of purposes (it can also be harmful, as we all know): figure out what you are going to do, plan, clarify your thoughts, whatever. So if one organism just happens to gain a language capacity, it might have reproductive advantages, enormous ones. And if it hap*pened to proliferate in a further generation, they all would have it.”[34]

The pieces of the story, then, fit nicely together. As a scientific theory it is patently absurd, but at least it is internally consistent. Once Chomsky has decontaminated language of every last vestige of social or political life, he is stuck with the logical consequences. The first person to speak must have been muttering to herself. If language was ‘for’ anything at all, it must have been for some internal function: not communicating thoughts - just formulating them in the head. Since cultural and social evolution is irrelevant, the necessary concepts must have been present from the beginning - installed by those cosmic rays.

Revisiting Orwell's problem

For Chomsky, Orwell’s and Plato’s problems are poles apart, yet not wholly unrelated. In fact, Chomsky’s most daring polemical move is to defend Plato by invoking Orwell in his defence. How does this unexpected logic work? Well, a constant barrage of Orwellian state propaganda, claims Chomsky, is the only conceivable explanation for the observable fact that Platonic truth - against all the evidence - has been so effectively smothered and suppressed.

For Chomsky, it is blindingly obvious that there is such a thing as human nature. The mere fact that his own granddaughter (but not a rock or a monkey) can speak is sufficient proof:

“Is my granddaughter no different from a rock, a salamander, a chicken, a monkey? A person who dismisses this absurdity as absurd recognises that there is a distinctive human nature. We are left only with the question of what it is - a highly nontrivial and fascinating question, with enormous scientific interest and human significance.”[35]

Why, then, do intellectuals so tirelessly avoid addressing this hugely important question - important both scientifically and politically? What self-serving motives can possibly lie behind these people’s bizarre doctrine that language, for example, is cultural and social? Why, moreover, do they disseminate such patent falsehood in the name of ‘science’?

“When some doctrine has such a powerful grip on the intellectual imagination over such a broad range and when it has little in the way of empirical support, but is rather in conflict with the evidence at every point, it is fair to ask why the beliefs are so firmly maintained. Why should intellectuals be so wedded to the belief that humans are shaped by the environment, not determined by their nature?”

“One possible answer,” he continues, “lies in the role that intellectuals characteristically play in contemporary - and not so contemporary - society. Since intellectuals are the ones who write history, we should be cautious about the alleged ‘lessons of history’ in this regard; it would not be surprising to discover that the version of history presented is self-serving, and indeed it is. Thus the standard image is that the intellectuals are fiercely independent, honest, defenders of the highest values, opponents of arbitrary rule and authority and so on. The actual record reveals a different story. Quite typically, intellectuals have been ideological and social managers, serving power or seeking to assume power themselves by taking control of popular movements of which they declare themselves to be the leaders. For people committed to control and manipulation it is quite useful to believe that human beings have no intrinsic moral and intellectual nature, that they are simply objects to be shaped by state and private managers and ideologues - who, of course, perceive what is good and right.”[36]

Chomsky will not quite commit himself to this style of explanation. He treats it as merely a “possible answer” to the question he has posed. Still, he invites us to consider it seriously. “I rather suspect that these speculations about the otherwise quite surprising appeal of environmentalist views,” he observes, “has more than a little truth to it.”[37]

Chomsky is not averse to turning the weapons of his enemies against those same enemies themselves.

Reason and revolution

The problem, says Chomsky, is not new. As the history of religion all too clearly shows, entire populations for millennia have been induced to believe things “completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts about the world around us”. While our genes give us insight, state propaganda takes it away. The problem is a political one - “Orwell’s problem” in its most general form. To solve it, “we must discover the institutional and other factors that block insight and understanding in crucial areas of our lives and ask why they are effective”.[38] This, of course, falls within the remit of politics, religious history and the sociology of knowledge - fields decisively shaped by Marx’s revolutionary ideas.

The human mind, then, is a meeting-place between Platonic good and Orwellian bad. Alongside our capacities for self-serving ideology and deception, we have sophisticated capacities for insight and understanding, empathy and concern. What must socialists do in order to have some hope of fostering the good in us all? At this point, Chomsky turns for inspiration to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pioneering social scientist and prophet of the 1789 French Revolution: “One of the earliest and most remarkable of the 18th century investigations of freedom and servitude,” writes Chomsky, “is Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality (1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract.”

In it, Rousseau seeks to “set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone”.[39]

His conclusions, Chomsky notes, appeared so shocking to the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of Dijon (to whom the work had been submitted) that they refused to hear the manuscript through.

Rousseau held that, “although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech itself is nonetheless not natural to him”.[40] Chomsky accepts this, interpreting it in terms of his own distinction between fixed genetic capacity and flexible social use. “Rousseau discusses the origin of language at some length,” continues Chomsky, “though he confesses himself to be unable to come to grips with the problem in a satisfactory way.” Rousseau, claims Chomsky, was forced to abandon his evolutionary speculations in the face of a conundrum. In order to invent speech, men had first to invent society. Yet in order to invent society, they had first to invent speech.

To resolve the conundrum, Chomsky goes back 100 years - back to Descartes. “The Cartesians,” he says, “cut the Gordian knot” by postulating the existence of mind as something quite separate from body. Since mind is incommensurable with body, the notion of its evolution from non-mind (ie, from a non-human precursor) is simply inconceivable. From a Cartesian standpoint, however, that presents no problem at all.

Contrary to Rousseau, claims Chomsky, there is “no need to explain the origin of language in the course of historical evolution. Rather man’s nature is qualitatively distinct: there is no passage from body to mind.”[41]

In the absence of such a “passage” - such an evolutionary transition - Chomsky resolves Rousseau’s conundrum with his story about a sudden mutation.

What he fails to mention is Rousseau’s own success in resolving the conundrum he had himself acknowledged. While denouncing ‘civilised’ society, Rousseau was no simple-minded worshipper of nature. He was well aware that other forms of society are possible. In fact, he argued persuasively that man is by nature a social animal and that rationality presupposes society for its expression. With the establishment of civil society, writes Rousseau in The social contract, men at last began governing themselves. The founding contract was an agreement between equals. Reason became sovereign in human affairs because, for the first time, each had to consult his own conscience as the moral equal of anyone else:

“The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.”[42]

Why did language begin to evolve from this moment on? According to Rousseau, the explanation is simple: social equality exerted pressure to communicate in linguistic ways: “As soon as one man was recognised by another as a sentient, thinking being similar to himself, the desire or need to communicate his sentiments and thoughts made him seek the means to do so. These means can only be drawn from the senses, the only instruments by which one man can act upon another. Hence the institution of sensible signs to express thought. The inventors of language did not make this argument, but instinct suggested its conclusion to them.”[43]

This, then, was Rousseau’s speculative theory of the origins of language. Revolutionary egalitarianism, cooperative instincts and “the institution of sensible signs” are all intimately intertwined - and have been so from the beginning.

Is this not as intriguing a “fairy tale” as Chomsky’s one about cosmic rays? Indeed, is it not rather more interesting, more testable and (all things considered) more likely to be true? Chomsky accuses the state of suppressing creativity and reason. Governments, he says (paraphrasing Rousseau), are little more than conspiracies by the rich to plunder the poor. By its very nature, all such government is illegitimate. “New revolutions must,” in Rousseau’s inflammatory words, “dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institution ... The uprising that ends by strangling or deposing a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him.”[44]

But if Rousseau is right then language - the liberated voice of human reason - is more than just an object in the head. It rests on passions and instincts for agreement and legitimate (ie, collectively agreed) action. Evolution can explain how these instincts evolved, but revolution was needed to liberate their potential. Hunters and gatherers - the ‘noble savages’ of Rousseau’s imagination - are passionate and committed egalitarians. It was they who invented the first words and rules. Language is the historical product not of ‘nature’ considered in the abstract - but of our species’ most ancient, adaptive and distinctively human egalitarian institutions and corresponding ideals.

Notes

1.N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures Cambridge MA 1988, p189.
2.Engels, quoting Marx in a letter to Eduard Bernstein of November 1882: K Marx, F Engels CW London 1987, p353.
3.N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures Cambridge MA 1988, pp189-90.
4.Ibid p190.
5.In fact, seven years after. For US behaviour in response to the 1979 revolution, see N Chomsky, ‘Teaching Nicaragua a lesson’, in What Uncle Sam really wants Tucson 1992, pp40-46.
6.N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures Cambridge MA 1988, pp195-96.
7.Ibid p178.
8.N Chomsky The architecture of language Oxford 2000, p30n.
9.Ibid p1.
10.Ibid p2.
11.Address given at the Community Church of Boston, December 9 1984 and reprinted as ‘Afghanistan and South Vietnam’ in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, pp223-26. The quotation is on pp225-26.
12.N Chomsky What Uncle Sam really wants Tucson 1992, pp86-87.
13.N Chomsky Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use London 1986, pxxv.
14.N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures Cambridge MA 1988, p4.
15.Ibid.
16.Ibid.
17.N Chomsky ‘A review of BF Skinner’s Verbal behavior’ in Language 35(1): 26-58, 1959.
18.Ibid.
19.Ibid.
20.Ibid.
21.“Generally speaking, it is only when a sentence is taken to be false that we accept it as a metaphor and start to hunt out the hidden implication” - D Davidson, ‘What metaphors mean’, S Sacks (ed) On metaphor Chicago 1979, pp29-45. The quotation is on p40.
22.N Chomsky The architecture of language Oxford 2000, p2.
23.N Chomsky Language and mind: current thoughts on ancient problems - lectures presented at Universidade de Brasilia, part 2, p3. Published under the title ‘Linguagem e mente. Pensamentos atuais sobre antigos problemas’ in Pesquisa Linguistica 3.4, 1998. Page references are to the English manuscript.
24.See C Knight, ‘The Chomsky enigma’ Weekly Worker January 11 2007.
25.N Chomsky The architecture of language Oxford 2000, p4.
26.Ibid p18.
27.N Chomsky Powers and prospects London 1996, p29.
28.N Chomsky The architecture of language Oxford 2000, p75.
29.GA Olson, L Faigley, ‘Politics and composition: a conversation with Noam Chomsky’ Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1, 1991, pp1-36.
30.H Putnam Representation and reality Cambridge MA 1988, p15. Putnam is criticising the “strong innateness hypothesis”, as presented by Gerry Fodor, one of Chomsky’s students. There is no difference between Chomsky’s and Fodor’s position.
31.N Chomsky New horizons in the study of language and mind Cambridge 2000, p61.
32.Ibid pp64-66.
33.D Dennett Consciousness explained London 1991, pp192-93.
34.N Chomsky On nature and language Cambridge 2002, p148.
35.Interview conducted in May 1995 Red and Black Revolution No2, 2001, pp17-21.
36.N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures Cambridge MA 1988, pp165-66.
37.Ibid p166.
38.N Chomsky Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use London 1986, pxxvii.
39.Quoted in J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, p141.
40.Ibid p146. Chomsky is quoting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the origin of languages.
41.Ibid p147.
42.J-J Rousseau The social contract and discourses London 1973, pp179-309. The quotation is on p207.
43.J-J Rousseau, ‘Essay on the origin of languages’, V Gourevitch, (ed) Rousseau: The discourse and other early political writings Cambridge 1997, pp247-99. The quotation is on p248.
44.J Peck (ed) The Chomsky reader London 1988, p142.

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002551

So, Chomsky's not a fan of your own idealist 'theory', 'materialist dialectics', is he?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Finally:


Here’s some external disputes with other socialists she’s had:

http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/rosa.htm

This is the guy who thinks that when I refer to the 'alien class' ideas of the ruling class I am in fact referring to shape-shifting lizards!

So, I'm not surprised you link to this buffoon.:lol:

[ChrisK]

If by Rosa you mean Rosa Lichtenstein, then no thanks. I and every other well-informed, serious leftist are in a consensus: she’s an uneducated, pseudo-philosophical fraud and I’m not yet sure about the actual content of her socialism (perhaps she’s a leftist, it’s undecided at this point).

I’ve already illustrated that she doesn’t have the best grasp on linguistics here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/human-naturei-t68061/index3.html

Evidently Rosa is superb at quoting at length the work of professionals rather than actually writing her own thoughts and arguments and believes that this suffices as a serious discussion in a forum between herself and others. She’s something a bit more than a joke.

Here’s some external disputes with other socialists she’s had:

http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/rosa.htm

I must warn you, if you degenerate this discussion into the endless hysteria and copy/paste maze conjured by Rosa I will have nothing to do with it. I’m sure you and I can have a perfectly reasonable discussion ourselves with our own unique, individual thoughts and arguments.

Why didn't you engage any of the arguments made in Chris Knights article? Also, why don't you actually respond to Rosa's arguments instead of just claiming that she is distorting chomsky.


Show me where this happens. On the specific question of human nature they simply disagree and Foucault surely doesn’t illustrate any “greater command” over this topic than Chomsky, quite the contrary. Foucault’s domain is, as he himself specifies, not in the science of human biology and human nature, conspicuously, but rather in the history of madness and power and oppression and so on. With the topic of human nature Chomsky expressed a scientifically informed philosophical, if you will, understanding of human nature that gives full breadth to its complex, diverse manifestations (an epigenetic concept well before such a concept had become the dominant, accepted theory within the related scientific fields). Foucault, on the other hand, doesn’t actually put forward anything of substance, it’s quite difficult not to notice if you have actually studied these subjects.

It’s worth nothing that the substance of what Chomsky said in that discussion about human nature is now the view well established and accepted within the related scientific fields researching the topics and it is dully worth noting that Foucault’s name doesn’t even register.

Foucaults command comes from his rejection of Human Nature as being anything but a humanly created category. While Chomsky, on the other hand, bascially claims that language is an a priori "thing" that people have, using children's learning language as his main example.

Foucault's argument is far more convicing than people have some language bestowed upon them.


If Wittgenstein really believed and wrote and argued that “all philosophical problems” – such as the nature of being, the problem of something from nothing, the dichotomy of determinism and free will – if he thought all of this could be resolved simply through a correct use of language than he was wrong in a most elementary sense. Although, I certainly don’t know this to be the case, perhaps you could cite his arguments relevant to this.

Not resolved. Dissolved. His point was that language is being used out of its ordinary meaning. Using a word as it is not meant to be used creates new problems and questions and are what we call philosophical problems. If we move back to the ordinary use of these words, then the problem can be seen as nonsense and therefore, not a problem at all.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

See also here:

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext26/Chomsky.html

[JDHURF]

Why didn't you engage any of the arguments made in Chris Knights article? Also, why don't you actually respond to Rosa's arguments instead of just claiming that she is distorting Chomsky.


I have done so elsewhere extensively, to no avail (the exchange lasted months and was utterly futile). I am not responsible for arguing every full-length article and journal entry Rosa copies and pastes, the notion that people must do so is utterly ridiculous and absurd. Any simpleton can be a wikiwarrior, any fool can cull up articles on google and paste them ad infinitum, no one should be expected, in such a situation, to eternally respond to linked pieces.


Foucaults command comes from his rejection of Human Nature as being anything but a humanly created category. While Chomsky, on the other hand, bascially claims that language is an a priori "thing" that people have, using children's learning language as his main example. Foucault's argument is far more convicing than people have some language bestowed upon them.

Foucault’s “rejection of Human Nature as being anything but a humanly(sic) created category” barely rises above caricature. Obviously there is a human genome that gives full breadth to the manifestation of human creativity, behavior and constitution while also in many ways restricting the ways in which such manifestations may be expressed. To say that there is no human nature is to disqualify one’s self from any serious, adult, scientifically informed discussion of the topic. After all, the human genome is constrained in such a way as to prevent the sprouting of wings during development, for instance. That is simply a fundamental aspect of human nature and to deny this is to depart from the rational and enter into the Twilight Zone of ideological incoherence and foolishness.

This is, after all, Karl Marx’s contention. Perhaps yourself and Rosa there don’t claim to be Marxists, but it must be recalled that Marx himself distinguished between human nature in general (the foundation which is fixed and unchanging) and human nature as modified in each historical epoch (that which is fluid and subject to influence and change as impacted by surrounding environment). You can find Marx’s views on this in Capital. I’ve written about this extensively as well.

