Socialists on homosexuality

[Guardia Rossa]

What were the opinions of Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Rosa, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Hoxha on homosexuality?

I read somewhere that Marx wrote to Engels that "If homosexuality became politized we will have to defend it" does someone has that text?

Thanks

[BIXX]

What were the opinions of Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Rosa, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Hoxha on homosexuality?

I read somewhere that Marx wrote to Engels that "If homosexuality became politized we will have to defend it" does someone has that text?

Thanks

Rafiq has posted that here before. However Marx also shat on a politicized movement of queers.

Most of the socialists you listed I think actually hated queers.

[The Feral Underclass]

I don't think there is any evidence that Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Trotsky, Lenin or Luxemburg had any hatred towards homosexuality.

I know that Lenin de-criminalised homosexuality. It is also conceivable that Bakunin was bisexual at the very least and some speculate his relationship with Nechayev was sexual, although I don't think there is any concrete evidence for that. Being opposed or hating homosexuality would certainly not be consistent with Bakunin's body of work.

Tito, Stalin and Hoxha were hideous homophobes by all accounts.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Sadly, for a long time in the socialist movement homosexuality was often seen as a symptom of 'bourgeois decadence'. In fact for some time it was actually considered an element of Fascism.

This wasn't necessarily universal mind you: Emma Goldman was by modern standards pro-lgbt, and one of the first American modern gay rights organization (the Mattachine Society) was founded by communists.

[motion denied]

Not too bad for 19th century Germany, I'd say.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1898/01/13.htm

That's one of the reasons I don't buy many excuses regarding the subject in the 20s or 30s. But yeah, afaik, Emma Goldman was much ahead.

[BIXX]

I don't think there is any evidence that Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Trotsky, Lenin or Luxemburg had any hatred towards homosexuality.

I know that Lenin de-criminalised homosexuality. It is also conceivable that Bakunin was bisexual at the very least and some speculate his relationship with Nevchayev was sexual, although I don't think there is any concrete evidence for that. Being opposed or hating homosexuality would certainly not be consistent with Bakunin's body of work.

Tito, Stalin and Hoxha were hideous homophobes by all accounts.

While I don't have the book on my there is some documentation that I've read recently of Marx's issues with queers.

You may be right about Bakunin, however I suspect the nechayev theory might be a bit of fan fiction hahahaha

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

What were the opinions of Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Rosa, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Hoxha on homosexuality?
Homophobia was at one time the default position, and just as much so on the Left. Marx and Engels were known to make homophobic comments in their personal correspondence. I don't know what Lenin's views were, but he supported the decriminalization of homosexuality (which was recriminalized under Stalin).

[Os Cangaceiros]

There were some people in the USA during the late 19th century who were on the political left & fought for homosexual rights...Alexander Berkman and (as previously mentioned) Emma Goldman, to name a couple. Leonard D. Abbott, as well. Benjamin Tucker was an outspoken advocate of free love, and published & promoted works by Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman when no one else would publish them in the USA (being outlawed in some areas, actually).

(All this info is in "Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States")

In Europe there were some people, mostly individualist anarchists like Emile Armand, who were big proponents of free love.

All of these people were affiliated with anarchist thought, though, which IMO has been more advanced than Marxism historically when it comes to the topic of sexuality.

[Matteo]

It shouldn't be forgotten that when Lenin was in power he essentially decriminalised homosexuality and made it legal for openly homosexual men or women to be politicians. That's progressive for its time.

[Leo]

Proudhon - Hideous homophobe.

Marx - Probably not, since he was a Fourerist on the question of patriarcy.

Engels - Possible, but no evidence.

Bakunin - Anti-semitic people do tend to be homophobes, but for stated reasons Bakunin might be an exception.

Lenin - Russia did decriminalize homosexuality, but there was a real movement which pushed for it. I don't think he was a rabid homophobe but basically his position on sexuality amounted to claiming Bebel had writted all that was to be said on this issue, and there was no reason to keep going on about it. Overall, he was conservative against the radical anti-patriarchal proletarian currents.

Rosa - Not a homophobe, the German party in general was quite progressive on this question.

Stalin - Hideous homophobe, recriminalized homosexuality.

Trotsky - Most probably not a homophobe.

Tito - Hideous homophobe.

Hoxha - Hideous homophobe.

[Comrade Jacob]

What were the opinions of Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Rosa, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Hoxha on homosexuality?

I read somewhere that Marx wrote to Engels that "If homosexuality became politized we will have to defend it" does someone has that text?

Thanks

Proudhon - homophobe
Marx - backwards view but no hate
Engels - backwards view but no hate
Bakunin - I dinnie ken
Lenin - No
Rosa - No
Stalin - backwards view but no hate
Trotsky - I dinnie ken
Tito - don't like him but I do believe he tried to make homosexuality accepted
Hoxha - a bit of a homophobe
Mao - some backwards view but no hate at all (ie. It will go away as capitalism goes (which is not true, we now know this))
Fidel - backwards views at first but changed them
Che - some backwards views, never had the chance to change them

[Durruti's friend]

I think everything is said about most of the mentioned people, but I'd like to add something about Tito, probably because I like talking about Yugoslavia. It's a common trait.

The Yugoslav partisans executed male homosexuals in the army, because they considered homosexuality a, you guessed it, bourgeois deviation. I don't know of any civilian executions though, albeit they might have happened. Female homosexuality was never considered to be a problem.

Homosexuality was officially banned in 1959 and gay people were sometimes even publicly shamed during the 1950s. It all kinda cooled in the next decade and after the 1974 Constitution passed and the federal republics got more independence, SR Slovenia, SR Croatia, SR Montenegro and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina decriminalized homosexuality after urges from the republican medical chambers. I don't know how Tito felt about any of that, but the fact that he allowed (and probably ordered) executions of LGBT people and the criminalization of homosexuality means that he was hardly "trying to make homosexuality acceptable", as the poster above claims.

Later on in the 1980s homosexuality became ever more acceptable, even though homophobia of course remained at high levels. There were even attempts by the League of Communists to create a gay section in the late 80s but it failed for various reasons.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Stalin - backwards view but no hate

Well that's alright then, I mean imagine how bad gay people would have had it if homosexuality had been criminalised due to intentional hatred.


Hoxha - a bit of a homophobe

"A bit". I dread to think who would qualify as more than "a bit" homophobic then, Khomeini?


Trotsky - Most probably not a homophobe.

He certainly seems to have avoided the subject, even when he worked with gay and homophilic people like, respectively, Chicherin and Bonch-Bruevich. And the American SWP, which he worked closely with, basically treated homosexuality like a personal pathology. So I think Trotsky should be criticised for a lack of attention to the issue.


Rafiq has posted that here before. However Marx also shat on a politicized movement of queers.

Except Marx did no such thing. The closest you're going to get is Engels complaining that if gay rights catch on their own arseholes won't be safe. When it came to actual political action, rather than personal correspondence between close friends, the Marxist group defended the chief of the Lassalleans when he was disbarred because he was caught with another man. I think that counts more than off-colour jokes.

[The Feral Underclass]

Proudhon - homophobe

Marx - backwards view but no hate

Engels - backwards view but no hate

Bakunin - I dinnie ken

Lenin - No

Rosa - No

Stalin - backwards view but no hate

Trotsky - I dinnie ken

Tito - don't like him but I do believe he tried to make homosexuality accepted

Hoxha - a bit of a homophobe

Mao - some backwards view but no hate at all (ie. It will go away as capitalism goes (which is not true, we now know this))

Fidel - backwards views at first but changed them

Che - some backwards views, never had the chance to change them


Where do you get this information from? Do you just state your opinion as fact?


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[The Feral Underclass]

Proudhon - Hideous homophobe.

Marx - Probably not, since he was a Fourerist on the question of patriarcy.

Engels - Possible, but no evidence.

Bakunin - Anti-semitic people do tend to be homophobes, but for stated reasons Bakunin might be an exception.

Lenin - Russia did decriminalize homosexuality, but there was a real movement which pushed for it. I don't think he was a rabid homophobe but basically his position on sexuality amounted to claiming Bebel had writted all that was to be said on this issue, and there was no reason to keep going on about it. Overall, he was conservative against the radical anti-patriarchal proletarian currents.

Rosa - Not a homophobe, the German party in general was quite progressive on this question.

Stalin - Hideous homophobe, recriminalized homosexuality.

Trotsky - Most probably not a homophobe.

Tito - Hideous homophobe.

Hoxha - Hideous homophobe.


Bakunin wasn't an anti-Semite.


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[Rafiq]

Bakunin wasn't an anti-Semite.


Bakunin was one of the most prominent anti-semites in the history of the Left, and in a pathological sense. That means he took it beyond a mere personal disdain of Jews.

[RedWorker]

Bakunin wasn't an anti-Semite.


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"This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other... This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found."

- Mikhail Bakunin

The key of anti-Semitism was never that Jews are dumb or ugly; it ever was that Jews are powerful and evil, often economically powerful. Bakunin's statement fits in with this.

[L.A.P.]

For Comrade Jacob:

https://libcom.org/history/gay-gulag

[The Feral Underclass]

"This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other... This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found."

- Mikhail Bakunin

The key of anti-Semitism was never that Jews are dumb or ugly; it ever was that Jews are powerful and evil, often economically powerful. Bakunin's statement fits in with this.

Yawn.

This is attributed to Bakunin from what text?

[The Feral Underclass]

Bakunin was one of the most prominent anti-semites in the history of the Left, and in a pathological sense. That means he took it beyond a mere personal disdain of Jews.

That is simply a lie.

[Rudolf]

Yawn.

This is attributed to Bakunin from what text?


That quote apparently appears in Historica Judaica by Edmund Silberner. I've been unable to find a copy of this to see where it's from and therefore can't say if it's a legit quote.

[Rafiq]

The text is real. It is from a letter, as a response to the schism of the Hague congress. Here was Engels's indirect response:

"Bakunin has issued a furious, but very weak, abusive letter in reply to the Scissions. That fat elephant is beside himself with rage because he has finally been dragged from his Locarno lair out into the light, where neither scheming nor intrigues are of any more use. Now he declares that he is the victim of a conspiracy of all the European—Jews!”

I don't see how it is a point of controversy that Bakunin was a vicious anti-Semite.

[The Feral Underclass]

That quote apparently appears in Historica Judaica by Edmund Silberner. I've been unable to find a copy of this to see where it's from and therefore can't say it's a legit quote.

It's not legitimate.

[Rafiq]

Here is the endnote given by Libcom in referencing it:


Quoted from Ibid., 296. The circular letter is available as “Lettre aux Internationaux de Bologne (décembre 1871),” in Bakounine, Œuvres Complètes, Volume 2. For more of Bakunin’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, see his “Aux Compagnons de la Fédération des Sections Internationales du Jura (février-mars 1872),” in Michel Bakounine, Œuvres Complètes, Volume 3: Michel Bakounine et les Conflits Dans L’Internationale 1872 (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1975). In Bakunin’s reply to Marx and Engels’ “The Alleged Splits in the International,” he denounced the lies of “German and Russian Jews.” See “Résponse à la Circulaire Privée du Conseil Général: Les Prétendues Scissions dans L’Internationale,” in Bakounine, Œuvres Complètes, Volume 3, 121.
https://libcom.org/library/marx-bakunin-question-authoritarianism#footnote58_xpqsa9j

[The Feral Underclass]

The text is real. It is from a letter, as a response to the schism of the Hague congress. Here was Engels's indirect response:

"Bakunin has issued a furious, but very weak, abusive letter in reply to the Scissions. That fat elephant is beside himself with rage because he has finally been dragged from his Locarno lair out into the light, where neither scheming nor intrigues are of any more use. Now he declares that he is the victim of a conspiracy of all the European—Jews!”

Provide the source quote so that we can all see what the letter actually says and whether it has been altered in translation, misquoted or taken out of some kind of context. Even this response is unattributed. A quote by Engels in which he personally insults Bakunin is neither proof that this alleged letter contains the quote or that he was an anti-Semite, especially when you consider the motivation Engels might have for portraying Bakunin in a negative way.


I don't see how it is a point of controversy that Bakunin was a vicious anti-Semite.

Because it's a bullshit lie propagated by his political enemies to discredit through misinformation.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

(Hal) Draper cites the paragraph as Bakunin: Lettre aux Int. de Bologne, Archives Bakounine 1.2:109. I haven't read the text, but Draper was generally a careful scholar.

[The Feral Underclass]

Here is the endnote given by Libcom in referencing it:


https://libcom.org/library/marx-bakunin-question-authoritarianism#footnote58_xpqsa9j

Yet apparently no one has taken the time to translate the letters and put them on the Internet...Odd.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

In fact most works by Bakunin are not online. I don't know if this is due to a lack of interest, jumpy publishers, or something else. In either case, unless someone on RL has access to the Archives Bakounine or his Ouevres etc., it seems we can't see the letter. But the preponderance of evidence is in this case surely on the side of people like Draper and other scholars not falsifying that letter.