In any case, you are falsifying Chomsky's position. He has never said that language is something people a priori have, but something that people are hardwired for attaining. He contends, and this is taught in any introductory psychology as well as philosophy course, that within the cognitive, modular mind there is a language acquisition device (LAD) that predisposes human beings to developing language (not that language already exists). He compares this to puberty. People do not learn puberty, it is simply a genetically encoded process of development that is going to take place at a certain time regardless, based upon the hardwiring of the genetic code and the process of human development. Acquisition of language takes place in much the same way.

Here's a brief example:

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198311--.htm


Not resolved. Dissolved. His point was that language is being used out of its ordinary meaning. Using a word as it is not meant to be used creates new problems and questions and are what we call philosophical problems. If we move back to the ordinary use of these words, then the problem can be seen as nonsense and therefore, not a problem at all.


Again no citation or example from Wittegenstein’s work. Until some proof, evidence or example is provided by you cited from him I find nothing of substance to respond to here.

Btw – Rosa – I do not subscribe to any idealist philosophy and am not an adherent to materialist “dialectics” or “dialectics” of any sort – I was putting you on at PCF for the reason I find it impossible to take you seriously.

[ChrisK]

I have done so elsewhere extensively, to no avail (the exchange lasted months and was utterly futile). I am not responsible for arguing every full-length article and journal entry Rosa copies and pastes, the notion that people must do so is utterly ridiculous and absurd. Any simpleton can be a wikiwarrior, any fool can cull up articles on google and paste them ad infinitum, no one should be expected, in such a situation, to eternally respond to linked pieces.

I have seen no such response.


Foucault’s “rejection of Human Nature as being anything but a humanly(sic) created category” barely rises above caricature. Obviously there is a human genome that gives full breadth to the manifestation of human creativity, behavior and constitution while also in many ways restricting the ways in which such manifestations may be expressed. To say that there is no human nature is to disqualify one’s self from any serious, adult, scientifically informed discussion of the topic. After all, the human genome is constrained in such a way as to prevent the sprouting of wings during development, for instance. That is simply a fundamental aspect of human nature and to deny this is to depart from the rational and enter into the Twilight Zone of ideological incoherence and foolishness.

This is, after all, Karl Marx’s contention. Perhaps yourself and Rosa there don’t claim to be Marxists, but it must be recalled that Marx himself distinguished between human nature in general (the foundation which is fixed and unchanging) and human nature as modified in each historical epoch (that which is fluid and subject to influence and change as impacted by surrounding environment). You can find Marx’s views on this in Capital. I’ve written about this extensively as well.


You are comparing language to a physical quality. Further, human nature is something that evolves and changes with changes in the material conditions of society. The fact is, if language is a proof of a set human nature, then it would have to be the case that language was an a priori thing in humans from the first humanoids onward. This is not only idealist, but unscientific. Language is an evolved thing based on a social need, through labor, to communicate.

I don't recall seeing that in Captial, care to show me where?

I do remeber where Marx said langauge only develops due to labor.


Again no citation or example from Wittegenstein’s work. Until some proof, evidence or example is provided by you cited from him I find nothing of substance to respond to here.

How about the whole of the Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. You seem to have only heard of the Tractatus, which he completely turns away from.

A good summary of his ideas can be found here (http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/).

[Zanthorus]

Just read the first section of the German Ideology where he talks about men entering production relations to meet their purely natural needs and then developing other socio-cultural needs on top of that.

Although seeing as how the "nature" of something is what's inherent to it, Marx's characterisation of man as a being which produces universally would probably be closer to his own idea of "human nature".

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hurfinator:


I have done so elsewhere extensively, to no avail (the exchange lasted months and was utterly futile). I am not responsible for arguing every full-length article and journal entry Rosa copies and pastes, the notion that people must do so is utterly ridiculous and absurd. Any simpleton can be a wikiwarrior, any fool can cull up articles on google and paste them ad infinitum, no one should be expected, in such a situation, to eternally respond to linked pieces.

In fact, you lied about my work, and were caught out, but would not withdraw your lie.

And, if we follow the link you posted, we'll see (shock! horror!) that you cut and paste stuff, too!

What's good enough for the Hurfinator, is surely good enough for little old me...:thumbup1:

Finally, in that debate, I cut and pasted mostly my own work. How despicable of me!

So much worse than lying, eh?

[JDHURF]

I have seen no such response.
That’s neither here nor there. I’m simply not interested in Rosa or her copy/paste jobs.

She's not taken seriously anywhere she goes:

http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/letters.shtml


You are comparing language to a physical quality.

No I am not. I am, as has Chomsky, comparing the process of developing language with the process of going through puberty, and both are physical processes (language acquisition has to do with the development of a specific region of the modular mind, the inter-wiring of the cognitive neuro-network of the brain). I am not discussing language as such, I am discussing the process of developing language with regards, specifically, to the development of the cognitive system.

And in any case physical qualities are paramount with regards to human nature, quite obviously and here it is simply unambiguous: there is a human nature. Quite apart from any discussion of language, the very fact that human beings have a relatively fixed genome that restricts development - preventing, say, the sprouting of wings and so on - definitively illustrates that there is a human nature. It is a part of human nature to develop a visual system, a central nervous system and a cognitive system that gives rise to the acquisition of language. Your conflation here is with the cognitive subsystem that gives rise to language with language as such. I am talking about the former rather than the latter and it is simply a fact that the former is parallel to a physical quality because that is precisely what the cognitive system is: a physical quality.


Further, human nature is something that evolves and changes with changes in the material conditions of society. The fact is, if language is a proof of a set human nature, then it would have to be the case that language was an a priori thing in humans from the first humanoids onward. This is not only idealist, but unscientific. Language is an evolved thing based on a social need, through labor, to communicate.

You are simply repeating what I have already stressed, you simply fail to understand the elementary distinction Karl Marx observed so long ago in his Capital. There is a general human nature as such that is fixed and unchanging (such as the fact that aspects of the human genome are not subject to radical change, i.e., the sprouting of wings, the ability to see through solid objects, the ability to emit sounds at a range humans are currently unable to register and hear) and there is a human nature as modified in each historical epoch, to again use Marx’s phrasing, that is fluid and subject to influence and change based upon the impact of the surrounding environment. You only recognize the latter and fail to, unlike Karl Marx, recognize the former. No one is arguing that language is evidence of a fully set human nature, you are falsifying – either our of an ignorance that is incapable of understanding what is being said or a willful misrepresentation in order to not have to address the actual substance of the argument – the contention. The universal human propensity to develop language at a given time, as genetically determined during the unfolding and flowering of the cognitive system, is evidence of a human nature that is shaped and determined by a fundamental, constrained human nature that is at the same time, in various other aspects, fluid and subject to change. This is known as epigenetic theory and is the dominant, accepted theory within the research-based, related sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science, etcetera), never mind the psueo-scientific, data-less, ideological excursions of social science and cultural lit. charlatans and this also happens to be the position of Karl Marx.


I don't recall seeing that in Captial, care to show me where?

p. 668:


To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#n50

It's worth thinking about the fact that if you do not posit some concept of human nature Marx's work on alienation becomes pure gibberish. If there is no human nature, then how does one become alienated from that which does not exist? Everyone who argues against any sort of human nature - people who have no understanding of science - need to get serious.

[ChrisK]

That’s neither here nor there. I’m simply not interested in Rosa or her copy/paste jobs.

She's not taken seriously anywhere she goes:

http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/letters.shtml

I take her seriously. They don't because she is attacking dialectical materialism.


You are simply repeating what I have already stressed, you simply fail to understand the elementary distinction Karl Marx observed so long ago in his Capital. There is a general human nature as such that is fixed and unchanging (such as the fact that aspects of the human genome are not subject to radical change, i.e., the sprouting of wings, the ability to see through solid objects, the ability to emit sounds at a range humans are currently unable to register and hear) and there is a human nature as modified in each historical epoch, to again use Marx’s phrasing, that is fluid and subject to influence and change based upon the impact of the surrounding environment. You only recognize the latter and fail to, unlike Karl Marx, recognize the former. No one is arguing that language is evidence of a fully set human nature, you are falsifying – either our of an ignorance that is incapable of understanding what is being said or a willful misrepresentation in order to not have to address the actual substance of the argument – the contention. The universal human propensity to develop language at a given time, as genetically determined during the unfolding and flowering of the cognitive system, is evidence of a human nature that is shaped and determined by a fundamental, constrained human nature that is at the same time, in various other aspects, fluid and subject to change. This is known as epigenetic theory and is the dominant, accepted theory within the research-based, related sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science, etcetera), never mind the psueo-scientific, data-less, ideological excursions of social science and cultural lit. charlatans and this also happens to be the position of Karl Marx.

You completely missed the point of what I have written. The only possible way for language to develop would be in a social context. What you are claiming is that the first humanoids automatically had the capacity to develop a certain type of language. That is a priori nonsense.

Language would have had to develop with increases in the labor process. Therefore, it is not part of the set human nature.


p. 668

That doesn't help at all. In my copy that's the first page of Chapter 18 and has nothing to do with human nature. Which chapter? How far into it about?

[JDHURF]

I take her seriously. They don't because she is attacking dialectical materialism.

Well, I don’t take her seriously and I agree with her conclusions regarding dialecticism.


You completely missed the point of what I have written. The only possible way for language to develop would be in a social context. What you are claiming is that the first humanoids automatically had the capacity to develop a certain type of language. That is a priori nonsense. Language would have had to develop with increases in the labor process. Therefore, it is not part of the set human nature.

You just don’t grasp what is being said and you clearly have no understanding of epigenetic theory. Epigenetic theory is the dominant, accepted theory within the related sciences. It’s also clear you don’t bother yourself with any of the sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science, etcetera). Epigenetic theory posits that the whole nature versus nurture argument is null and void, in just about every instance, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the instance, it is simultaneously a case of both nature and nurture. In the case of puberty people are genetically programmed to begin puberty within a constrained time frame but the initiation of puberty takes place within that time frame either earlier or later depending upon surrounding environment, intake of food, chemicals and so on and is thus both genetically determined as well as environmentally influenced. Now surely you wouldn’t argue that because environment can both speed up and delay the process of puberty that it is not actually genetically determined, that it is only within a social context that puberty takes place, that would just be absurd. The acquisition of language is parallel. With the sufficient development of the cognitive system, specifically the region within which lies the LAD, which is as genetically determined as is the process of puberty, language is then readily usurped by the developing person (they don’t learn language, it is not taught to them, they develop it) and the environment no doubt plays a crucial role here. For if the person is developing language in Japan, they are going to develop Japanese, or if the person is developing language in Kansas, they are going to develop English with a Kansas accent and so on. The underlying rules and principles of language are simply far too intricate, complex and unexplained for the child who is developing language to grasp consciously, to cognitively understand, to be taught, it is something they are, based upon the constitution of their cognitive system, predisposed to usurping when exposed to language, thus making the speech giver not the trigger, but rather the nutrient (Slobin, 2001, p.438). Reinforcement is unnecessary, “infants merely need dendrites to grow, mouth muscles to strengthen, neurons to connect, and speech to be heard. (Berger, p.181)[1]”

That’s just plainly how it works.

Noam Chomsky discusses this on p. 579 of Language and Politics:

http://books.google.com/books?id=1lCwP-RNExkC&pg=PA579&lpg=PA579&dq=Chomsky%2Blanguage+acquisition%2Bnutrients%2Bla nguage+and+politics&source=bl&ots=azKkMxG6iu&sig=mqJbrEy2w1gdLw0nfx347rwx_bE&hl=en&ei=Au4kTIjVIcOHnQerveTPBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (http://books.google.com/books?id=1lCwP-RNExkC&pg=PA579&lpg=PA579&dq=Chomsky%2Blanguage+acquisition%2Bnutrients%2Bla nguage+and+politics&source=bl&ots=azKkMxG6iu&sig=mqJbrEy2w1gdLw0nfx347rwx_bE&hl=en&ei=Au4kTIjVIcOHnQerveTPBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)


That doesn't help at all. In my copy that's the first page of Chapter 18 and has nothing to do with human nature. Which chapter? How far into it about?

I gave you a link to the relevant chapter and the direct quote – yet you have still refused to even hint at any support for your claims regarding Wittgenstein (recalling in my mind the quote about how people will require the most strenuous evidence for that which they don’t believe yet require no evidence whatsoever for their own beliefs, how true that is - and, again, it's worth thinking about the fact that if you do not posit some concept of human nature Marx's work on alienation becomes pure gibberish. If there is no human nature, then how does one become alienated from that which does not exist? Everyone who argues against any sort of human nature - people who have no understanding of science - need to get serious.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=dbGTRQgvyy8C&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=noam+chomsky%2Blanguage%2Bnutrients&source=bl&ots=29AhHAxRaf&sig=m2zd6soYYPGcADu3D4aTfrjRcTc&hl=en&ei=Ne8kTLe5Fs6EnQedg5W_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false

[ChrisK]

You just don’t grasp what is being said and you clearly have no understanding of epigenetic theory. Epigenetic theory is the dominant, accepted theory within the related sciences. It’s also clear you don’t bother yourself with any of the sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science, etcetera). Epigenetic theory posits that the whole nature versus nurture argument is null and void, in just about every instance, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the instance, it is simultaneously a case of both nature and nurture. In the case of puberty people are genetically programmed to begin puberty within a constrained time frame but the initiation of puberty takes place within that time frame either earlier or later depending upon surrounding environment, intake of food, chemicals and so on and is thus both genetically determined as well as environmentally influenced. Now surely you wouldn’t argue that because environment can both speed up and delay the process of puberty that it is not actually genetically determined, that it is only within a social context that puberty takes place, that would just be absurd. The acquisition of language is parallel. With the sufficient development of the cognitive system, specifically the region within which lies the LAD, which is as genetically determined as is the process of puberty, language is then readily usurped by the developing person (they don’t learn language, it is not taught to them, they develop it) and the environment no doubt plays a crucial role here. For if the person is developing language in Japan, they are going to develop Japanese, or if the person is developing language in Kansas, they are going to develop English with a Kansas accent and so on. The underlying rules and principles of language are simply far too intricate, complex and unexplained for the child who is developing language to grasp consciously, to cognitively understand, to be taught, it is something they are, based upon the constitution of their cognitive system, predisposed to usurping when exposed to language, thus making the speech giver not the trigger, but rather the nutrient (Slobin, 2001, p.438). Reinforcement is unnecessary, “infants merely need dendrites to grow, mouth muscles to strengthen, neurons to connect, and speech to be heard. (Berger, p.181)[1]”

I find it funny that you say I don't understand what is being said, when you clearly have no clue as to what I'm responding to.

I'm responding to his belief that homo sapiens just came on to the scene with language. That they just appeared knowing grammar and there was no development of it needed.

Maybe you should respond to that, in stead of thinking that I don't know that children, regardless of ethnicity, growing up in different areas will learn the language if the area.


I gave you a link to the relevant chapter and the direct quote – yet you have still refused to even hint at any support for your claims regarding Wittgenstein (recalling in my mind the quote about how people will require the most strenuous evidence for that which they don’t believe yet require no evidence whatsoever for their own beliefs, how true that is - and, again, it's worth thinking about the fact that if you do not posit some concept of human nature Marx's work on alienation becomes pure gibberish. If there is no human nature, then how does one become alienated from that which does not exist? Everyone who argues against any sort of human nature - people who have no understanding of science - need to get serious.

You didn't give a link until after I posted. And its funny, if we post the whole quote (which is a footnote) we get:


Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.” Artistic criticism is “harmful,” because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nuila dies sine line!,” piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.

He is, in fact, criticizing Bentham's method, which is where you got your quote from, and calling it a poor argument. He is not passing judgement on human nature!

As for Wittgenstein I gave you three books and an article, what more do you want?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hurfinator:


Well, I don’t take her seriously and I agree with her conclusions regarding dialecticism.