[The Feral Underclass]

In fact most works by Bakunin are not online. I don't know if this is due to a lack of interest, jumpy publishers, or something else. In either case, unless someone on RL has access to the Archives Bakounine or his Ouevres etc., it seems we can't see the letter. But the preponderance of evidence is in this case surely on the side of people like Draper and other scholars not falsifying that letter.

All of his most significant or popular texts have been translated and published either in print or online. Considering the widespread discussion and enduring controversy over this particular aspect of Bakunin's life, it strikes me as bizarre that no one in the course of history has ever translated into English and had published the letter anywhere either online or in print. If this letter is such definitive proof of Bakunin's rabid anti-Semitism, then where is it? Locked away in some compiled and edited collected works in some archive somewhere?...

That quote has been widely attributed to Bakunin by fascists and Illuminati conspiracy theorists, to Leninists and capitalists alike, but without seeing the letter and reading its content, there is absolutely no basis to say that it is legitimate. Considering Bakunin's friends, beliefs and actions it would be entirely inconsistent for him to hold these views.

[Quail]

I can't find the letter anywhere online, so I guess we're going to have trouble finding it. I suppose my view is that even if Bakunin was an anti-semite, it doesn't mean that everything else he said was complete rubbish. It just means he was an anti-semite, in which case ignore his views on Jews and focus on the rest.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

All of his most significant or popular texts have been translated and published either in print or online. Considering the widespread discussion and enduring controversy over this particular aspect of Bakunin's life, it strikes me as bizarre that no one in the course of history has ever translated into English and had published the letter anywhere either online or in print. If this letter is such definitive proof of Bakunin's rabid anti-Semitism, then where is it? Locked away in some compiled and edited collected works in some archive somewhere?...

That quote has been widely attributed to Bakunin by fascists and Illuminati conspiracy theorists, to Leninists and capitalists alike, but without seeing the letter and reading its content, there is absolutely no basis to say that it is legitimate. Considering Bakunin's friends, beliefs and actions it would be entirely inconsistent for him to hold these views.

I don't know if it has been published in print. I suspect it hasn't because, let's be honest, there isn't that much of a market for Bakunin. Or Marx, for that matter. And it hasn't been put online, from what I gather, probably because the people who publish Archives Bakounine object (they've disabled searching through their books on Google Books, for example).

So the question is whether we can trust Draper. I think we can. In those cases where an online edition exists, e.g. with Proudhon's Cahiers, Draper's quote always matches the source material. And I think it's preposterous to imply Draper had some ulterior motive here - his thesis, that the libertarianism of the early anarchists was largely a myth, can be proven if we ignore Bakunin's relationship to the Jews (and focus on his "Alliance of Socialist Democracy" or Proudhon's statements about becoming a general director etc.).

Alternately we can send someone to Amsterdam and beat them with sticks unless they present us genuine Shaky-Toaster-Rama photos of the offending letter.

[Rafiq]

You fail to see that if Engels merely wanted to smear Bakunin, he wouldn't have to resort to accusing him of adhering to a Jewish conspiracy. This is hardly slander by 19th century standards. There are other ways to slander the "fat elephant" - so why would Engels specifically accuse him of making pretenses to a Jewish conspiracy? It makes no sense.

I mean, use reason here - is Engels just randomly making this up? How does that make sense? The reason it hasn't been published online is for the same reason it's not that easy to get your hands on Marx and Engels's collected works (after the whole MIA scandal too) - his anti-semitism probably wasn't a huge feature of his mainstream works (why would it be?) but he was certainly an anti-Semite where it counted. I mean, the grand majority of those who publish his works online are probably for him - why would they go out of their way to publish a few letters or marginal works by Bakunin that encapsulate his rabid anti-semitism? And this is hardly surprising considering the likes of Pierre Joseph Proudhon on the Jews:

Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicide. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. By steel or by fire or by expulsion the Jew must disappear.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/1847/jews.htm

My point being that even though anti-semitsim probably didn't feature that heavily in Proudhons works, it was tacitly incorporated and acknowledged. The context of 19th century politics were basically that - in lacking a scientific, cohesive criticism of capitalism, it was not uncommon for "socialists" to become susceptible to reactionary conspiracy theories.

Anarchism in general aside, it is difficult to see how people can still defend Bakunin, who by all accounts was a slimy individual.

[The Feral Underclass]

You fail to see that if Engels merely wanted to smear Bakunin, he wouldn't have to resort to accusing him of adhering to a Jewish conspiracy. This is hardly slander by 19th century standards. There are other ways to slander the "fat elephant" - so why would Engels specifically accuse him of making pretenses to a Jewish conspiracy? It makes no sense.

I mean, use reason here - is Engels just randomly making this up? How does that make sense? The reason it hasn't been published online is for the same reason it's not that easy to get your hands on Marx and Engels's collected works (after the whole MIA scandal too) - his anti-semitism probably wasn't a huge feature of his mainstream works (why would it be?) but he was certainly an anti-Semite where it counted. I mean, the grand majority of those who publish his works online are probably for him - why would they go out of their way to publish a few letters or marginal works by Bakunin that encapsulate his rabid anti-semitism?

But this entire discussion is based on nothing but hearsay. You have no basis to claim that quote is true or accurate. Nothing.

And if it was true or accurate, then why hasn't his enemies published it. I mean, they go on about it enough. Surely it would make all this guessing and hearsay redundant if they just produced this letter...

No one knows what this letter is supposed to have said, so no one knows what Engels was referring to or whether what he was saying was even a fair representation of what Bakunin said.

You're clutching at straws.


Anarchism in general aside, it is difficult to see how people can still defend Bakunin, who by all accounts was a slimy individual.

Because unlike you, people with credibility don't judge or support a set of ideas based on the "slimyness" of the person who wrote them.

[Counterculturalist]

The book referenced in the libcom article exists, the letter is in it, and it says what it's reputed to say.

Check the excerpts from page 109 and 110 in the following links.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=oF8iAAAAMAAJ&dq=Oeuvres+compl%C3%A8tes+de+Bakounine+-+Volume+2.+-+Michel+Bakounine+et+l%27Italie&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=juive


https://books.google.ca/books?id=oF8iAAAAMAAJ&dq=Oeuvres+compl%C3%A8tes+de+Bakounine+-+Volume+2.+-+Michel+Bakounine+et+l%27Italie&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=parasite

I like Bakunin, but unless somebody at google books has a serious vendetta against him, he said what he said. Too bad, but it doesn't do anybody any good to pretend otherwise.

[The Feral Underclass]

The book referenced in the libcom article exists, the letter is in it, and it says what it's reputed to say.

Check the excerpts from page 109 in the following links.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=oF8iAAAAMAAJ&dq=Oeuvres+compl%C3%A8tes+de+Bakounine+-+Volume+2.+-+Michel+Bakounine+et+l%27Italie&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=juive


https://books.google.ca/books?id=oF8iAAAAMAAJ&dq=Oeuvres+compl%C3%A8tes+de+Bakounine+-+Volume+2.+-+Michel+Bakounine+et+l%27Italie&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=parasite

I like Bakunin, but unless somebody at google books has a serious vendetta against him, he said what he said. Too bad, but it doesn't do anybody any good to pretend otherwise.

What am I supposed to be looking at?

[Counterculturalist]

It's the result of a google books search. Look at "from inside the book." Unfortunately, google only allows a small portion of the text to be displayed, but it's enough to see that the exact quote in question is in the book.

The book is Oeuvres complètes de Bakounine: pt. 2. Michel Bakounine et l'Italie 1871-1872: La première internationale en Italie, Editions Champ libre, 1974.

[The Feral Underclass]

It's the result of a google books search. Look at "from inside the book." Unfortunately, google only allows a small portion of the text to be displayed, but it's enough to see that the exact quote in question is in the book.

The book is Oeuvres complètes de Bakounine: pt. 2. Michel Bakounine et l'Italie 1871-1872: La première internationale en Italie.

This is a translation of the letter, not a quote?

[Counterculturalist]

This is a translation of the letter, not a quote?

Yeah, it's the letter in French.

I think that's pretty good evidence for its existence. I mean, I doubt that Editions Champ Libre invented the letter and inserted it into their edition of Bakunin's works just to fuck with people.

[The Feral Underclass]

Yeah, it's the letter in French.

I think that's pretty good evidence for its existence. I mean, I doubt that Editions Champ Libre invented the letter and inserted it into their edition of Bakunin's works just to fuck with people.

Yes, you're right. It is incredibly damning, not to mention disappointing.

I have found the book on amazon so will buy it. It's in French, but at least I will have it and be able to study the letter in full in order to understand what the fuck is going on with it.

We all have the ability to have contradictory points-of-view. In this instance Bakunin clearly followed a popular contemporary position and failed to see beyond the myopia of anti-Semitic values, which he certainly had the capacity to do and should have known better. He was not as enlightened and as forward thinking on this matter as he should have been, especially when you consider how enlightened and forward thinking he was with so many other issues.

Disappointing indeed.

[Rafiq]

No, Bakunin's anti-semitism was just as much a display of cognitive dissonance as Proudhon's.

That is to say, it was not. There was nothing contradictory about it because, quite simply, Bakunin had overtly reactionary tendencies in the domain of politics... If you could even call it that. He followed with his "master" (Bakunin referred to Proudhon as "the master of us all") in his reactionary petite-bourgeois politics caught between the intricacies of the decaying remnants of feudalism and emerging modern society. Alongside his overt Russian chauvinism (Russia being the center of all de-facto reactionary politics in the late 19th century), Bakunin was inarguably someone of no relevance to the industrial (or even post-industrial) proletariat aside from being a source of obfuscation. Few leaders of the Left have been so contemptible, dishonest, and outright unscrupulous. The "libertarian" Bakunin's anti-democraticism would make Bordiga blush. In fact, there is much reason to despise him - for it was his conspiratorial maneuverings in attempting to usurp in secret the First international that had cemented the permanent divide between the red and black.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never heard of any applicability of Bakunin's current among the industrial proletariat - I know that he pertained almost exclusively to the rural petty bourgeoisie. He was hardly a huge icon among the anarcho-syndicalists in the United States and Europe, etc.

[The Feral Underclass]

I have never heard of any applicability of Bakunin's current among the industrial proletariat

Because you're a philistine whose point of reference doesn't extend beyond the end of his nose. To have heard of its "applicability" you would first have to understand what it is. Go and read a fucking book, you insufferable prick.

[Rafiq]

Is it then wrong to identify different currents of anarchism, i.e. as though all share the same history? This is ridiculous.

The class character of Bakunin's theoretical foundations had no basis among the industrial proletariat. You mistaken me when I speak of applicability - I do not speak of the direct application of Bakunin's ideas, I speak of Bakunin's unique relevance all together. As muddied as is the class character of the anarchist tradition itself (something which you apparently insist on recognizing as homogeneous, not me) - what proletarian elements were among it had little at all to do with Bakunin in the unique sense. That was my point. If this is erroneous, then what part of "correct me of I'm wrong" is beyond you? The fact of the matter is that before the mass movement defined anarchism (i.e. anarcho-syndicalism) then Bakunin's anarchism was the anarchism of individual "terrorism" and petite-bourgeois radical politics. Anarchism's maturity culminated in its adherence among the American, British, Spanish, etc. industrial proletariat, after Bakunin. Is this wrong?

It does not matter how many books I have read (Funny, however, that it was Bakunin whom I read before the overwhelming majority of Marxists that I'm familiar with... Right at the beginning of my adherence to radical politics), if I have claimed something which betrays a sense of unfamiliarity with collectivist anarchism and its practical realities, then you're free to demonstrate this. Though how seriously should we take someone who had just previously insisted on the "illegitimacy" of what should be common knowledge to anyone who has shit for familiarity with Bakunin, only to go back on himself later when (unnecessarily) confronted with what only you would need as definite proof. Again, reason dictates that there would be no reason for anti-semitism to have been falsely attributed to Bakunin, none the less by Engels in the 19th century!

[Collective Reasons]

In fact most works by Bakunin are not online. I don't know if this is due to a lack of interest, jumpy publishers, or something else. In either case, unless someone on RL has access to the Archives Bakounine or his Ouevres etc., it seems we can't see the letter. But the preponderance of evidence is in this case surely on the side of people like Draper and other scholars not falsifying that letter.

The letter exists, and is document #71025 on the Bakunin CD-ROM. There are two variant drafts from the same period (71026, 71026A). It's long, but the quotations are substantially correct.

There will be a full English translation in one of the later volumes of the collected works edition currently in progress. (With a little luck, the first volumes will start to appear late in 2016.) So far, I'm not finding much like it in the other works, but there is still a lot of the correspondence to look through.

[motion denied]

What Draper book you referred to, 870?

[mushroompizza]

I heard Marx was a defender of homosexuality. Engels thought it was "capitalist" or something stupid like that. Lenin legalized homosexual marriage in Russia, the first country to do so, Stalin later prosecuted homosexuals and sent them to camps.