In fact, you posted an article explaining and defending dialectics at your blog, in which you also posted a lie about me and my ideas (and you took me to task for rejecting that 'theory' -- see my next post). So, you can drop the pretence that you never accepted/defended this regressive 'theory'.

This used to be here (along with my reply to you, but it looks like you have either moved it, or you no longer wish to inflict your 'ideas' on humanity):

http://secularhumanism.blogspot.com/2008/02/demystifying-dialectics.html

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In fact, I saved some of the above material -- here it is:


This is from your original post:


"The dialectic “law of the negation of the negation,” is one of the aspects of dialectics which is subject to such gross extrapolation and mystification. Rosa Lichtenstein, a self-professed “anti-dialectical Marxist” - an epithet, by the way, which definitively proves either one of two things, either one hasn’t read Marx or one did not understand what one has read[3] – concocts verbose and incoherent screeds about the mystical triad of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,” predominately, although possibly mistakenly, attributed to Hegel. Although, as Ollam [sic] points out, “[d]ialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation.” The negation of the negation is simply the observation and articulation of the dynamic process of birth, growth, death and decay; that entities tend to negate themselves in order to advance or reproduce.

Bold added.

Now, you have been asked repeatedly to substantiate the above allegation, and you have consistently refused to do so.

I have also pointed out to you that there are only two places at my site where this triad is mentioned:

1) Here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Thesis_Anti-Thesis_Synthesis.htm

where I also say this:


I publish this here in the vain hope that it will help squash the myth that Hegel's method can be summarised by the crude formula: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis:

The material I re-published there was from this Hegel internet page:

http://www.hegel.net/en/faq.htm#6.4

and that material was originally from the following:

Müller, G. (1958), 'The Hegel Legend Of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis", Journal of the History of Ideas 19, pp.411-14; reprinted in Stewart (1996), pp.301-05.

Stewart, J. (1996) (ed.), The Hegel Myths And Legends (Northwestern University Press).

The only other place I mention this triad is in Essay Four, Note 23, where I re-iterate the above points.

Nowhere in my work do I 'concoct':


verbose and incoherent screeds about the mystical triad of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,” predominately, although possibly mistakenly, attributed to Hegel.

Now, in the face of my repeated claims that you have lied, all you can say is the following:


Go back through this thread and you will find that I already have. I cited a thread at RevLeft where you went on for pages ranting about the triad and you even do so on your homepage, therefore, I lied about nothing. I said that you write about the triad, incoherently, which you do, there is no controversy here.

You have not told us anywhere in this thread where I say such things. [I note that I post links, you just make unfounded allegations.]

Furthermore, there is only one page at RevLeft where I have mentioned in detail this triad:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=707195&postcount=7

There are other threads where I have mentioned it in passing, but only to correct other posters who wanted to attribute it to Hegel.

There are no threads at my site or at RevLeft where I do this:


I cited a thread at RevLeft where you went on for pages ranting about the triad and you even do so on your homepage

The fact that, even now, months after the original lie, you cannot provide any links, and still continue to make the same baseless allegations, confirms you as the liar we have come to know and loathe.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Here are a few of your other comments about dialectics (posted by you at the now defunct Political Crossfire Forum):


False. Dialectics is certainly a method that helps clarify submerged social realities, mechanisms, forms of oppression and so on that are not identifiable upon first approximations, however, dialectics by no means subverts the empirical method, but rather, in my view, it supplements it and can help to guide it.


Dialectics is accessible to anyone who can read and take the time to research necessary background material – as is always the case in philosophy, just because a coal miner may not be able to read and fully understand Einstein* does not by any stretch prove that Einstein was an authoritarian or an elitist who used mathematical language, formula and theory to further the interests of the tiny minority of elite physicists – and does not necessarily have the maniacal intrinsic qualities you attempt to ascribe to it.


Here shows the truly anti-empirical and anti-intellectual underside of your anti-dialectics. To begin with, dialectics does not necessarily have anything to do with a word you just said; nothing I have read in either Bookchin or Zizek would support a single word of yours here. Secondly, dialectics in no way either apologizes for or justifies the “status quo,” as any reading of Zizek’s work, literally, any of it, would so quickly demonstrate. Zizek’s dialectics moved him to write about the spontaneous creation of utopia (which he qualified, he means something rather specific and unique by the term “utopia”) and the material conditions which will initiate or should initiate this creative spontaneity, all of this being empirically grounded. Lastly, dialectics has nothing inscribed into it on the subject of human nature, however, empirically, there simply is no question that there is an innate, fixed human nature – for instance, no matter how much free will you believe you have, you are simply not going to sprout wings and learn to fly, that is simply neither genetically nor humanly possible – that you would reject modern science on this subject (biology, cognitive psychology, genetics and so on) demonstrates only one thing, that it is you and your outrageous theories who is and are anti-empirical.

Oops, cutting and pasting again...

Naughty me.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

And you might like to peruse Chomsky's comments about the (French, etc.) windbags upon whose work you seem to dote:


This text has circulated quite a number of times on Usenet, and so far as I know is authentic. This version (less, of course, the HTML airs and graces) was posted by one [email protected] to rec.arts.books, 13 Nov 1995 03:21:23 -0500, message-id [email protected] Jenm289 wrote: "The following was written several months ago by Noam Chomsky in a discussion about po-mo and its contribution to activism et al. The discussion took place on LBBS, Z-Magazine's Left On-Line Bulletin Board (contact [email protected] to join)."


I've returned from travel-speaking, where I spend most of my life, and found a collection of messages extending the discussion about "theory" and "philosophy," a debate that I find rather curious. A few reactions -- though I concede, from the start, that I may simply not understand what is going on.

As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I, Mike, and maybe others don't have "theories" and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to "theory" and "philosophy" and "theoretical constructs" and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world. I won't speak for Mike. My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before "postmodernism" had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: "if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret," despite much "pseudo-scientific posturing."

To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call "theory" and "philosophy," but little that I can detect beyond "pseudo-scientific posturing." That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies (Rawls's important work is the case I mentioned, in response to specific inquiry).

The latter fact has been noticed. One fine philosopher and social theorist (also activist), Alan Graubard, wrote an interesting review years ago of Robert Nozick's "libertarian" response to Rawls, and of the reactions to it. He pointed out that reactions were very enthusiastic. Reviewer after reviewer extolled the power of the arguments, etc., but no one accepted any of the real-world conclusions (unless they had previously reached them). That's correct, as were his observations on what it means.

The proponents of "theory" and "philosophy" have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a "secret" to me: I'll be happy to look. I've asked many times before, and still await an answer, which should be easy to provide: simply give some examples of "a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to" the kinds of problems and issues that Mike, I, and many others (in fact, most of the world's population, I think, outside of narrow and remarkably self-contained intellectual circles) are or should be concerned with: the problems and issues we speak and write about, for example, and others like them. To put it differently, show that the principles of the "theory" or "philosophy" that we are told to study and apply lead by valid argument to conclusions that we and others had not already reached on other (and better) grounds; these "others" include people lacking formal education, who typically seem to have no problem reaching these conclusions through mutual interactions that avoid the "theoretical" obscurities entirely, or often on their own.

Again, those are simple requests. I've made them before, and remain in my state of ignorance. I also draw certain conclusions from the fact.

As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return.

These are very easy requests to fulfil, if there is any basis to the claims put forth with such fervor and indignation. But instead of trying to provide an answer to this simple requests, the response is cries of anger: to raise these questions shows "elitism," "anti-intellectualism," and other crimes --- though apparently it is not "elitist" to stay within the self- and mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals who talk only to one another and (to my knowledge) don't enter into the kind of world in which I'd prefer to live. As for that world, I can reel off my speaking and writing schedule to illustrate what I mean, though I presume that most people in this discussion know, or can easily find out; and somehow I never find the "theoreticians" there, nor do I go to their conferences and parties. In short, we seem to inhabit quite different worlds, and I find it hard to see why mine is "elitist," not theirs. The opposite seems to be transparently the case, though I won't amplify.

To add another facet, I am absolutely deluged with requests to speak and can't possibly accept a fraction of the invitations I'd like to, so I suggest other people. But oddly, I never suggest those who propound "theories" and "philosophy," nor do I come across them, or for that matter rarely even their names, in my own (fairly extensive) experience with popular and activist groups and organizations, general community, college, church, union, etc., audiences here and abroad, third world women, refugees, etc.; I can easily give examples. Why, I wonder.

The whole debate, then, is an odd one. On one side, angry charges and denunciations, on the other, the request for some evidence and argument to support them, to which the response is more angry charges -- but, strikingly, no evidence or argument. Again, one is led to ask why.

It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.

Specific comment. Phetland asked who I'm referring to when I speak of "Paris school" and "postmodernist cults": the above is a sample.

He then asks, reasonably, why I am "dismissive" of it. Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion -- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.

Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I've met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible -- he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven't met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones --- the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I've dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish. When I proceed as I do in other areas where I do not understand, I run into the problems mentioned in connection with (1) and (2) above. So that's who I'm referring to, and why I don't proceed very far. I can list a lot more names if it's not obvious.

For those interested in a literary depiction that reflects pretty much the same perceptions (but from the inside), I'd suggest David Lodge. Pretty much on target, as far as I can judge.

Phetland also found it "particularly puzzling" that I am so "curtly dismissive" of these intellectual circles while I spend a lot of time "exposing the posturing and obfuscation of the New York Times." So "why not give these guys the same treatment." Fair question. There are also simple answers. What appears in the work I do address (NYT, journals of opinion, much of scholarship, etc.) is simply written in intelligible prose and has a great impact on the world, establishing the doctrinal framework within which thought and expression are supposed to be contained, and largely are, in successful doctrinal systems such as ours. That has a huge impact on what happens to suffering people throughout the world, the ones who concern me, as distinct from those who live in the world that Lodge depicts (accurately, I think). So this work should be dealt with seriously, at least if one cares about ordinary people and their problems. The work to which Phetland refers has none of these characteristics, as far as I'm aware. It certainly has none of the impact, since it is addressed only to other intellectuals in the same circles. Furthermore, there is no effort that I am aware of to make it intelligible to the great mass of the population (say, to the people I'm constantly speaking to, meeting with, and writing letters to, and have in mind when I write, and who seem to understand what I say without any particular difficulty, though they generally seem to have the same cognitive disability I do when facing the postmodern cults). And I'm also aware of no effort to show how it applies to anything in the world in the sense I mentioned earlier: grounding conclusions that weren't already obvious. Since I don't happen to be much interested in the ways that intellectuals inflate their reputations, gain privilege and prestige, and disengage themselves from actual participation in popular struggle, I don't spend any time on it.

Phetland suggests starting with Foucault --- who, as I've written repeatedly, is somewhat apart from the others, for two reasons: I find at least some of what he writes intelligible, though generally not very interesting; second, he was not personally disengaged and did not restrict himself to interactions with others within the same highly privileged elite circles. Phetland then does exactly what I requested: he gives some illustrations of why he thinks Foucault's work is important. That's exactly the right way to proceed, and I think it helps understand why I take such a "dismissive" attitude towards all of this --- in fact, pay no attention to it.

What Phetland describes, accurately I'm sure, seems to me unimportant, because everyone always knew it --- apart from details of social and intellectual history, and about these, I'd suggest caution: some of these are areas I happen to have worked on fairly extensively myself, and I know that Foucault's scholarship is just not trustworthy here, so I don't trust it, without independent investigation, in areas that I don't know -- this comes up a bit in the discussion from 1972 that is in print. I think there is much better scholarship on the 17th and 18th century, and I keep to that, and my own research. But let's put aside the other historical work, and turn to the "theoretical constructs" and the explanations: that there has been "a great change from harsh mechanisms of repression to more subtle mechanisms by which people come to do" what the powerful want, even enthusiastically. That's true enough, in fact, utter truism. If that's a "theory," then all the criticisms of me are wrong: I have a "theory" too, since I've been saying exactly that for years, and also giving the reasons and historical background, but without describing it as a theory (because it merits no such term), and without obfuscatory rhetoric (because it's so simple-minded), and without claiming that it is new (because it's a truism). It's been fully recognized for a long time that as the power to control and coerce has declined, it's more necessary to resort to what practitioners in the PR industry early in this century -- who understood all of this well -- called "controlling the public mind." The reasons, as observed by Hume in the 18th century, are that "the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers" relies ultimately on control of opinion and attitudes. Why these truisms should suddenly become "a theory" or "philosophy," others will have to explain; Hume would have laughed.

Some of Foucault's particular examples (say, about 18th century techniques of punishment) look interesting, and worth investigating as to their accuracy. But the "theory" is merely an extremely complex and inflated restatement of what many others have put very simply, and without any pretense that anything deep is involved. There's nothing in what Phetland describes that I haven't been writing about myself for 35 years, also giving plenty of documentation to show that it was always obvious, and indeed hardly departs from truism. What's interesting about these trivialities is not the principle, which is transparent, but the demonstration of how it works itself out in specific detail to cases that are important to people: like intervention and aggression, exploitation and terror, "free market" scams, and so on. That I don't find in Foucault, though I find plenty of it by people who seem to be able to write sentences I can understand and who aren't placed in the intellectual firmament as "theoreticians."

To make myself clear, Phetland is doing exactly the right thing: presenting what he sees as "important insights and theoretical constructs" that he finds in Foucault. My problem is that the "insights" seem to me familiar and there are no "theoretical constructs," except in that simple and familiar ideas have been dressed up in complicated and pretentious rhetoric. Phetland asks whether I think this is "wrong, useless, or posturing." No. The historical parts look interesting sometimes, though they have to be treated with caution and independent verification is even more worth undertaking than it usually is. The parts that restate what has long been obvious and put in much simpler terms are not "useless," but indeed useful, which is why I and others have always made the very same points. As to "posturing," a lot of it is that, in my opinion, though I don't particularly blame Foucault for it: it's such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to his credit, he distanced himself from it. As for the "corruption" of this culture particularly since World War II, that's another topic, which I've discussed elsewhere and won't go into here. Frankly, I don't see why people in this forum should be much interested, just as I am not. There are more important things to do, in my opinion, than to inquire into the traits of elite intellectuals engaged in various careerist and other pursuits in their narrow and (to me, at least) pretty unininteresting circles. That's a broad brush, and I stress again that it is unfair to make such comments without proving them: but I've been asked, and have answered the only specific point that I find raised. When asked about my general opinion, I can only give it, or if something more specific is posed, address that. I'm not going to undertake an essay on topics that don't interest me.

Unless someone can answer the simple questions that immediately arise in the mind of any reasonable person when claims about "theory" and "philosophy" are raised, I'll keep to work that seems to me sensible and enlightening, and to people who are interested in understanding and changing the world.

Johnb made the point that "plain language is not enough when the frame of reference is not available to the listener"; correct and important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent "theories." Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that might be considered, all in plain language. I've never found that a problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it's true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll. Johnb says that outside of circles like this forum, "to the rest of the country, he's incomprehensible" ("he" being me). That's absolutely counter to my rather ample experience, with all sorts of audiences. Rather, my experience is what I just described. The incomprehensibility roughly corresponds to the educational level. Take, say, talk radio. I'm on a fair amount, and it's usually pretty easy to guess from accents, etc., what kind of audience it is. I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and "frame of reference" issues because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us. With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to disentangle lots of ideological constructions.

It's certainly true that lots of people can't read the books I write. That's not because the ideas or language are complicated --- we have no problems in informal discussion on exactly the same points, and even in the same words. The reasons are different, maybe partly the fault of my writing style, partly the result of the need (which I feel, at least) to present pretty heavy documentation, which makes it tough reading. For these reasons, a number of people have taken pretty much the same material, often the very same words, and put them in pamphlet form and the like. No one seems to have much problem --- though again, reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement or professional academic journals don't have a clue as to what it's about, quite commonly; sometimes it's pretty comical.

A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behaviour of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, sceptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.

End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

Oh dear, more cutting and pasting.

Sommmmebody stop me...