[RedWorker]

As far as I know, the following are two of the known points of the interaction between Marx, Engels and homosexuality:

1) Marx sending Engels a book he had received about homosexuality, Engels sending Marx a private letter attacking the "pedophile-homosexuals" described in the book.
2) Expulsing a female "free love" (involved with homosexuality?) militant (from the USA?) from the International, though the reasons for expulsion may have been others.

[Sewer Socialist]

I think that, in addition to criticizing socialists' inadequate and / or incorrect stances on homosexuality, it would be a nice balance to make more of an effort to point out those who were ahead of their time, those who helped to progress the left's stance on the issue.

Huey Newton gave a speech on the left and gay liberation in 1970, one year after Stonewall, and I think it was a significant part of the movement's history and relationship with the left, comparing it to the struggles of people of color. The speech also addresses the importance of women's struggle, as well as the importance of the direction, unity and co-operation of all these struggles against capital.

http://www.workers.org/2012/us/huey_p_newton_0524/

I'm not sure when Angela Davis (a lesbian) joined the Black Panthers, but if it predates the speech, she may have been an influence. She seems likely to have been an important part of the left's inclusion of homosexual struggle, but I don't know precisely.

[Art Vandelay]

I'm not sure when Angela Davis (a lesbian) joined the Black Panthers, but if it predates the speech, she may have been an influence.

Angela Davis was never a member of the Black Panther Party. She was a member of the CP.

[The Disillusionist]

Who cares what a bunch of old, dead, useless white people thought anyway? Does it really matter if Bakunin was an anti-semite? We take ideas that are useful to us, and we discard the rest. Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Hoxha... some of their ideas were good, but as people, they're not relevant.

Applying this perspective to the question of homosexuality... let's say that every single one of the people mentioned in this thread was a rabid homophobe... does that mean that Socialism is inherently homophobic? Does it mean we should be homophobic like them? No.... of course not.... Again, we take what we can use from their ideas, and we discard the rest. We move beyond them.

It is only because these people have been elevated to some kind of pseudo-religious position in Leftist thought that we are even having this discussion. That's a huge part of the discussion on this site... a bunch of people poring over irrelevant minutiae and obscure quotes trying to determine the "true" views of their chosen revered prophets. Go to any church, and you'll find people having the same kinds of discussions.

I''ll say it again... let's move on. Let's bring leftism into the modern age and become relevant again... Forget the prophets, return to the dynamic power of theory. Theory can be updated, dead people cannot.

[Sewer Socialist]

Angela Davis was never a member of the Black Panther Party. She was a member of the CP.

Ah. Some sources say she was, but that would explain why there's no specific information about it when I try to search for it.

Did Angela Davis work to advance the cause of gay liberation in the '70s?

Disillusionist, I am trying to discuss Angela Davis, who is still alive, and Huey Newton, only dead because he was murdered in 1989, and neither of whom are white, though I'm not sure what those have to do with whether someone should be discussed. I think the background of the linking of the left and the gay liberation movement is indeed important.

[RedWorker]

Does it really matter if Bakunin was an anti-semite?

Yes. Because if he was, then he failed to understand many other concepts, among other things. And the impact on his theory would have to be analyzed: from that quote he seems to have assigned Jews an important role in capitalism, which suggests that his analysis may have been flawed.

[The Disillusionist]

Yes. Because if he was, then he failed to understand many other concepts, among other things. And the impact on his theory would have to be analyzed: from that quote he seems to have assigned Jews an important role in capitalism, which suggests that his analysis may have been flawed.

Why? Theory is theory, no matter what the views of the people who come up with it are. Theory can be tested and used independently of the people who first thought it up. We can look at Bakunin's theory independently of his personal views of Jews, and evaluate that theory for antisemitism. We don't need to know what his opinions were to determine if his theories were inherently antisemitic, we just need to think for ourselves. Isaac Newton was probably an asshole, but that doesn't mean that the theory of gravity is inherently an asshole theory.

But, the problem is that to evaluate theory independently of the opinions of the people who came up with it, you have to use science. Unfortunately, leftists don't believe in science, they're postmodernists, so this whole discussion is just going to keep going on, and people are going to keep linking theory with the opinions of useless dead people, and we're never going to make any progress here.

[Rafiq]

I''ll say it again... let's move on. Let's bring leftism into the modern age and become relevant again... Forget the prophets, return to the dynamic power of theory. Theory can be updated, dead people cannot.

That's very cute of you. The fact of the matter is that what you fail to understand is that the positions of these "dead people" reflect very much their ideological and theoretical foundations, their predispositions to this or that. These foundations remain and endure, because believe it or not: We still live in the same capitalist epoch, and what it universal about such theories remain, nevermind the peculiarities of its changing content in each according condition in capitalism - form remains. What ought "theory be updated" for? I mean, FROM WHAT POINT OF REFERENCE? From the moral desire to abolish capitalism and "achieve our goals"? What are our goals? How can we understand them without theory?

What that means is that regarding the "dynamic power of theory" cannot amount to arbitrarily picking and choosing what content you want from a theory - this is a disgusting logic! In your mind, you literally think we can just re-approach Bakunin, disregard his anti-semitism "because anti-semitism is bad and in a utilitarian way leads to the holocaust" (this stupid, philistine utilitarian thinking which doesn't even critically regard its moral foundations) and be on our merry fucking way with the "dynamic power of theory". A theoretical system is not a set of ideas which are isolated from each other. Bakunin's conception of the world allows him to be an anti-semite. Bakunin's anti-semitism is contingent upon everything about Bakunin, because from Proudhoun, it was not some marginal insane outburst divorced from the essence of his works, it was necessarily a logical conclusion to them.

People are so fucking stupid because they MORTIFY Marx THEORETICALLY by reducing him to "just a dead guy" or a figure, an object of our historical gaze who existed in the 19th century. They don't understand that in the 19th century, there existed an epoch which stood on its own two feet, regardless of our gaze upon it, a capitalist totality which wouldn't have allowed Marx to have been myopic on many issues, including anti-semitism or homosexuality. That is why there is no pathological trace of any of these things in Marx. If you criticize Marx, or any 'dead person', you need to actually recognize that these are men who dedicated their lives to theory for decades upon decades, more than you ever will. Marx did not come up with his ideas arbitrarily out of his ass - the period between the 1830's to the 1880's might seem like the glimpse of an eye to you, but more happened than you can ever imagine, virtually nothing outside of our scope. So it goes to show that saying "Marx wasn't able to see that" or "This is too outdated to accommodate for" is a nonsensical criticism - be honest and criticize Marx as though you were one of his opponents while he lived.

[Rafiq]

But, the problem is that to evaluate theory independently of the opinions of the people who came up with it, you have to use science. Unfortunately, leftists don't believe in science, they're postmodernists, so this whole discussion is just going to keep going on, and people are going to keep linking theory with the opinions of useless dead people, and we're never going to make any progress here.

For fuck's sake. My fucking god. Bakunin's anti-semitism is not some kind of trivial personal reservation like some kind of personal characteristic - who the FUCK are you to pick and choose what constituted a personal idiosyncrasy, and a core part of a theory that is up for evaluation? Marx may have personally had an aversion toward Jews, but that has fuck all to the absence of any theoretical predisposition to anti-semitism, and the same goes for blacks. Marx spoke of "niggers" and Engels too was hardly politically correct, but that had fuck all to do with their theoretical approach to blacks.

But Bakunin's and Prodhouns anti-semitism extends far beyond some kind of personal reservation about individuals, it designates structurally a CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD. You keep trying to intimidate people with "science" but you don't know what science actually is - you arrogantly assume that your epistemology is built on solid foundations as though the question of what constitutes science is not a controversial one. The word "science" for you is the same as divine law for the religious - it merely designates a structural apparatus which is given a monopoly over truth, regardless of its CONTENT.

[The Disillusionist]

That's very cute of you. The fact of the matter is that what you fail to understand is that the positions of these "dead people" reflect very much their ideological and theoretical foundations, their predispositions to this or that. These foundations remain and endure, because believe it or not: We still live in the same capitalist epoch, and what it universal about such theories remain, nevermind the peculiarities of its changing content in each according condition in capitalism - form remains. What ought "theory be updated" for? I mean, FROM WHAT POINT OF REFERENCE? From the moral desire to abolish capitalism and "achieve our goals"? What are our goals? How can we understand them without theory?

What that means is that regarding the "dynamic power of theory" cannot amount to arbitrarily picking and choosing what content you want from a theory - this is a disgusting logic! In your mind, you literally think we can just re-approach Bakunin, disregard his anti-semitism "because anti-semitism is bad and in a utilitarian way leads to the holocaust" (this stupid, philistine utilitarian thinking which doesn't even critically regard its moral foundations) and be on our merry fucking way with the "dynamic power of theory". A theoretical system is not a set of ideas which are isolated from each other. Bakunin's conception of the world allows him to be an anti-semite. Bakunin's anti-semitism is contingent upon everything about Bakunin, because from Proudhoun, it was not some marginal insane outburst divorced from the essence of his works, it was necessarily a logical conclusion to them.

People are so fucking stupid because they MORTIFY Marx THEORETICALLY by reducing him to "just a dead guy" or a figure, an object of our historical gaze who existed in the 19th century. They don't understand that in the 19th century, there existed an epoch which stood on its own two feet, regardless of our gaze upon it, a capitalist totality which wouldn't have allowed Marx to have been myopic on many issues, including anti-semitism or homosexuality. That is why there is no pathological trace of any of these things in Marx. If you criticize Marx, or any 'dead person', you need to actually recognize that these are men who dedicated their lives to theory for decades upon decades, more than you ever will. Marx did not come up with his ideas arbitrarily out of his ass - the period between the 1830's to the 1880's might seem like the glimpse of an eye to you, but more happened than you can ever imagine, virtually nothing outside of our scope. So it goes to show that saying "Marx wasn't able to see that" or "This is too outdated to accommodate for" is a nonsensical criticism - be honest and criticize Marx as though you were one of his opponents while he lived.

This is all very post-modernist. Again, because Newton was probably a bigot in some way or another, we should reject his theories because they must have somehow been inherently bigoted? Theories are ideas which can be evaluated by others. Using the scientific method, we can evaluate ideas, and differentiate theories from baseless opinions. So yes, it is entirely possible to divorce Bakunin's economic/political theories from his anti-semitism, we just take those theories and evaluate them on their own merit. Again, the only reason you don't see that this is possible is because you view these people are prophets. Oh, and your argument that we can't fully criticize dead people's theories because they "dedicated their lives to theory for decades and decades, more than you ever will" is yet another ridiculous example of this kind of prophet worship.

Also, you have such a narrow perspective it's almost impossible to comprehend. We have to criticize Marx "as though you were one of his opponents while he lived"? What? Again, the scientific method lets us continue to evaluate and modify these theories after the thinkers that created them are long dead. The only thing that criticizing Marx in the context of his own period gets us is stuck in Marx's own time period. Again, let's move into the modern age, shall we? It's not the 19th century anymore. We know new things now. Continuing with my Newton example... if I only approached Newton's theories from a perspective restricted to that of his own time period, I would be absolutely incapable of comprehending relativity, or molecular physics, or anything like that, because that was outside of Newton's scope of thought. Worshiping Newton would have just led to stagnation, and no new progress would have been made. The same goes for the worship of old dead people, like Marx.

[The Disillusionist]

For fuck's sake. My fucking god. Bakunin's anti-semitism is not some kind of trivial personal reservation like some kind of personal characteristic - who the FUCK are you to pick and choose what constituted a personal idiosyncrasy, and a core part of a theory that is up for evaluation? Marx may have personally had an aversion toward Jews, but that has fuck all to the absence of any theoretical predisposition to anti-semitism, and the same goes for blacks. Marx spoke of "niggers" and Engels too was hardly politically correct, but that had fuck all to do with their theoretical approach to blacks.

But Bakunin's and Prodhouns anti-semitism extends far beyond some kind of personal reservation about individuals, it designates structurally a CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD. You keep trying to intimidate people with "science" but you don't know what science actually is - you arrogantly assume that your epistemology is built on solid foundations as though the question of what constitutes science is not a controversial one. The word "science" for you is the same as divine law for the religious - it merely designates a structural apparatus which is given a monopoly over truth, regardless of its CONTENT.

Who are you to disagree with me? You aren't privy to any more information than me, and the only evidence that Bakunin was anti-semitic is in some obscure letter than almost no one can even find. He didn't include it in his actual books about theory. How is that bigotry any more significant to Bakunin's theory than Marx or Engel's bigotry was to their own theories? Your so-called truth is meaningless, because it isn't scientific, it's just opinion backed by dead authorities. Your truth is entirely faith-based, yet you constantly insist that it is science that is biased.