[JDHURF]

I find it funny that you say I don't understand what is being said, when you clearly have no clue as to what I'm responding to. I'm responding to his belief that homo sapiens just came on to the scene with language. That they just appeared knowing grammar and there was no development of it needed. Maybe you should respond to that, in stead of thinking that I don't know that children, regardless of ethnicity, growing up in different areas will learn the language if the area.


I don’t find it amusing in the least that you insist on taking us through a maze of tangents away from our initial discussion (Foucault’s discussion with Chomsky) in order, apparently, to never have to solidly defend anything (if you can just keep skirting away by changing the topic and chasing endless tangents you don’t ever have to solidly defend anything with evidentiary argument).

Homo Sapiens did indeed come “on to the scene” with the intact cognitive structure that underlay the possibility for developing language. The hominid brain has changed very little over the course of the last tens of thousands of years. Now, I don’t expect you to know any of this because you so clearly haven’t read the relevant scientific literature on the topic, so let me give you a few brief cliff notes. Humans are the descendents of a select breeding group of hominids from the cradle of Africa that then diverged and spread out across the entire globe. These hominids, though lacking any sophisticated language, already had evolved the large brain required. The large brain had been earlier selected by evolution for the better survival of those with said large brain. The large brain evolved, within the overall, general time frame of the evolutionary timeline, almost overnight. All of the consequences of this new, large brain didn’t, for obvious and straightforward reasons, come to immediate fruition. There first came cave paintings some 30,000 years ago and these are understood to be evidence that humans had “developed sophisticated capacities for symbolization and communication.(Nicholas Humphrey)” Later concretization of these early moves towards sophisticated human abstract thought, symbolization and communication occurred because, again, it proved better for survival for the hominid groups so doing, however, and this is the important part that you don’t yet grasp, the cognitive structures that allow for all of this, the modular cognitive subsystems of the neuro-network that are the basis of and give rise to such attributes existed long, long before the manifestations of communication and so on matured.

Such symbolization and communication clearly requires, as a foundation, a unique and specialized basis in the brain. Rabbits simply can’t learn to speak human language no matter the labor process. They would first require quite an evolutionary change in the structure of their cognitive structure, in their brain. That’s just trivially the case and should be clear to anyone who take time to think about this seriously.


He is, in fact, criticizing Bentham's method, which is where you got your quote from, and calling it a poor argument. He is not passing judgement on human nature!

He is criticizing Bentham’s method precisely for the fact that he doesn’t make the distinction Marx makes between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each historical epoch.


As for Wittgenstein I gave you three books and an article, what more do you want?


A direct quote that supports your contention.

[JDHURF]

Rosa, you might want to take a better look around PCF when it comes back up because you will find not only do I cite the very same link from Chomsky on postmodernism that you just cited, but, in fact, the only time I ever argued in favor of it was with you and for the reason I have already indicated (I was putting you on for the reason of not taking you seriously). The very fact that I was citing Zizek (a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher and an opponent, for lack of a better term, of Chomsky) in favor of what I was writing should definitively prove this fact (that I was putting you on).

[Zanthorus]

How exactly do you expect anyone to want to debate with you properly if all you do is play around and not take what they say seriously?

[ChrisK]

I don’t find it amusing in the least that you insist on taking us through a maze of tangents away from our initial discussion (Foucault’s discussion with Chomsky) in order, apparently, to never have to solidly defend anything (if you can just keep skirting away by changing the topic and chasing endless tangents you don’t ever have to solidly defend anything with evidentiary argument).

Why is that so? I claimed he was not a good philosopher and I have continued to defend that position. I also happen to think that Foucault is a poor philosopher so I'm not defending his positions either.


Homo Sapiens did indeed come “on to the scene” with the intact cognitive structure that underlay the possibility for developing language. The hominid brain has changed very little over the course of the last tens of thousands of years. Now, I don’t expect you to know any of this because you so clearly haven’t read the relevant scientific literature on the topic, so let me give you a few brief cliff notes. Humans are the descendents of a select breeding group of hominids from the cradle of Africa that then diverged and spread out across the entire globe. These hominids, though lacking any sophisticated language, already had evolved the large brain required. The large brain had been earlier selected by evolution for the better survival of those with said large brain. The large brain evolved, within the overall, general time frame of the evolutionary timeline, almost overnight. All of the consequences of this new, large brain didn’t, for obvious and straightforward reasons, come to immediate fruition. There first came cave paintings some 30,000 years ago and these are understood to be evidence that humans had “developed sophisticated capacities for symbolization and communication.(Nicholas Humphrey)” Later concretization of these early moves towards sophisticated human abstract thought, symbolization and communication occurred because, again, it proved better for survival for the hominid groups so doing, however, and this is the important part that you don’t yet grasp, the cognitive structures that allow for all of this, the modular cognitive subsystems of the neuro-network that are the basis of and give rise to such attributes existed long, long before the manifestations of communication and so on matured.

Such symbolization and communication clearly requires, as a foundation, a unique and specialized basis in the brain. Rabbits simply can’t learn to speak human language no matter the labor process. They would first require quite an evolutionary change in the structure of their cognitive structure, in their brain. That’s just trivially the case and should be clear to anyone who take time to think about this seriously.


Congrats, you just told me what Anthropology taught be a long time ago. However, as Chris Knight, an anthropologist argues, that language does not reside in the brain or mind, but rather in the social grouping. He further criticizes (as I do) Chomsky's belief in a Cartesian mind.

Its all right here for you.
http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/language-a-darwinian-adaptations.pdf

I find it funny that you tell me that I clearly have not read up on a subject, while you only read a few people who support Chomsky and ignore all actual debate on the subject.


He is criticizing Bentham’s method precisely for the fact that he doesn’t make the distinction Marx makes between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each historical epoch.

No, he is criticizing Bentham's use of utility and . No judgement passed on human nature. The aspect of human nature that you attribute to Marx, is, in fact, part of Bentham's argument.



A direct quote that supports your contention.


Quotes can be taken out of context, books cannot. However



We must do away with all explanation and descripition alone must take its place. This description gets its light, that is to say, its purpose from philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of our urge to misunderstand them.

Aphorism 109
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2916793/Ludwig-Wittgenstein-Philosophical-Investigations

And if you want to see how he put this to use, read On Certainty

[syndicat]

Congrats, you just told me what Anthropology taught be a long time ago. However, as Chris Knight, an anthropologist argues, that language does not reside in the brain or mind, but rather in the social grouping.

yeah but chomsky and many linguists will point out that there is a common "deep structure" to all languages. if we consider that humans are all derived from a relatively small population of a few hundred thousand in central Africa around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, the common biological basis of human language shouldn't be much of a surprise.

what is social is how the "structures" are used. for example, language groups may lack features that other have. inuit languages have something like 11 words for snow. Papua Guinea languages do not have the full range of color words found in countries with a more complex culture. some languages pack in reference to time in the verbs and some stuff it in adverbial modifiers.

the words themselves are obviously added in order to serve purposes of discussion, and meanings of words change, or spellings change. all of this reflects the social aspect of language, and its social function. but it doesn't follow it doesn't have a biological basis. language universals are hard to explain otherwise. and there should be no doubt that having the ability to generate complex subject/predicate sentences was highly adaptive for coordinating human activity.

[JDHURF]

Why is that so? I claimed he was not a good philosopher and I have continued to defend that position. I also happen to think that Foucault is a poor philosopher so I'm not defending his positions either.

You claimed Foucault “beat” Chomsky in the debate. I countered by observing that the only real dispute that emerged and was hashed out was about justice and here Chomsky very clearly edged Foucault out. You claimed that Foucault knew what he was talking about with regards to human nature and have yet to actually defend that position.

As far as human nature, you also have diverted from the fact that there is a real and clear human nature and this is central to Marx’s work also. I also twice observed – and both times you ignored the observation, for what I would say were transparent reasons - that it's worth thinking about the fact that if you do not posit some concept of human nature Marx's work on alienation becomes pure gibberish. If there is no human nature, then how does one become alienated from that which does not exist? Everyone who argues against any sort of human nature - people who have no understanding of science - need to get serious. Obviously, quite apart from language, as I have previously said, there is a fundamental human nature and Marx wrote extensively about this, specifically, in relation to his concept of alienation.


Congrats, you just told me what Anthropology taught be a long time ago. However, as Chris Knight, an anthropologist argues, that language does not reside in the brain or mind, but rather in the social grouping. He further criticizes (as I do) Chomsky's belief in a Cartesian mind.
I find it funny that you tell me that I clearly have not read up on a subject, while you only read a few people who support Chomsky and ignore all actual debate on the subject.


The argument that language has no basis in the brain is like arguing that sight has no basis in the brain. It doesn’t even rise to the level of caricature. Furthermore, as far as idealism in philosophy goes, arguing that language has no material basis in human cognitive physiology, but rather is a magical apparition that spontaneously emerges through “social grouping” – as though social grouping itself had no basis in human nature, in the biologically determined, evolutionarily shaped tendency for social species to group together for better survival – having no basis in the cognitive structures of the mind that have been shown to be the regions of the brain responsible for language (such as the prefrontal lobe is responsible for reasoning and so on, as well as other regions being responsible for registering sight, pain, taste and so on).


No, he is criticizing Bentham's use of utility and . No judgement passed on human nature. The aspect of human nature that you attribute to Marx, is, in fact, part of Bentham's argument.

You simply can’t read plain English. Marx criticized Bentham’s method for failing to make the distinction Marx makes.

I have only 15 mins. at the library and will return with a further response.

[Wolf Larson]

. And then he tries to make Left-Communism out to be basically anarchism in Marxist clothing.

well.....libertarian marxism fits the bill. Luxemburg?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg)

[ChrisK]

You claimed Foucault “beat” Chomsky in the debate. I countered by observing that the only real dispute that emerged and was hashed out was about justice and here Chomsky very clearly edged Foucault out. You claimed that Foucault knew what he was talking about with regards to human nature and have yet to actually defend that position.

Why do I have to support either side? Foucault is more right because he avoids a priori garbage.


As far as human nature, you also have diverted from the fact that there is a real and clear human nature and this is central to Marx’s work also. I also twice observed – and both times you ignored the observation, for what I would say were transparent reasons - that it's worth thinking about the fact that if you do not posit some concept of human nature Marx's work on alienation becomes pure gibberish. If there is no human nature, then how does one become alienated from that which does not exist? Everyone who argues against any sort of human nature - people who have no understanding of science - need to get serious. Obviously, quite apart from language, as I have previously said, there is a fundamental human nature and Marx wrote extensively about this, specifically, in relation to his concept of alienation.

Fine, it does not become gibberish because human nature in capitalist society supports Marx's claim. Perhaps you need to get serious about expressing a prior nonsense in your writing. Static human nature is bullshit, things will change in humans depending on the material conditions of society.


The argument that language has no basis in the brain is like arguing that sight has no basis in the brain. It doesn’t even rise to the level of caricature. Furthermore, as far as idealism in philosophy goes, arguing that language has no material basis in human cognitive physiology, but rather is a magical apparition that spontaneously emerges through “social grouping” – as though social grouping itself had no basis in human nature, in the biologically determined, evolutionarily shaped tendency for social species to group together for better survival – having no basis in the cognitive structures of the mind that have been shown to be the regions of the brain responsible for language (such as the prefrontal lobe is responsible for reasoning and so on, as well as other regions being responsible for registering sight, pain, taste and so on).

By no basis in the brain, I mean language didn't just form in the brain. It formed out of social interaction that made language of some sort very necessary. So yes, the brain is where language develops, but it only developed in the first place through social interaction.


You simply can’t read plain English. Marx criticized Bentham’s method for failing to make the distinction Marx makes.

I have only 15 mins. at the library and will return with a further response.

He is criticizing Bentham for believing in absolute human nature and not applying nature that changes from era to era. You are the one claiming that Marx would have characterized language as general human nature; but he makes no judgement on this. In fact, he makes a judgement that supports my claim.



Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness,” but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness. From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#p4



Individuals producing in Society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing.

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a Zwon politikon not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat, Carey, Proudhon etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made, and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus communis.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

[Wolf Larson]

[/FONT][/COLOR]


He is criticizing Bentham for believing in absolute human nature and not applying nature that changes from era to era.
....depending on our relation to the means of production. :) Right now "human nature" is said to be selfish greed (or the capitalist euphemism 'self interest'). Ayn Rand would say "I swear by my life and my love of it I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine".
Her view of human nature. Capitalism.

Capitalists have used Darwin to excuse a 'survival of the fittest' system so they claim not only human nature but nature itself. The entire world and most all teh beings in it, in their view, is based in competition in lieu of cooperation. This is where Kropotkin's 'Mutual Aid' comes in handy. We can go any which way depending on the 'stage' set.

[syndicat]

"social interaction" was part of the conditions in which evolution was operating in the process that gave rise to language.


Foucault is more right because he avoids a priori garbage.


Chomsky doesn't argue from apriori assumptions. If you think otherwise, you need to provide an argument.

Maybe what you mean is something like the following. When a child is born, their genetic endowment includes various genetic predispositions. Among these predispositions is to produce sentences with subject/predicate structure and other features of "deep structure". But growing up in a human community is a necessary part of how this predisposition is realized, and it can be realized in any number of different ways.

Now, what is the reason to believe this? The same as the reason to believe in evolutionary biology in general, that is, that it can account for a very wide variety of facts. so the reason is abductive. so there is no apriori assumption. our genetic endowment limits the possible variation in human development. We can't grow to be 30 feet or have six legs. and so it is with the language ability, which also has a genetic basis.

it's hard to explain how children can suck up tens of thousands of years of human culture in a period of, say, two years, when they learn a language, if we don't suppose there is some predisposition here. between the age of 3 and 4, according to developmental psychologists, children master the concept of a natural kind such as a chemical substance or animal species. this means they learn that it has some underlying nature that may not be fully expressed in its readily perceptible features. and thus children learn there is a distinction between a toy cat and a cat, even tho the toy cat is very realistic and "meows" like a cat when you pet it. this is part of learning how to use natural kind words. now, how do you explain this without a genetic predisposition?

[Zanthorus]

well.....libertarian marxism fits the bill. Luxemburg?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg)

There is no such thing as "libertarian Marxism", at least not historically. It's just a label some anarchists slapped on Marxists which they liked.

Also Luxemburg supported the Russian Revolution:


Let the German Government Socialists cry that the rule of the Bolsheviks in Russia is a distorted expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it was or is such, that is only because it is a product of the behavior of the German proletariat, in itself a distorted expression of the socialist class struggle. All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the socialist order of society can be realized. The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. They are not supposed to perform miracles. For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle.

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescencies in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to “Bolshevism.”

And here is Luxemburg on anarchism:


The Russian Revolution, which is the first historical experiment on the model of the class strike, not merely does not afford a vindication of anarchism, but actually means the historical liquidation of anarchism...

[...]

But apart from these few “revolutionary” groups, what is the actual role of anarchism in the Russian Revolution? It has become the sign of the common thief and plunderer; a large proportion of the innumerable thefts and acts of plunder of private persons are carried out under the name of “anarchist-communism” – acts which rise up like a troubled wave against the revolution in every period of depression and in every period of temporary defensive. Anarchism has become in the Russian Revolution, not the theory of the struggling proletariat, but the ideological signboard of the counterrevolutionary lumpenproletariat, who, like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution. And therewith the historical career of anarchism is well-nigh ended.

So it is difficult to claim Luxemburg for any kind of "libertarian" Marxism anyway.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Chomsky is most certainly not like any "anarchist" I've ever met. I saw one video with him talking about his criticisms of the US anarchist movement and he said something like "abolishing the state? That's not a strategy. I mean sure if you have a rich network of co-operatives, spanning most of america or maybe even the globe then we can talk about abolishing the state. Until then it's not a strategy."!!!!

I mean seriously? We have to have a global network of co-operatives before abolishing the state? That's about a thousand times stupider than the strategy of even the most authoritarian of stalinogothic lifestylists.

Speaking of which, Chomsky on Marxism makes me want to eat my own ears. He plays the classic card of the "young humanist Marx" and the "cranky authoritarian old Marx" and also that evil baby eating intellectual Lenin who crushed the workers and paved the way for Stalin. And then he tries to make Left-Communism out to be basically anarchism in Marxist clothing.