On top of that, even if Bakunin had based his theories entirely around anti-semitism... we are able to still able to evaluate those theories. It's not like anti-semitism is some kind of undercover theory-virus that sneaks in without anyone noticing... We can evaluate Bakunin's theories for bigotry, and we can either reject or modify his theories to suit our own purposes, removing bigotry.

[Rafiq]

Also, you have such a narrow perspective it's almost impossible to comprehend. We have to criticize Marx "as though you were one of his opponents while he lived"? What? Again, the scientific method lets us continue to evaluate and modify these theories after the thinkers that created them are long dead. The only thing that criticizing Marx in the context of his own period gets us is stuck in Marx's own time period. Again, let's move into the modern age, shall we? It's not the 19th century anymore. We know new things now. Continuing with my Newton example... if I only approached Newton's theories from a perspective restricted to that of his own time period, I would be absolutely incapable of comprehending relativity, or molecular physics, or anything like that, because that was outside of Newton's scope of thought. Worshiping Newton would have just led to stagnation, and no new progress would have been made. The same goes for the worship of old dead people, like Marx.

What you still don't understand is that Newton's potential bigotry, or shitty politics, was NOT a logical extension of his work in pertinence to the natural sciences, but this can hardly be said about the theoretical foundations, regarding politics and economics - in Prodhoun and Bakunin in pertinence to both of their anti-semitism. Do you understand the difference? You cannot "modify" something arbitrarily to suit your ends. A better example would be to claim "Why can't we divorce Newton's superstitious mysticism from his science"? And the reason for this is because again, Newton was not distinguished by his mysticism, but quite on the contrary, his contribution to the emergence of bourgeois science as a discipline, and that Newton's theories can very well be pre-supposed, "modified and evaluated" because they practically, for the first time, deal with such questions of physics in a scientific matter. This is hardly the case for Bakunin, because virtually EVERYTHING that Bakunin dealt with was dealt with by Marx as well!

The fact of the matter is that what made Bakunin distinct from Marx is what pathologically sustained his anti-semitism. What you don't understand is that unlike the field of physics, the fields which Marx pertain to cannot have their theoretical foundations change, only the CONTENT that which is approximated by such foundations can be. That is to say, new anthropological evidence, and so on, at this point is not going to do much as to alter how you're going to approach, approximate and evaluate these things. The content of Marxism might change, but its theoretical foundations will not. Conversely, for the natural sciences, which must regularly deal with changes that affront a definite standard of reason and challenge dominant paradigms, theoretical foundations change - but in matters that pertain to the social sciences, which we ourselves are a PART OF, create and compose of, which has not been divorced from us, mortified and abstracted in such a way that we can approach in an "unbiased" manner, the question of Marx being myopic in matters which he was most certainly able to address, and which he for the most part actually did largely address is a nonsensical one. The arguments leveled against Marx when he lived, and the arguments that are leveled against him today are, if not the same - inferior today as they were in their depth and profoundness as they were in the 19th century.

I'll give you just one example: Some thought they had "debunked" historical materialism by pointing out that in fact, the English revolution was not a bourgeois revolution at all, but was purely religious, since many of the anti-monarchists were not of bourgeois descent. But Marx and Engels had already, explicitly stated that many of the landowning classes, who had much to gain from international trade and commerce, had sided with the bourgeoisie, and whose relations to production were already bourgeois in nature. But the haughty, narrow minded philistines could only make the distinction between the urban, clear-cut bourgeoisie of the towns, and of the guilds, and the agrarian landowning classes. They thought they found something that upset the Marxist narrative on the English revolution, when in fact they found nothing that wasn't addressed a hundred years prior.


Who are you to disagree with me? You aren't privy to any more information than me, and the only evidence that Bakunin was anti-semitic is in some obscure letter than almost no one can even find. He didn't include it in his actual books about theory. How is that bigotry any more significant to Bakunin's theory than Marx or Engel's bigotry was to their own theories? Your so-called truth is meaningless, because it isn't scientific, it's just opinion backed by dead authorities. Your truth is entirely faith-based, yet you constantly insist that it is science that is biased.

On top of that, even if Bakunin had based his theories entirely around anti-semitism... we are able to still able to evaluate those theories. It's not like anti-semitism is some kind of undercover theory-virus that sneaks in without anyone noticing... We can evaluate Bakunin's theories for bigotry, and we can either reject or modify his theories to suit our own purposes, removing bigotry.


Are you FUCKING kidding me? You're so fucking ARROGANT with your SHITTY epistemology that you would dare call into question my ability to "disagree with you". According to you, it's because I don't have "more information" - what a SICKENING, barbaric epistemology? What kind of fucking child thinks this way? You literally SPEAK FOR ME, I don't even have to point out the fact that you see arguments as, rather than occupying a shared place of collective reason, some kind of dick-waving contest between who has the most sceptors of legitimacy that qualifies them to "disagree" with the other. Well fuck you! And the fact of the matter is that - if you were paying attention to the FUCKING thread, we DID find the letter, but nevermind that - Bakunin's anti-semitism is something that has been well known for a long time, and we might entertain the idea that it's some kind of bizarre outburst if not for the fact that Prodhoun, whom Bakunin referred to as "our master" was an avid and explicit anti-Semite, even from a theoretical standpoint.

The difference is that THIS ISN'T ABOUT FUCKING BIGOTRY. You can talk about how you like Blacks, how you think they're all merry fellows while giving an avid justification for support of the confederacy during the civil war - it would STILL demonstrate that you are THEORETICALLY a racist. And it is INFINITELY worse than calling someone a "nigger" in a letter - what counts are your positions on such world-historical matters that concern the very structural foundation of racism. It is not a matter of political correctness, it is a matter of a pretense to an understanding of THE WORLD. If you go on talking about Jewish conspiracies to dominate the world that are "not only unbound by the borders of nations, but also that of political opinion", THAT ISN'T MERELY BIGOTRY, IT IS PATHOLOGICALLY ANTI-SEMITIC TO THE CORE. Marx and Engels would have NEVER been able to even talk such cack, because it is a pretense to an understanding of the world which is antithetical to a scientific understanding of it. Do you see the fucking difference? Yes it is that antisemitism is a pathology which speaks VOLUMES about the ENTIRETY of someone's theoretical and political worth, but you still appear to be mistaken: No one claims Bakunin was wrong only because he was an anti-semite, but that bizarre nonsense like antisemitism was a logical conclusion of Bakunin's petite-bourgeois ideological foundations and his pathetic theoretical poverty. That's the fucking point.