Yes, its remarkable how these soft lefty historian types make such blantant errors when talking about marx/lenin. I mean, he's clearly put a lot of effort into his work in Imperialism..why the hell can't he read enough to find out more beyond RAGHAGHGH LENIN EVIL DICTATOR COMMUNISM WAS HIS EXCUSE!!1

[BAM]

Zan, plenty of anarchists supported and partook in the Russian Revolution.

[Zanthorus]

Zan, plenty of anarchists supported and partook in the Russian Revolution.

Ok, but Luxemburg was still nowhere near anarchism.

[BAM]

Ok, but Luxemburg was still nowhere near anarchism.

Indeed, as that ridiculous statement of hers proves.

[Zanthorus]

It's not that ridiculous:


To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers...

[...]

By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal “meat” (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, “dregs of society”) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat.

Also looked at in the context of the 1905 revolution it makes sense.

Although it's not a fair characterisation of a lot of anarchists.

[BAM]

Eh? Bakunin was dead by 1876. This has nothing to do with Luxemburg's absurd slur against anarchists (unfortunately, all too common amongst Marxists, even those one might hope knew better).

[BAM]

Eh? Bakunin was dead by 1876. This has nothing to do with Luxemburg's absurd slur against anarchists (unfortunately, all too common amongst Marxists, even those one might hope knew better).

[Zanthorus]

It's not just an absurd slur though, she was recounting the role which anarchists had played in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not trying to insinuate that all anarchists are counter-revolutionary lumpenproles. I was just trying to show that it's absurd for anyone to claim that Luxemburg was all that close to anarchism.

[BAM]

Well, without wanting to derail this thread any further (I don't have much to say about Chomsky, I'm afraid) you do realise that the mass/general strike was a synduicalist/anarchist idea before Luxemburg appropriated it? Before then Social Democracy was dismissive of it. So for her to say that the revolution spelled the end of anarchism is somewhat surprising.

[Zanthorus]

Well, without wanting to derail this thread any further (I don't have much to say about Chomsky, I'm afraid) you do realise that the mass/general strike was a synduicalist/anarchist idea before Luxemburg appropriated it?

Yes, the very first Chapter of Luxemburg's book on the mass strike deals with exactly the same question. She notes that the mass strike in Russia was waged for the purpose of gaining the political rights to carry on the partyist tactics which the anarchists opposed and led by the social-democratic party which the anarchists also opposed.

[syndicat]

Yes, the very first Chapter of Luxemburg's book on the mass strike deals with exactly the same question. She notes that the mass strike in Russia was waged for the purpose of gaining the political rights to carry on the partyist tactics which the anarchists opposed and led by the social-democratic party which the anarchists also opposed.

Luxemburg bends over backwards to try to differentiate herself from anarchism even while taking anarchist positions...because it was necessary for her to maintain her credibility in social dem circles...which simply reflects left sectarianism. For example, anarcho-syndicalists didn't say a mass strike had to be artificially "called" or could be, that it responds to the rhythms of struggle was something they would agree on.

and in what sense was the mass strike "led" by the social-democratic party? Luxemburg doesn't make that claim. the strike started out as a strike of the typographical union, and spread to the textile workers, and then the railway workers and so on, with the formation by workers of the strike committees, which were the first soviets.

it's true that they did demand democratic political rights, such as election of a parliament. but that wasn't all that they demanded. and a mass strike also leads to changes in consciousness so that people come to even surpass the early positions they took. an example was the radicalization of a part of the Social Revolutionary party...the largest party in Russia and one of the key influences in that era. A part of the party developed basically libertarian and syndicalist positions, rejecting the parliamentary road of the SRs and social dems...and this got them expelled from the SR party.

[Zanthorus]

Well even if the mass strike was originally an anarchist tactic, I don't see anything inherently anarchist about it. So it would be difficult to claim on that basis that Luxemburg was anywhere close to anarchism.

In some senses Lenin was closer to anarchism than Luxemburg. He dissolved the constituent assembly in favour of Soviet power, a move which Luxemburg opposed. He was even labelled as an anarchist and a new Bakunin by many social-democrats of his time.

[syndicat]

actually it was an anarchist detachment of sailors from Kronstadt who dissolved the constituent assembly, tho no doubt Lenin approved.

before World War 1 "Marxism" was identified with the more conservative, electoralist form of socialism. in the USA the more influential "Marxists" were people like John Spargo and Morris Hillquit...of the rightwing faction of the American SP. this is why Lenin and the Bolsheviks were attacked for "anarchism" by the Marxian social dems. before World War 1, the radical wing of socialism was identified with syndicalism and anarchism, not marxism. Influence of anarchism on marxism in that era also applied to the Italian Socialist Party, as well as the leftwing of the American SP. you should take a look at Carl Levy's history, "Gramsci and the Anarchists." Knowledge of Marxism wasn't very widespread in the Italian Socialist party, partly because Marx's works were difficult to understand. popular writers and speakers were influencd by anarchism and syndicalism in that era.

[Zanthorus]

The most radical faction of the Italian socialist party was Bordiga's abstentionist faction. I find it hard to believe that Bordiga was very influenced by anarchism.

[syndicat]

You're talking about something that developed during the biennio rosso, whereas I was talking about the development of radicalism in the years leading up to the biennio rosso.

also, if you read Lynn William's book "Proletarian Order," you'll find out that Bordiga's hierarchical and abstract approach had little support in that period. And this was when Italy went thru the closest to a revolution it ever has. Massive general strike in April 1920 in Piedmont, 600,000 workers seize their factories in Sept 1920, the revolutionary syndicalist USI mushrooms from 300,000 to nearly 800,000 members. the mass influence of revolutionaries were mainly thru the Marxian syndicalists in Turin (the group around Gramsci) and the revolutionary syndicalists (USI, independent railway and maritime unions). Bordiga's tendency had little relationship to the worker mass organizing on the ground.

this is different than Luxemburg, for example, who at least had some relationship to the radical shop stewards movement in Germany after World War 1.

[BAM]

Luxemburg bends over backwards to try to differentiate herself from anarchism even while taking anarchist positions...because it was necessary for her to maintain her credibility in social dem circles...which simply reflects left sectarianism. For example, anarcho-syndicalists didn't say a mass strike had to be artificially "called" or could be, that it responds to the rhythms of struggle was something they would agree on.

Syndicat: indeed. Luxemburg cuts down a straw-man when she's talking about anarchism, only to go and adopt the positions that anarchists already actually held.

Zan: I often like a lot of the things you write, but there's no need uncritically to accept Luxemburg's story.

[JDHURF]

Why do I have to support either side? Foucault is more right because he avoids a priori garbage.

If you take a position, you have to support the position. Chomsky doesn’t posit “a priori garbage.” You don’t even understand Chomsky’s work.


Fine, it does not become gibberish because human nature in capitalist society supports Marx's claim. Perhaps you need to get serious about expressing a prior nonsense in your writing. Static human nature is bullshit, things will change in humans depending on the material conditions of society.

I have several times now cited epigenetic theory as the basis of what I am talking about (epigenetic theory, again, being the accepted and dominant view within the related research-based sciences) and epigenetic theory does not presume “static human nature.” That is your falsification and straw man used to cower away from addressing the substantive issues. Noam Chomsky’s linguistic work is an expression of epigenetic theory. It’s not that human nature is static and it’s not that human nature is infinitely malleable, both of those positions are ridiculous, childish and without any scientific support. It happens to be the case that human nature is a mixture, a combination of hardwired genetic encoding that is expressed and influenced within and through a specific environment. There’s simply no denying the genome, but there is also no dispute here that the phenotypic expression is also influenced by surrounding environment, that is epigenetic theory. Phenotypic attributes are indeed altered by environment, but this is also constrained by the genome (such as the example that regardless of environment human beings are not going to spontaneously sprout wings and take to flight).


By no basis in the brain, I mean language didn't just form in the brain. It formed out of social interaction that made language of some sort very necessary. So yes, the brain is where language develops, but it only developed in the first place through social interaction.

Perhaps we are closer here than it originally seemed. Of course language, virtually by definition, requires a social situation - although, if you review the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s work, spoken language to one’s self during development as a child is crucial to the sufficient development of language proper – but without the prerequisite genetically encoded hardwiring of the cognitive neuro-web, no amount of social activity and grouping can produce language: language requires as a prerequisite a specific genetic encoding that produces as unique cognitive structure that allows for the development of language. The brain didn’t change because people wanted to talk to each other and they forced their brains to develop the required cognitive structure, people began to speak because their brain circuitry developed and allowed for them to do so.

Clearly the claim, as has been made by others and it seemed as though you were making it, perhaps not so much, that language only has to do with social grouping is infantile. The human species is the only species with a sophisticated language that signifies abstract thought and so on (the communication of other organisms is not on the same level by far). Yet humans are not even the most social of the social species. There is far more violent conflict within the human species than there is within the species of other social animals – there are various other social species less given to inner-species conflict - however, humans remain the only with language. If social grouping were the only basis for the developing of language quite obviously the animal kingdom would be rife with language. The reason this is not so is straightforward: human genetics, that is to say, human nature. If not for the unique human brain circuitry (the cognitive structure of the neuro-network) that allows for the processing of abstract thought, symbolization and language, all the social grouping in the universe would not and could not produce language.


He is criticizing Bentham for believing in absolute human nature and not applying nature that changes from era to era. You are the one claiming that Marx would have characterized language as general human nature; but he makes no judgement on this. In fact, he makes a judgement that supports my claim.

No. He is criticizing Bentham for not making a distinction between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each historical epoch. I have already offered the quote and it speaks for itself:


To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.

[syndicat]

By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal “meat” (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, “dregs of society”) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat.

read Mark Leier's biography. Bakunin was talking about unskilled, lower paid workers. He wasn't talking about thieves. he was distinguishing the mass of lower paid, more exploited workers from the more skilled "labor aristocracy"...a distinction that Marx also was aware of.

[Zanthorus]

If I might put forward a little theory about JHDURF's quote from Marx on human nature, recall that for Marx the fundamental essence of humans is that they can transform the world around them through their own labour, humans are producing beings. "Human nature as modified in each historical epoch" could refer to the way that productive activities change within each mode of production.

This is just lazy speculation mind.

[JDHURF]

Zanthorus:

That is certainly a piece of what Marx was on about there. Karl Marx was criticizing the two dichotomized views that, on the one hand, there is a static human nature that is not subject to change and, on the other hand, that there is an infinitely malleable, fluid and formless human nature. Marx, long before the sophisticated science of genetics, anticipated epigenetic theory. He would famously argue in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – one of Marx’s better works in my view – that “[m]en 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.” Marx in fact formulated a mature, nuanced theory regarding human nature and their activity that accounted both for what was constrained by various factors – the human genome, historical social residues and so on – and that which was subject to either immediate or long-term change. This is also evident in the excerpt from Capital where he is criticizing Bentham’s utilitarian method for not taking into account the distinction Marx makes between human nature in general – the foundation, the genome, the “raw material as it were, which, as such, cannot be changed” – and human nature as modified in each historical epoch – the fluid portion of human nature, the phonotypic expressions of the genome that are subject to change and influence by the environment – such as the way in which human behavior is affected differently when expressed within the confines of feudalism as within state capitalism and so on.

The way that productive activities change with regards to changes in the modes of production is a piece of this, but by far not the only piece. Not only do productive activities change with changes in modes of production and changes in entire historical epochs, but so too does human behavior, ideology and so on change as well (as any reader of Marx would expect, the dominant ideology being drawn from the ruling class ideology and so on). People’s consciousness changes, ideology changes, behavior changes and yet there still remains human nature in general that constrains all of this fluid, possible change within a certain realm.

Marx understood that not only did society change from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism, in a productive sense, not only did the labor process change, for instance, but so too did the dominant ideologies, so too did human behavior, so too did the consciousness of the people and so on.

[ChrisK]

If you take a position, you have to support the position. Chomsky doesn’t posit “a priori garbage.” You don’t even understand Chomsky’s work.

No I don't. I can take the third route of saying both suck and I think Foucault sucked a bit less.


I have several times now cited epigenetic theory as the basis of what I am talking about (epigenetic theory, again, being the accepted and dominant view within the related research-based sciences) and epigenetic theory does not presume “static human nature.” That is your falsification and straw man used to cower away from addressing the substantive issues. Noam Chomsky’s linguistic work is an expression of epigenetic theory. It’s not that human nature is static and it’s not that human nature is infinitely malleable, both of those positions are ridiculous, childish and without any scientific support. It happens to be the case that human nature is a mixture, a combination of hardwired genetic encoding that is expressed and influenced within and through a specific environment. There’s simply no denying the genome, but there is also no dispute here that the phenotypic expression is also influenced by surrounding environment, that is epigenetic theory. Phenotypic attributes are indeed altered by environment, but this is also constrained by the genome (such as the example that regardless of environment human beings are not going to spontaneously sprout wings and take to flight).

You are ignoring my actual argument.


Perhaps we are closer here than it originally seemed. Of course language, virtually by definition, requires a social situation - although, if you review the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s work, spoken language to one’s self during development as a child is crucial to the sufficient development of language proper – but without the prerequisite genetically encoded hardwiring of the cognitive neuro-web, no amount of social activity and grouping can produce language: language requires as a prerequisite a specific genetic encoding that produces as unique cognitive structure that allows for the development of language. The brain didn’t change because people wanted to talk to each other and they forced their brains to develop the required cognitive structure, people began to speak because their brain circuitry developed and allowed for them to do so.

Clearly the claim, as has been made by others and it seemed as though you were making it, perhaps not so much, that language only has to do with social grouping is infantile. The human species is the only species with a sophisticated language that signifies abstract thought and so on (the communication of other organisms is not on the same level by far). Yet humans are not even the most social of the social species. There is far more violent conflict within the human species than there is within the species of other social animals – there are various other social species less given to inner-species conflict - however, humans remain the only with language. If social grouping were the only basis for the developing of language quite obviously the animal kingdom would be rife with language. The reason this is not so is straightforward: human genetics, that is to say, human nature. If not for the unique human brain circuitry (the cognitive structure of the neuro-network) that allows for the processing of abstract thought, symbolization and language, all the social grouping in the universe would not and could not produce language.

And how did that genome evolve.


No. He is criticizing Bentham for not making a distinction between human nature in general and human nature as modified in each historical epoch. I have already offered the quote and it speaks for itself:



Read what I wrote again.

[JDHURF]

No I don't. I can take the third route of saying both suck and I think Foucault sucked a bit less.

Of course you can merely say that, but if you expect to be taken seriously you must support that “third route.”


You are ignoring my actual argument.

No. You have the whole time been ignoring the argument that goes back to precisely that initial topic you wish to at all costs ignore: the Chomsky and Foucault discussion. The issues were: the topic of justice, where Chomsky put forth an overwhelmingly better case than Foucault and, conspicuously here, human nature. There is a human nature, Marx recognized this and you have yet to counter the fact.


And how did that genome evolve.

I already gave you the cliff notes, remember?


Humans are the descendents of a select breeding group of hominids from the cradle of Africa that then diverged and spread out across the entire globe. These hominids, though lacking any sophisticated language, already had evolved the large brain required. The large brain had been earlier selected by evolution for the better survival of those with said large brain. The large brain evolved, within the overall, general time frame of the evolutionary timeline, almost overnight. All of the consequences of this new, large brain didn’t, for obvious and straightforward reasons, come to immediate fruition. There first came cave paintings some 30,000 years ago and these are understood to be evidence that humans had “developed sophisticated capacities for symbolization and communication.(Nicholas Humphrey)” Later concretization of these early moves towards sophisticated human abstract thought, symbolization and communication occurred because, again, it proved better for survival for the hominid groups so doing, however, and this is the important part that you don’t yet grasp, the cognitive structures that allow for all of this, the modular cognitive subsystems of the neuro-network that are the basis of and give rise to such attributes existed long, long before the manifestations of communication and so on matured.

[JDHURF]

He is criticizing Bentham for believing in absolute human nature and not applying nature that changes from era to era. You are the one claiming that Marx would have characterized language as general human nature; but he makes no judgement on this. In fact, he makes a judgement that supports my claim.

This is simply a falsification of my position. All that I observed was precisely what you now want to pretend you agreed with: that Marx posited a fundamental human nature and distinguished between this human nature in general and human nature as modified in each historical epoch: the epigenetic conception that Chomsky’s linguistic work is an example of. I didn’t argue that Marx saw language as general human nature, I argued that Marx posited human nature and made the distinction I have already cited several times. Recall, this goes back to the initial dispute between Chomsky and Foucault on human nature, Chomsky basically arguing Marx’s early anticipation of epigenetic theory, Foucault, on the other hand, ridiculously and childishly denying any such human nature and that was what you were originally defending. If you have changed your mind about this dispute, fantastic, but let’s try to stay on track here and keep the context in mind.

About language in the excerpt you cited Marx is only claiming that language arises due to the “necessity” to speak to others. He is only discussing the existential social utility of language, he is not discussing the physiological foundation of language and that much is pretty clear. Marx didn’t argue and would not have argued that language only developed because of social grouping because he was intelligent and insightful enough to gather the impossibility of such a development (I refer you back to my previous post). However, Marx is incorrect with regards to consciousness. Consciousness is a self-reflexive loop that is an emergent property of the modular mind: it is produced by, is basically the central, edifying force of, the subsystems of the cognitive neuro-network and is the product of the machinery of the brain circuitry; it didn’t spontaneously emerge by the Hegelian magic of “social grouping”. It wasn’t the effect of some mystical philosophical idealism, some spiritual manifestation of human sociability. As I said previously, the brain didn’t change because people wanted to talk to each other and they forced their brains through some form of unspecified voodoo to develop the required cognitive structure, people began to speak because their brain circuitry developed and allowed for them to do so.

Marx was held back here by writing a hundred and some odd years before the sophisticated, maturation of cognitive science, genetics and so on and while Hegel’s philosophical idealism still tainted too much and perverted any strenuously materialist understanding of consciousness.

Do keep in mind that Marx isn't god and not everything he wrote could possibly be taken as the gospel, especially when he was speculating in a few lines about that which has since been investigated by a far more thoroughly rigorous and sophistocated science.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hurfunator:


Do keep in mind that Marx isn't god and not everything he wrote could possibly be taken as the gospel, especially when he was speculating in a few lines about that which has since been investigated by a far more thoroughly rigorous and sophistocated science.

And neither is Chomsky, whose 'theory' depends on a miracle (an ancestor of ours being blasted by cosmic rays, and suddenly being able to talk! Smacks too much of the Edenic myth, if you ask me -- or even if you don't), and all our concepts (including 'bus ticket', 'thermostat', 'pile up on Route 66', 'DNA', 'Dry cleaning', 'MP3 Player', etc.) being present (in this Chomskyan Adam's -- or Eve's -- head) from day one, hundreds of thousands of years ago!

You have to be pretty naive to swallow all that. Genuine miracles should be easy to believe after this!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Syndicat:


Because the sentence production capacity is an inherited biological trait, it is in fact "innate."

And your evidence for this is what?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hurfinator:


Rosa, you might want to take a better look around PCF when it comes back up because you will find not only do I cite the very same link from Chomsky on postmodernism that you just cited, but, in fact, the only time I ever argued in favor of it was with you and for the reason I have already indicated (I was putting you on for the reason of not taking you seriously). The very fact that I was citing Zizek (a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher and an opponent, for lack of a better term, of Chomsky) in favor of what I was writing should definitively prove this fact (that I was putting you on).

1. I note you ignored that part of my post where I show that you did indeed defend dialectical materialism, and lied about me and my ideas.

2. Now you say this:


but, in fact, the only time I ever argued in favor of it was with you and for the reason I have already indicated (I was putting you on for the reason of not taking you seriously). The very fact that I was citing Zizek (a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher and an opponent, for lack of a better term, of Chomsky) in favor of what I was writing should definitively prove this fact (that I was putting you on).

In fact, you called me every name under the sun for criticising Zizek and similar mystical windbags. It was part of your reason (then!) for 'not taking me seriously'. Now you agree with me, and still don't take me seriously.

Whether or not you do is of no concern to me, but how can anyone take you seriously when you lie so blatantly?

When PCF comes back up, I'll post the link and comrades here can make their own minds up whether you were just 'putting me on'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Ok, the Political Crossfire Forum is now back on-line. Here is the Hurfinator's original post:


A lot has been written about the topic dialectics, in fact, entire volumes are dedicated to the subject. Inevitably there is introduced mass confusion upon virtually every other mention of dialectics, ranging from the esoteric and mystical to the completely incoherent and nonsensical, with the admixture of extrapolations, exaggerations and outright falsifications. What then is dialectics?

Dialectics is, beyond being a mere philosophical outlook, a way of viewing and understanding the world with its myriad, inter-connected processes; dialectics is a way of thinking.[1] As Leon Trotsky wrote, it is “a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes.” Its philosophical roots took hold long before Hegel, despite the claims of many, going as far back as to at least the philosophy of Heraclitus and the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.

Philosophically dialectics is concerned with being and existence. The first crucial point which dialectics stresses is that, as Erich Fromm points out, “the concept of process, activity, and movement as an element in being” is central to any serious investigation, “that being implies change…that being is becoming.” Frederick Engels observed that natural science has provided ample evidence for the “conception that nature does not just exist, but comes into being and passes away.”

Fromm further points out that “[t]he position that being is a permanent, timeless, and unchangeable substance and the opposite of becoming, as expressed by Parmenides, Plato, and the scholastic ‘realists,’ makes sense only on the basis of the idealistic notion that a thought (idea) is the ultimate reality. If the idea of love (in Plato’s sense) is more real than the experience of loving, one can say that love as an idea is permanent and unchangeable. But when we start out with the reality of human beings, existing, loving, hating, suffering, then there is no being that is not at the same time becoming and changing. Living structures can be only if they become; they can exist only if they change. Change and growth are inherent qualities of the life process.”

In this sense, the dialectic is simply the elementary concept that all things are in a state of constant change and flux.

Dialectics therefore alters the way in which matter, objects and systems are conceived and analyzed by rejecting the conception of said items as fixed and immutable, as Bertell Ollam writes, “by replacing the common sense notion of ‘thing’ (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of ‘processes’ (which contains its history and possible futures) and ‘relation’ (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations).”

As Engels wrote in the Dialectics of Nature, dialectics “lays particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history and natural science,” this holds true for social systems as well, as Marx so ably demonstrated in Capital.

Dialectics according to Engels “offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connectedness in general, and transitions from one field to another.” One of the ways in which dialectics serves to explain transitions is through the dialectical “law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa.”

Through gradual, incremental and accumulative quantitative changes are produced qualitative leaps in nature whereby new forms are made manifest, as Karl Marx wrote in Capital, “[m]erely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” The most daunting scientific evidence of the dialectic of quantity and quality has been provided by Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection.

Dialectics also posits the “law of the interpenetration of opposites.” It is this premise which has stoked the most controversy, the premise for which Karl Popper expended such vitriol. Popper appears to have not understood the concept. It is, after all, another elementary premise, that existence is a unity of opposites. That, for example, electricity is composed of unified protons and electrons, contradictory charges; or that the essence of light is both wave and particle. All of existence is replete with such “interpenetration of opposites.”

Peter Kropotkin demonstrated that evolutionary upsurge is not solely characterized by the Darwinian emphasis on struggle – which Darwin based on vulgar Malthusianism – although struggle and self-assertion are very much a part of evolution, but that mutual aid and cooperation too were very much integral aspects of evolution, hence the subtitle of his book: “A Factor of Evolution.” In this sense, evolution itself demonstrates the “interpenetration of opposites” through the dialectical struggle and interplay between self-assertion and competition on one end and mutual aid and cooperation on the other. Human beings manifest the dialectic of opposites through the struggle between love and hate, modesty and narcissism, selfishness and altruism and so forth.

Organic entities seek a balance, or equilibrium, between internal and external forces in order to maintain homeostasis, a balancing of opposing forces, such as acidity and alkalinity, as does the human body, “[a]s the body’s overall salt, glucose, water, and acid levels fluctuate, an ongoing homeostatic process, which involves a complex interaction among many internal organs and systems, returns the body to equilibrium by making people hungry, thirsty and so on.”[2]

Engels pointed out that “[m]otion is the mode of existence of matter” and that the unity of opposites in nature is the dynamic, stimulating factor of movement and change. As G. W. F. Hegel phrased it: “Contradiction in nature is the root of all motion and of all life.”

The dialectic “law of the negation of the negation,” is one of the aspects of dialectics which is subject to such gross extrapolation and mystification. Rosa Lichtenstein, a self-professed “anti-dialectical Marxist” - an epithet, by the way, which definitively proves either one of two things, either one hasn’t read Marx or one did not understand what one has read[3] – concocts verbose and incoherent screeds about the mystical triad of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,” predominately, although possibly mistakenly, attributed to Hegel. Although, as Ollam [sic The Hurfinator means Ollman - RL] points out, “[d]ialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthsis that serves as an all-purpose explanation.” The negation of the negation is simply the observation and articulation of the dynamic process of birth, growth, death and decay; that entities tend to negate themselves in order to advance or reproduce.

Engels explains the dialectic of negation in Anti-Duhring thusly: “Let us take a grain of barley…if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilized and finally once more produces grains of barely, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold.”

Engels applies the dialectic of negation to butterflies also. Butterflies, emerging from an egg, progress through “certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs.”

The dialectical premise of negation is simply the observation and articulation of the fact that nature is constantly expanding through cycles. "For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher."

Dialectics is a tool which helps us better understand the world in which we find ourselves, from the laws of physics to the socioeconomic and political systems that are still today evolving.

The dialectical process can be applied to every field and subject. Taking the dialectics of culture, specifically, art, one can view Pablo Picasso’s painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” as the end result of the internal dialectical process and struggle in Picasso - after having been exposed to African art forms through African masks - between the conventional art forms he was accustomed to and the new African art forms that he was exposed to which he ultimately synthesized in the painting; a painting which is widely credited with inspiring what is now referred to as “modern art.”

Applying dialectics to society we find that social progress is cyclic, that through the accumulated quantitative changes of society are brought about qualitative leaps, revolutions, which completely transform society. As Marx-Engels famously wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Marx-Engels then go on to provide a dialectical analysis of the evolution of the bourgeoisie from the feudal system of industry.

Ollman writes, in his Dance of the Dialectic, that “Marx claims…the dialectic ‘is in its essence critical and revolutionary.’ It is revolutionary because it helps us to see the present as a moment through which our society is passing, because it forces us to examine where it has come from and where it is heading as part of learning what it is, and because it enables us to grasp that as agents as well as victims, in this process in which everyone and everything are connected, we have the power to affect it.”

[1] Dialectical thought is defined in developmental psychology as “[t]he most advanced cognitive process, characterized by the ability to consider a thesis and its antithesis simultaneously and thus to arrive at a synthesis. Dialectical though makes possible an ongoing awareness of pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, possibilities and limitations.” Cited in The Developing Person Through the Lifespan by Kathleen Berger, p. 443

[2] ibid, p. 417, citing “[Holliday, 1995]”

[3] After all, Marx clearly did not reject dialectics, as the so-called anti-dialectical Marxists claim, as is demonstrated by his entire corpus of theory, Capital is replete with the dialectical method. In fact, it was in the 1873 afterword to the Second German edition of Capital that Marx famously declared that with Hegel dialectics had been stood “on its head” and that Marx had rightly flipped Hegel’s dialectics over. As Marx says: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite…The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion…The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99383

Bold emphasis and paragraph breaks added.

This was posted at that forum weeks before I joined, so the above cannot have been, as The Hurfinator now claims, to 'wind me up'. A few pages later, I joined this debate and asked this character to withdraw the claim I have highlighted since it is a lie, which he failed to substantiate, and has still failed to substantiate after being asked to do so many times.

Comrades can decide for themselves whether this character is a liar or not.

The original Essay he was lying about is here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2011_01.htm

He even went as far as to say he doubted whether I had written these essays. So I posted this page for him:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/hurfinator.htm

Here other things he said about me on that page (well before I joined to argue with him):



Lord Hargreaves wrote:

You are too tough on Rosa Lichtenstein. Many Marxists reject dialectics.

Hurf:

I realize this and I am willing to have a rational debate about dialectics with Marxists who reject it. However, Rosa Lichtenstein has no idea what she’s talking about. I recommend that you visit her site to understand what I mean. She wrote an incredibly verbose piece on the totality entitled “The Totality – WTF Is It?” She goes so low as to quote Stalin after, ironically, she quoted Engels’ straightforward description of the totality; her mass confusion is inexplicable. That is, setting aside for now that she argues that Marx himself rejected dialectics, which is proof positive that she either didn’t read a word Marx wrote or didn’t understand any of it, for, as I quoted directly from Marx, he absolutely accepted and applied the dialectical method.

Is he now also 'winding up' Lord Hargreaves?

Comrades will note that The Hurfinator presents us with no counter-arguments to what I argue in that Essay, just personal attacks, something he has continued here.

And as far as Zizek is concerned, here are a few things this character wrote:


For anyone who is interested, I certainly recommend this book to LH, considering his regard for Adorno and Jameson, I highly recommend the following work by Slavoj Zizek:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10762

http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99383&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=160


Rosa:

It is evident to me and I am sure many others that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. That the most recent so called dialectician you seem to talk about is Stalin – and the fact that you are at the same time apparently oblivious to the Frankfurt school, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Jameson, Habermas, etcetera, and other theorists such as Murray Bookchin and Slavoj Zizek, suggests that you not only dwell in the past but that you also couldn’t even hope to explain modern dialectics. I would like for once to see you write one coherent sentence, that is not some peripheral copy and paste job that does not adequately answer the specific questions put to you, about dialectics.
You might seem more convincing if you were to, say, explain how and why Zizek’s dialectical method is incorrect, where something’s opposite turns out to be its positive condition and so on. You could begin by demonstrating how Zizek’s dialectical conception of the Real is fallacious or otherwise unworthy of consideration

http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99383&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=180


Rosa:

Your last post is exactly what I'm talking about. You are living in the past and living through the verbose writings which can be found at the anti-dialectics site - which you may or may not have written yourself - and which you refuse over and over again to expand upon or otherwise improvise specific answers to questions which the copy and paste jobs from the other site in no way serve as an adequate response.

That you are unwilling to discuss modern philosophy - unwilling to set aside Mao, Stalin and the other pseudo-philosophers and their pseudo-dialectical ideologies you so love to dwell upon - such as the Frankfurt school's tradition of dialectics (especially Adorno's negative dialectics) or Murray Bookchins dialectical naturalism and Slavoj Zizek's dialectics of the Real, suggests that you have nothing relevant or in the least consequential to offer to a modern discussion of dialectics.

When, instead of responding to specific questions, inquiries and lines of discussion, you instead divert the discussion away from the subject of modern dialectics - as exemplified y the likes of Bookchin and Zizek - by calling me and others silly names, charging us with all sorts of silly shenanigans and otherwise blowing intellectually dishonest smoke screen into the discussion in order to distract everyone from the substantive issues of the discussion, you discredit yourself in effect.

http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99383&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=200


Here shows the truly anti-empirical and anti-intellectual underside of your anti-dialectics. To begin with, dialectics does not necessarily have anything to do with a word you just said; nothing I have read in either Bookchin or Zizek would support a single word of yours here. Secondly, dialectics in no way either apologizes for or justifies the “status quo,” as any reading of Zizek’s work, literally, any of it, would so quickly demonstrate. Zizek’s dialectics moved him to write about the spontaneous creation of utopia (which he qualified, he means something rather specific and unique by the term “utopia”) and the material conditions which will initiate or should initiate this creative spontaneity, all of this being empirically grounded. Lastly, dialectics has nothing inscribed into it on the subject of human nature, however, empirically, there simply is no question that there is an innate, fixed human nature – for instance, no matter how much free will you believe you have, you are simply not going to sprout wings and learn to fly, that is simply neither genetically nor humanly possible – that you would reject modern science on this subject (biology, cognitive psychology, genetics and so on) demonstrates only one thing, that it is you and your outrageous theories who is and are anti-empirical.

http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99383&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=220

Plenty more of the same in the above thread.

All a [I]wind up, as he now tries to tell us?

[Unkut]

For one, dual power structures cannot exist. They will either be crushed by capitalism, or recuperated into capitalism.

Also, my problem with that statement is not so much that he thinks there needs to be a dual power structure, but that he's not even active in trying to create a "rich network of co-operatives." He seems more interested in siding with the Democrats.

He probably wouldn't be as big of a figure or as wealthy if he was more active in doing so.

[~Spectre]

Hurfunator:



And neither is Chomsky, whose 'theory' depends on a miracle (an ancestor of ours being blasted by cosmic rays, and suddenly being able to talk! Smacks too much of the Edenic myth, if you ask me -- or even if you don't), and all our concepts (including 'bus ticket', 'thermostat', 'pile up on Route 66', 'DNA', 'Dry cleaning', 'MP3 Player', etc.) being present (in this Chomskyan Adam's -- or Eve's -- head) from day one, hundreds of thousands of years ago!

You have to be pretty naive to swallow all that. Genuine miracles should be easy to believe after this!


Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display when dealing with work that is antagonistic to a mystic known as Wittgenstein. For example, Keynes referring to him quite literally as "God" (true story).


Her arguments here have already been neutralized, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, defeated, and discredited. Proof here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHS1NraVsAc

[Dean]

Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display...

Do you know what "histrionic" means? Consider this a verbal warning for sexism.

[Meridian]

Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display when dealing with work that is antagonistic to a mystic known as Wittgenstein. For example, Keynes referring to him quite literally as "God" (true story).

First off, Rosa is not a member of the bourgeoisie, I believe she's working class. Second, it is not common among the bourgeoisie to be in any way proponents of Wittgenstein. Third, Wittgenstein was not a mystic. Finally, Keynes referred to him as "God", okay, so what?


Her arguments here have already been neutralized, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, defeated, and discredited. Proof here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHS1NraVsAc
Feel free to point out where exactly any (of Wittgenstein's or Rosa's) arguments were neutralized, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, defeated and/or discredited. I must have missed it.

[fa2991]

Speaking of which, Chomsky on Marxism makes me want to eat my own ears. He plays the classic card of the "young humanist Marx" and the "cranky authoritarian old Marx" and also that evil baby eating intellectual Lenin who crushed the workers and paved the way for Stalin. And then he tries to make Left-Communism out to be basically anarchism in Marxist clothing.

Ultimately, the problem with Chomsky is that he rejects all the bourgeois lies about American greatness, but accepts all the bourgeois lies about communists and M-L states.

Case in point:
yQsceZ9skQI

The only reason he has any sort of sympathy for Cuba, for example, is because American imperialism victimized it.

[Revolution starts with U]

Most of us learned a lot about the failures of capitalism from Chomsky. To hate on him because he isn't left enough for you is a travesty really.

[~Spectre]

Do you know what "histrionic" means? Consider this a verbal warning for sexism.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/histrionic


–adjective Also, his·tri·on·i·cal. 1. of or pertaining to actors or acting.

2. deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional; overly dramatic, in behavior or speech.

[~Spectre]

Feel free to point out where exactly any (of Wittgenstein's or Rosa's) arguments were neutralized, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, defeated and/or discredited. I must have missed it.


Link to evidence was already provided.

[fa2991]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/histrionic


–adjective Also, his·tri·on·i·cal. 1. of or pertaining to actors or acting.

2. deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional; overly dramatic, in behavior or speech.

It also means people, esp. women, who crave attention and get their way/get people to notice them by flirting & being sexual and manipulative, hence the sexism accusation.

So, basically, you called Rosa Luxemburg a manipulative, slutty attention whore... which is a sexist thing to say.

[~Spectre]

It also means people, esp. women, who crave attention and get their way/get people to notice them by flirting & being sexual, hence the sexism accusation.

That's a histrionic personality disorder, which is different than saying someone is engaging in histrionics.

[fa2991]

That's a histrionic personality disorder

...which is how Dean interpreted your use of the word. It does seem like that's what you were saying.

[~Spectre]

...which is how Dean interpreted your use of the word.

The word is derived from the latin "to act". It cannot even remotely be interpreted in a manner that makes it seem as if I said "you have histrionic personality disorder". The presence of the word "histrionic" in said personality disorder, is simply meant to convey the dramatic nature of the disorder, not that that word is in and of itself synonymous with the disorder. Coincidentally, histrionic personality disorder is not a female unique condition. Absolutely no way you slice it, does your criticism make a lick of sense.

Dean should apologize and retract.

But don't take my word for it, look it up.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

The word is derived from the latin "to act". It cannot even remotely be interpreted in a manner that makes it seem as if I said "you have histrionic personality disorder". The presence of the word "histrionic" in said personality disorder, is simply meant to convey the dramatic nature of the disorder, not that that word is in and of itself synonymous with the disorder. Coincidentally, histrionic personality disorder is not a female unique condition. Absolutely no way you slice it, does your criticism make a lick of sense.

Dean should apologize and retract.

But don't take my word for it, look it up.

For what its worth people may have "hysteria" confused with "histrionic". Hysteria can be sexist and is problematical. Freud talked about "hysterical personality disorder" mostly pertaining to women. The debate on this is very complicated. I've always taken histrionic to mean overly dramatic.

[Meridian]

Link to evidence was already provided.
Not very quick. I asked you to point out where, and what, exactly this "evidence" was. In any argument, linking a video does little good unless you specify what assertion it is a response to, which part of it consists of said response, and if you want to claim it as "evidence", how said response disproves the assertion in question.

[ZeroNowhere]

Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display when dealing with work that is antagonistic to a mystic known as Wittgenstein. For example, Keynes referring to him quite literally as "God" (true story).
Yes, if one were to be in the company of Bill Gates, and one said that Wittgenstein was wrong and the slithy toves are in fact jabberwockies, meaning that the essential self may be found in the pulmonary artery, he would definitely begin condemning you for uttering words without sense and misunderstanding the nature of language-games.

[anticap]

stalinogothic lifestylists

This term, which is new to me, has done more to help me to understand Stalinists than anything else that I have ever read.

[Devrim]

Do you know what "histrionic" means? Consider this a verbal warning for sexism.

Surely if you don't know whether somebody did know what a word meant, you wouldn't know whether there was any sexist intention in what he said.

Devrim

[Palingenisis]

Surely if you don't know whether somebody did know what a word meant, you wouldn't know whether there was any sexist intention in what he said.

Devrim

Personally I have known loads of histornic males.

[Palingenisis]

I mean seriously? We have to have a global network of co-operatives before abolishing the state? That's about a thousand times stupider than the strategy of even the most authoritarian of stalinogothic lifestylists.

.

Oi! We are the people!

Honestly though the thing about "Stalinism" is that it gets the job done for all its faults.

Which is why it continues to be the prefered socialist alternative globally. Yes Left-Communism and some forms of anarchism are nicer...But as someone said politics is the art of the possible.

[Palingenisis]

For what its worth people may have "hysteria" confused with "histrionic". Hysteria can be sexist and is problematical. Freud talked about "hysterical personality disorder" mostly pertaining to women. The debate on this is very complicated. I've always taken histrionic to mean overly dramatic.

Freud might have but generally the term is taken today to something that both men and women suffer from.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Oi! We are the people!

Honestly though the thing about "Stalinism" is that it gets the job done for all its faults.

What job are you referring to?

[Leo]

Honestly though the thing about "Stalinism" is that it gets the job done for all its faults.

Which is why it continues to be the prefered socialist alternative globally.

I don't think this is true at all. If anything, Stalinism is the reason why socialism in general isn't really seen as an alternative by most people. As a form of state-ideology, Stalinism failed miserably. It is not an alternative any more in the level of changing even the colors of a regime, and the remaining Stalinist forces are the ones who realized this fact and became fully integrated into the existing form of the state, if they hadn't done so before and if they aimed at adopting the existing state into being a Russian or Chinese backed regime. I would even go further and say that not even the majority of Stalinists see Stalinism as an alternative today.

[Palingenisis]

I would even go further and say that not even the majority of Stalinists see Stalinism as an alternative today.

So the martyrs of TKP/ML hunger strike just threw their lives away in the horrible fashion for what they didnt believe was possible? Those involved in armed struggle from India, the Philipines, Columbia, Peru, etc are just doing it for laughs? Are the largest organizations calling themselves Communist in Turkey not "Stalinist"....Why do their militants join organizations that are illegal over there (and I realise your group is aswell)?

[Palingenisis]

I don't think this is true at all. If anything, Stalinism is the reason why socialism in general isn't really seen as an alternative by most people. As a form of state-ideology, Stalinism failed miserably.

No it didnt.....It radically transformed working people's lives for the better. It defeated Hitlerism. It gave women a dignity they had never had before. If the EKS took over Turkey tomorrow Im sure we would be hearing lots of horror stories about Left-Coms....

The Chinese workers who face riot police holding pictures of Mao obviously have a different opinion.

[Leo]

So the martyrs of TKP/ML hunger strike just threw their lives away in the horrible fashion for what they didnt believe was possible?

They, as well as members of many other organizations and other political inmates, were hunger striking against the new type F prisons, which meant that the prisoners would have to spend most of their jail-time in cells with a maximum of 3 people, under horrible conditions, enabling the torturers to constantly insult and humiliate them who would not have the chance to respond collectively. This was what the hunger strikes were about, it wasn't an epic struggle for socialism with the masses on the backs of the hunger strikers. It was a desperate, tragic struggle against the dehumanizing state terror roaming in the prisons, and the masses simply did not move over it.


Those involved in armed struggle from India, the Philipines, Columbia, Peru, etc are just doing it for laughs?

They aren't doing it for the laughs, I'd say on a structural level they are doing it for profits. If any of the organizations in these countries come to power, what they will do will be more or less on the lines of the Nepali Maoists. Most of the armed Stalinist organizations are aware that they can't come to power nation-wide any way (for example the Indian Maoists simply can not expand out of the red corridor) so they focus on reconciling with the existing political parties and attempt at establishing critical but civil relations, start participating in bourgeois elections, try to become respectable politicians and so forth.


Are the largest organizations calling themselves Communist in Turkey not "Stalinist"....

The largest organizations calling themselves "Communist" in Turkey are also disgusting nationalist anti-working class politicians, bourgeois politicians.

Is the largest organization calling itself "Communist" in India not the CPI(M), for example?


Why do their militants join organizations that are illegal over there (and I realise your group is aswell)?

The illegal Marxist-Leninist organizations nowadays are absolutely tiny (well, they are much bigger than us obviously). The glorious TIKKO (Workers' and Peasants' Liberation Army of Turkey) apparently numbers about 50 nowadays. Based on what I've heard from a former member from the 90ies who spent years in jail, when the hunger strikes were happening, they weren't more than 350.


No it didnt.....It radically transformed working people's lives for the better.

If what you mean by "radically transformed working people's lives for the better" things like health-care, education, employment, living and working conditions etc. ie the pride and glory of the Khrushchevites, this did not have to do with the nature of the Stalinist regimes per-say, but the post-war period and the post war boom. Under Stalin, of course, with war, state-terror, and famine, the conditions were mostly horrible for the working class, as horrible under Tsar Koba as it was under Tsar Nicholas anyway.


It defeated Hitlerism.

Allied imperialism defeated Hitlerism in general. It wasn't simply a merit of the Stalinists. And not only with the practices of the USSR but also with its other imperialist components, the Allied proved to be no less of butchers than the Nazis.


It gave women a dignity they had never had before.

By... banning abortions and no-fault divorce, idolizing the traditional family life, promoting the image of women whose main duty is to produce children, going as far as giving medals to those who mothered more than ten. Yes, such dignity, such a radically different alternative.


If the EKS took over Turkey tomorrow Im sure we would be hearing lots of horror stories about Left-Coms....

It is not political parties or organizations that take power, it is the class organs of the working class, the councils, soviets. This is what a revolution means. The emancipation of the working class can only be the task of the working class itself - no party or organization, no minority can substitute itself for the class as a whole to fulfill this task. This is what happened in October 1917.


The Chinese workers who face riot police holding pictures of Mao obviously have a different opinion.

Yes, and apparently the Iranian workers who face the riot police shouting Allah-u Ekber are all Islamists, adn the Turkish workers who face the riot police with Turkish flags are all rabid nationalists. It is not a matter of opinion as in a strong belief in the symbol put forward, be that such belief even might exist. It is a simple, perhaps naive security measure, based on hoping that one won't be beaten up, or at least beaten up so much if holding the symbol of a regime against its police.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Spectre:


Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display when dealing with work that is antagonistic to a mystic known as Wittgenstein. For example, Keynes referring to him quite literally as "God" (true story).

1. Wittgenstein's mysticism was a feature of his early work, but it was tacked on to it as an afterthought because of his experiences in WW1. It is certainly not integral to it. It is even less integral to his later work. In fact, the method he introduces there shows that mysticism is non-sensical.

2. What 'religious histrionics' have I 'displayed'. You do not say, but are nevertheless happy to post a baseless personal attack on me.

3. Keynes referred to Wittgenstien as 'God' ironically, as the context of what he said makes clear. But even if he was 100% sincere, what has Keynes's comment got to do with me? I certainly do not regard him this way. In fact, had you bothered to check your facts before you made a fool of yourself in public, you'd have seen I advance several pointed criticisms of his work at my site. Some of these can be found here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Wittgenstein.htm

4. And in what way am I am member of the 'bourgeoisie'? You obviously know more about me than I do myself. So, don't be shy, let's see the documentary evidence that I am not what I claim to be (a worker, and a trade union rep (unpaid))...

And thanks for the video link, I'll check it out and get back to you.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Meridian:


Feel free to point out where exactly any (of Wittgenstein's or Rosa's) arguments were neutralized, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, defeated and/or discredited. I must have missed it.

Me too!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Spectre:


Link to evidence was already provided.

Yes, we know.

The only problem is that he doesn't cover any of my objections -- nor those of others I referenced.

[~Spectre]

Spectre:

Quote:
Rosa is displaying the type of religious histrionics that all her fellow members of the bourgeoisie display when dealing with work that is antagonistic to a mystic known as Wittgenstein. For example, Keynes referring to him quite literally as "God" (true story).
1. Wittgenstein's mysticism was a feature of his early work, but it was tacked on to it as an afterthought because of his experiences in WW1. It is certainly not integral to it. It is even less integral to his later work. In fact, the method he introduces there shows that mysticism is non-sensical.

2. What 'religious histrionics' have I 'displayed'. You do not say, but are nevertheless happy to post a baseless personal attack on me.

3. Keynes referred to Wittgenstien as 'God' ironically, as the context of what he said makes clear. But even if he was 100% sincere, what has Keynes's comment got to do with me? I certainly do not regard him this way. In fact, had you bothered to check your facts before you made a fool of yourself in public, you'd have seen I advance several pointed criticisms of his work at my site. Some of these can be found here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Wittgenstein.htm

4. And in what way am I am member of the 'bourgeoisie'? You obviously know more about me than I do myself. So, don't be shy, let's see the documentary evidence that I am not what I claim to be (a worker, and a trade union rep (unpaid))...

And thanks for the video link, I'll check it out and get back to you.

My original post to you wasn't meant seriously. I was just having some fun posting in a mock up version of your usual style "bourgeoisie mystic" "religious histrionics" and a link to an hour long video (in lieu of the essay) over a specific objection.




Hurfunator:



And neither is Chomsky, whose 'theory' depends on a miracle (an ancestor of ours being blasted by cosmic rays, and suddenly being able to talk! Smacks too much of the Edenic myth, if you ask me -- or even if you don't), and all our concepts (including 'bus ticket', 'thermostat', 'pile up on Route 66', 'DNA', 'Dry cleaning', 'MP3 Player', etc.) being present (in this Chomskyan Adam's -- or Eve's -- head) from day one, hundreds of thousands of years ago!

You have to be pretty naive to swallow all that. Genuine miracles should be easy to believe after this!

Where does Chomsky's theory suggest or depend on the bolded? Arguing in favor of a biologically inherited structure of language and it's acquisition is something different.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Spectre:


Where does Chomsky's theory suggest or depend on the bolded? Arguing in favor of a biologically inherited structure of language and it's acquisition is something different.

Well, I gave the reference for this; follow it yourself -- it's on line.

[Dean]

The word is derived from the latin "to act". It cannot even remotely be interpreted in a manner that makes it seem as if I said "you have histrionic personality disorder". The presence of the word "histrionic" in said personality disorder, is simply meant to convey the dramatic nature of the disorder, not that that word is in and of itself synonymous with the disorder. Coincidentally, histrionic personality disorder is not a female unique condition. Absolutely no way you slice it, does your criticism make a lick of sense.

Dean should apologize and retract.

But don't take my word for it, look it up.
You're right, sorry.

Surely if you don't know whether somebody did know what a word meant, you wouldn't know whether there was any sexist intention in what he said.

Devrim
I agree, but that's why its a warning and not an infraction. But I was confused either way.

[Barry Lyndon]

a) They aren't doing it for the laughs, I'd say on a structural level they are doing it for profits. If any of the organizations in these countries come to power, what they will do will be more or less on the lines of the Nepali Maoists. Most of the armed Stalinist organizations are aware that they can't come to power nation-wide any way (for example the Indian Maoists simply can not expand out of the red corridor) so they focus on reconciling with the existing political parties and attempt at establishing critical but civil relations, start participating in bourgeois elections, try to become respectable politicians and so forth.

b) The illegal Marxist-Leninist organizations nowadays are absolutely tiny (well, they are much bigger than us obviously).

c) If what you mean by "radically transformed working people's lives for the better" things like health-care, education, employment, living and working conditions etc. ie the pride and glory of the Khrushchevites, this did not have to do with the nature of the Stalinist regimes per-say, but the post-war period and the post war boom. Under Stalin, of course, with war, state-terror, and famine, the conditions were mostly horrible for the working class, as horrible under Tsar Koba as it was under Tsar Nicholas anyway.

d) Allied imperialism defeated Hitlerism in general. It wasn't simply a merit of the Stalinists. And not only with the practices of the USSR but also with its other imperialist components, the Allied proved to be no less of butchers than the Nazis.

e) By... banning abortions and no-fault divorce, idolizing the traditional family life, promoting the image of women whose main duty is to produce children, going as far as giving medals to those who mothered more than ten. Yes, such dignity, such a radically different alternative.

f) It is not political parties or organizations that take power, it is the class organs of the working class, the councils, soviets. This is what a revolution means. The emancipation of the working class can only be the task of the working class itself - no party or organization, no minority can substitute itself for the class as a whole to fulfill this task. This is what happened in October 1917.

a) Poor, barefoot peasants fighting in jungles because their villages are being burned are 'fighting for profits'. Sure. I bet the Vietcong had big Swiss Bank accounts that they had to protect.
Do you always just make stuff up like this?

b) Ah, so maybe you should refrain from attacking political organizations because of their size. People in glass houses......

c) Yeah, I mean, who cares about the poor being fed, having a roof over their head, or learning how to read and write?
Basically you admitted you don't give a shit about the poor. Noted.
And your assertion that people were just as bad off in the Stalin era- I'm not even supporter of Stalin, but this is a flat out lie. What about the fact that the literacy rate went from roughly 40% to 90%, or the dramatic reduction in infant mortality due to the public health care system.

d) Another brazen lie. 80% of all German casualties in World War II-dead, wonded, and captured-were incurred on the Eastern Front. Before D-Day, it was 90%. The Soviets wiped out more German troops in one battle(Operation Bragation) then the Western Allies did in their entire six month drive from Normandy to the Rhine. Plenty of bourgeois historians readily adknowledge that if it weren't for the USSR, Nazi Germany would have won the war.

e) I agree with you here. Those were reactionary Stalinist reversals of the progressive gains of the October Revolution. Khruschev reversed those policies, though.

f) Then why do the left communists, the tiniest minority of them all, constantly assert they and they alone speal for the working class, while denouncing all other tendencies as 'anti-working class'? And why do they attack virtually every socialist revolution that has actually happened, insinuating that all the people who participated or supported them are liars, frauds, or dupes?

[Leo]

a) Poor, barefoot peasants fighting in jungles because their villages are being burned are 'fighting for profits'. Sure. I bet the Vietcong had big Swiss Bank accounts that they had to protect.
Do you always just make stuff up like this?

When you look at the Vietnamese Communist Party today, it is obvious that someone made an immense profit of all this. Of course it wasn't the poor, barefooted peasants who made the profit, it was rather those who manipulated and led the poor, barefooted peasants.


b) Ah, so maybe you should refrain from attacking political organizations because of their size. People in glass houses......

Yes, because my organization is tiny, I should say that TIKKO has thousands of men in the mountains, although they only have 50.


c) Yeah, I mean, who cares about the poor being fed, having a roof over their head, or learning how to read and write?

Yes, because entire populations in all non-Stalinist countries starve to death everyday, live in the streets and can't read or write.


I'm not even supporter of Stalin

Yeah, right.


What about the fact that the literacy rate went from roughly 40% to 90%, or the dramatic reduction in infant mortality due to the public health care system.

What about the millions who were subjected to ethnic cleansing during the forced deportations or the millions who died as a result of famines? What about the millions who were executed by the regime or who died in its prisons?

The Hitler regime in Germany also greatly improved civil and social services, and it more or less solved the immense problem of unemployment in the Weimar period. I'd like to see you try to argue that it also was an improvement.


Another brazen lie. 80% of all German casualties in World War II-dead, wonded, and captured-were incurred on the Eastern Front. Before D-Day, it was 90%. The Soviets wiped out more German troops in one battle(Operation Bragation) then the Western Allies did in their entire six month drive from Normandy to the Rhine.

Killing more soldiers in a war does not mean winning the war by yourself. True, the Eastern Front was more bloody and horrific and the Soviet Army killed more Germans than others, yet it was economically and logistically supported by the Western imperialist powers. Had Stalin got no economic support from the allies, or had the war not been going on in Europe, that is had Germany not have been fighting on multiple fronts, Stalin would have lost, and indeed it came pretty close to losing. The tactical error the German Army made with attacking Russia in June rather than in the spring also ended up contributing greatly to Germany's defeat on the Eastern front.


Plenty of bourgeois historians readily adknowledge that if it weren't for the USSR, Nazi Germany would have won the war.

Oh that is certainly true. Yet, if it wasn't for the Western powers, Nazi Germany would have won the war also.


f) Then why do the left communists, the tiniest minority of them all, constantly assert they and they alone speal for the working class, while denouncing all other tendencies as 'anti-working class'? And why do they attack virtually every socialist revolution that has actually happened, insinuating that all the people who participated or supported them are liars, frauds, or dupes?

Which "virtually every socialist revolution"? Revolutions are made by classes, not parties. The October Revolution was made by the working class. The German revolution and the Hungarian revolution also were made by the working class. Germany 1953 and Hungary 1956 were made by the working class as well, so was May 68, Hot Autumn, the Winter of Discontent, Iran 1979, Poland 1980 etc. etc. I don't see many Stalinists, Khruschevites, Guevarists, Maoists etc. talk about the significant working class struggles of the century. Yet every now and then, I hear that "the left communists don't support socialist revolutions". Who makes these "socialist" revolutions of yours? Who made, for example, the Chinese "revolution" of 1949? Was it the Chinese working class, which had risen in 1927? Or was it simply a "People's Army", led by bourgeois politicians, fighting against another "People's Army" again led by bourgeois politicians? Who made the Cuban "revolution"? Was it the Cuban working class, or an army led by bourgeois-nationalists who did not even claim to be socialists for the most part? Who came to power as a result of these "revolutions" of yours, the working class, through its own independent organs, the workers councils, the soviets, or this or that party, this or that patriotic organization claiming to be "socialist".

[Barry Lyndon]

a) When you look at the Vietnamese Communist Party today, it is obvious that someone made an immense profit of all this. Of course it wasn't the poor, barefooted peasants who made the profit, it was rather those who manipulated and led the poor, barefooted peasants.

b) Yes, because my organization is tiny, I should say that TIKKO has thousands of men in the mountains, although they only have 50.

c) Yes, because entire populations in all non-Stalinist countries starve to death everyday, live in the streets and can't read or write.

d) Yeah, right.

e) What about the millions who were subjected to ethnic cleansing during the forced deportations or the millions who died as a result of famines? What about the millions who were executed by the regime or who died in its prisons?

f) The Hitler regime in Germany also greatly improved civil and social services, and it more or less solved the immense problem of unemployment in the Weimar period. I'd like to see you try to argue that it also was an improvement.

g) Killing more soldiers in a war does not mean winning the war by yourself. True, the Eastern Front was more bloody and horrific and the Soviet Army killed more Germans than others, yet it was economically and logistically supported by the Western imperialist powers. Had Stalin got no economic support from the allies, or had the war not been going on in Europe, that is had Germany not have been fighting on multiple fronts, Stalin would have lost, and indeed it came pretty close to losing. The tactical error the German Army made with attacking Russia in June rather than in the spring also ended up contributing greatly to Germany's defeat on the Eastern front.

h) Which "virtually every socialist revolution"? Revolutions are made by classes, not parties. The October Revolution was made by the working class. The German revolution and the Hungarian revolution also were made by the working class. Germany 1953 and Hungary 1956 were made by the working class as well, so was May 68, Hot Autumn, the Winter of Discontent, Iran 1979, Poland 1980 etc. etc. I don't see many Stalinists, Khruschevites, Guevarists, Maoists etc. talk about the significant working class struggles of the century. Yet every now and then, I hear that "the left communists don't support socialist revolutions". Who makes these "socialist" revolutions of yours? Who made, for example, the Chinese "revolution" of 1949? Was it the Chinese working class, which had risen in 1927? Or was it simply a "People's Army", led by bourgeois politicians, fighting against another "People's Army" again led by bourgeois politicians? Who made the Cuban "revolution"? Was it the Cuban working class, or an army led by bourgeois-nationalists who did not even claim to be socialists for the most part? Who came to power as a result of these "revolutions" of yours, the working class, through its own independent organs, the workers councils, the soviets, or this or that party, this or that patriotic organization claiming to be "socialist".

a) There is a big difference between the original leaders of the Viet Minh and NVA/Vietcong like Ho Chi Minh, who lived simply and never used their position to profit themselves(something Iv'e never heard even being alleged by anti-Communist Vietnamese), and the corrupt party leaders who profited off the free market reforms made 20 years after Ho Chi Minh's death. But nice job slandering the Vietnamese revolution and the people and fought and died for it.

b) I never said or implied anything of the sort.

c) In much of the Third World, that is very much the case. The reason its not so dire in the advanced capitalist countries is either due to the historic and current economic exploitation of the global South, or due to protracted working class struggle from below to win improvements in living conditions. It's not due to the benevolence of the capitalist state.

d) I suggest that you take a look at 'The Gulag Myth' thread, where the Stalinists foam at the mouth at my 'Trotskyite-fascist' 'lies' about their 'Great Leader'.

e) I'm not denying any of that-those were terrible crimes and a betrayal of the principles of the October Revolution.
All I'm saying is that even under Stalin progressive gains for the working class that been won in the early years of the revolution were preserved and in some ways, expanded. History is not black and white as you like to paint it.

f)Not really- it crushed labor unions, cut wages drastically, and basically placed the economy into the hands of a group of state-managed corporations. There were neo-Kenesyian programs that benefited that petty-bourgeois base that supported the Nazis, but the working class was pretty horribly repressed.

g) The 'economic and logistic' support that the Western Allies gave the Soviet Union is somewhat exaggerated. The Soviets had already halted the German advance on Moscow in December 1941, when the US had just days before entered the war and Britain was so tied down in North Africa it wasn't in any position to help.
The Allied convoy lines to Archangel certainly accelerated the Soviet victory, but they were not necessarily what stood between victory and defeat.
And it was basically a one-front war, most of the time. The large-scale fighting in Europe against Nazi Germany was almost exclusively the Soviet Union until 1943-44.

h) Those are all important working-class struggles of great importance. The difference between you and me, however, is that I also recognize the merits of revolutions that succeed, not just endlessly fetishize failure.
And btw, the Cuban Revolution did involve the working class-the actions of the rebels in the countryside were co-ordinated with labor union strikes in the cities, which fatally disrupted Batista's regime.

[∞]

I'm not very sure about philosophy, but in the debate with Foucault he seems purposely bring linguistics to demonstrate his area of expertise.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Most of us learned a lot about the failures of capitalism from Chomsky. To hate on him because he isn't left enough for you is a travesty really.

The hate is because he is too left for them, and pointing out the flaws of ML states hurts the feelings of some MLs.

[∞]

Yeah, I learned alot from the guy...

[cska]

Leo seems like a liberal to me so I was about to ask wether he should be restricted. Then I noticed he is an admin...

[9]

Leo seems like a liberal to me so I was about to ask wether he should be restricted. Then I noticed he is an admin...

Wow, what a sophisticated political criticism. :rolleyes:

[Pawn Power]

chosmky philosophizing about anarchism (http://stagevu.com/video/ajlceanvxkla)

[Summerspeaker]

That linked paper by Chris Knight was fascinating. I've become increasing skeptical of Chomsky because of his wealth and the exaggerated devotion he inspires in so many. I didn't realize a direct military connect existed. I still think he's a valuable voice in the debate, but should be examined critically like anybody else.

[Pawn Power]

That linked paper by Chris Knight was fascinating. I've become increasing skeptical of Chomsky because of his wealth and the exaggerated devotion he inspires in so many. I didn't realize a direct military connect existed. I still think he's a valuable voice in the debate, but should be examined critically like anybody else.

Yes, but what he says and does should be analyzed, not the fact that he owns a house or that some nebulous connections he has.

[cowslayer]

Yes, but what he says and does should be analyzed, not the fact that he owns a house or that some nebulous connections he has.

Agreed. Even though Communists, Socialists and Anarchists such as Chomsky, own a nice house or own an operable car that doesn't look like shit, it does not mean they are now becoming products of the American Capitalist culture. It seems that a lot of people tend to think that fame in America means succumbing to Capitalist endeavors and losing your true values while pursuing luxuries. Chomsky has worked hard, is a smart man, has given much to modern English syntax, and had a job teaching at MIT. I do not share all views with him, but he has earned the right to these. He did not gain these through the suffering and exploitation of those who earned less than him.

[Great1917Revolution]

I admire Chomsky, though his positions on the Yugoslav Wars and Cambodia remain controversial.

[Summerspeaker]

Yes, but what he says and does should be analyzed, not the fact that he owns a house or that some nebulous connections he has.

As described by Knight, the connections with military research are concrete rather than nebulous.


Even though Communists, Socialists and Anarchists such as Chomsky, own a nice house or own an operable car that doesn't look like shit, it does not mean they are now becoming products of the American Capitalist culture.

It's often a good indication of exactly that. Any world celebrity with two million in the bank lives a profoundly different life than I do. It's natural for me to doubt such a person shares my interests. Why would they? As I said, I still consider Chomsky a valuable thinker. But wealth and fame alone are legitimate reasons for skepticism.

[Ocean Seal]

It's often a good indication of exactly that. Any world celebrity with two million in the bank lives a profoundly different life than I do. It's natural for me to doubt such a person shares my interests. Why would they? As I said, I still consider Chomsky a valuable thinker. But wealth and fame alone are legitimate reasons for skepticism.
While they are legitimate reasons for scepticism, his political views seem to be unrelated to his wealth. His ideological worth should not be scrutinized by his personal conditions unless there is reason to believe that they are affecting his views. Why would he be a socialist? The reason is that he might believe in moving us towards the more productive economy and he might find capitalism inherently wrong on moral grounds. I don't agree with his views entirely, but they are all that matters to me.