So no, you can't "modify or reject" his theories to suit your own purposes, because you cannot pre-suppose that your "purposes" are somehow a utilitarian given, ITSELF divorced from theoretical evaluation. Even if they are, your purposes are clearly not our purposes - yours concern STUPID fucking feel-good abstractions about "making the world a better place for humanity" while ours concern the victory of the proletariat and the destruction of the class enemy. Frankly, even from this utilitarian standpoint, Bakunin's petite-bourgeois depravity has no place among us, it is incompatible with our aims, it cannot be reconciled with our language. You're so pathetic because in claiming that you want to "modify or reject" things arbitrarily to suit your own ends, you reveal the poverty of your understanding of science. You don't "modify or reject" theories about physics to suit some kind of moral platitude, you do it for the practical purpose of conceiving the physical world around you in a more consistent, cohesive, and probable way. Likewise, you don't "reject or modify" Bakunin's theories on the basis of some moral platitude, to "suit your ends", you do it insofar they are relevant in attempting to critically evaluate the social world around you. Bakunin was not only distinguished by what he thought about the world, but by his programmic theories about how the proletariat ought to go about in their struggle. He was the man of the individual terrorist, the marginal petite-bourgeoisie, the agrarian displaced classes, and so on. Marxism may be contingent upon an OPPOSITION to capitalism, Communism, but if it ended simply with this we would end up with bourgeois perversions like Utopian or petite-bourgeois socialism. From this opposition opens up the space of scientific freedom, free from the designations of ruling ideology, just as from the bourgeois opposition to the ancien regime opened up the space of scientific freedom in the domain of the natural sciences, with all of their obfuscations (metaphysical distortions like the nonsensical implications people draw from the double-slit experiment) grounded in their social relevance.

You cannot "remove" bigotry politely, because the pathological foundations of anti-semitism would remain. Good job with your fucking garbage political correctness, see how far that will get you. People who I am sure you consider respectable gentlemen, scum like Pinker, Richard Lynn, and Hernstein - are perfectly politically correct and are by no means bigots. Yet they are infinitely more vile in their racism, in their reactionary fervor than the typical politically incorrect ignorant man. Like answer me this question: When Bakunin talks about "this whole Jewish world", do you actually think he's saying "Oh, I'm just being politically incorrect, you caught me on the wrong day, I'd never say this on the level of serious theory, I'm just kidding around". It speaks VOLUMES about his conception of the conditions of capitalism and therefore the nature of the struggle for "liberation".

[Collective Reasons]

Bakunin's and Prodhouns anti-semitism extends far beyond some kind of personal reservation about individuals, it designates structurally a CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

What's your evidence for this claim?

[The Feral Underclass]

The evidence for the claim is a single letter that Bakunin wrote. How this means the entire foundation of Bakunin's ideas is predicated on hatred of Jews is yet to be explained.

[Rafiq]

It does not matter if it was a single letter - to possess the ability to claim that there's some big Jewish conspiracy is contingent upon a plethora of other positions - it is not something which you can "marginally" ascribe to, it reveals the ideological character of the author himself. The only way one could dismiss this is if one could demonstrate that Bakunin was joking, or temporarily went insane... Such an idea becomes almost impossible when you're confronted with the reality that, whom bakunin referred to as "our master", Prodhoun, was deeply anti-Semitic.

[Collective Reasons]

It does not matter if it was a single letter - to possess the ability to claim that there's some big Jewish conspiracy is contingent upon a plethora of other positions - it is not something which you can "marginally" ascribe to, it reveals the ideological character of the author himself. The only way one could dismiss this is if one could demonstrate that Bakunin was joking, or temporarily went insane... Such an idea becomes almost impossible when you're confronted with the reality that, whom bakunin referred to as "our master", Prodhoun, was deeply anti-Semitic.

The problem with that last bit is, of course, that the evidence for Proudhon's "deep antisemitism" is mostly a couple of passages in his private notebooks, about which Bakunin could not even have known. And looking at the timing and contents of Bakunin's letter, it is pretty clear that it is a response to a series of personal and political attacks within the context of the International. There's no need to dismiss the comments, which even Bakunin himself characterized as rude and coarse, but more than this business about conspiracy theories is really needed to make the case that any of the rest of Bakunin's thought is compromised. After all, the various players struggling within the International were, in fact, conspiring, sometimes with and sometimes against one another.

[The Disillusionist]

The evidence for the claim is a single letter that Bakunin wrote. How this means the entire foundation of Bakunin's ideas is predicated on hatred of Jews is yet to be explained.

Again... post-modernism... A post-modernist can take any perspective he/she wants, and needs not concern themselves with reality, or science, or actual fact, because to a post-modernist, all speculation is truth, as long as you believe it hard enough. Hence Rafiq's constant tendency to put words in my mouth, yet he flips out when I mention that by his own logic, he doesn't have any more right to disagree with me than I do with him. It's because post-modernism is inherently arrogant. There's no arguing with them, it's like arguing with a child who has his fingers in his ears... they're right no matter what you, the evidence, or anything else says.

[Rafiq]

Disillusionist, might I ask: Do you even know what postmodernism is? Every time I see the word under your name, I want to fucking vomit. This incessant abuse of words you have absolutely no notion of.. I promise you we've been over this countless, countless fucking times. You, and other analytical dolts have created this dichotomy in the so-called science wars, wherein the entirety of the continental school was dismissed as "postmodernist". What you fail to understand is that self-proclaimed postmodernist ideologues (of which, as a Marxist, I am not among) are less postmodernist than the analytical philistines who attack them.

Because postmodernism is not simply a set of ideas, or some kindo f argumentative pattern, it is an ideological phenomena that encompasses the entirety of our language in the 21st century. The biggest culprit here is - yes, YOU, absolutely you. Only in a postmodern era can someone prattle of "picking and choosing" ideas in order to suit their "needs" - because you assume ideas to be self-sufficient unto themselves, you're incapable of questioning their function and origins - they are just an "opinion" or a "position".

The paradigm of Disillusionist's allegations of "postmodernism" only find this in common: Those who are unbound from prostrating before the legitimacy of the state-apparatus and such cheap buzzwords as 'science' which, as far as popscience garbage goes - has pretty much lost all meaning in the Anglo-Saxon world. You are infuriated by the fact that I can go on attacking you without waving about some kind of scepter of legitimacy, whether it's a peer reviewed article that supports my conclusion, or the display of some kind of token of "credential", you're horrified by this kind of freedom in our collective space of reason.

Of course for Communists, we seek the triumph of the commons - and this itself is not limited to our collective, common space of reason. You, in Kants words, are only capable of engaging in the private use of reason, this whole legacy of philistinism in the past three decades has been the privatization of the public use of reason.

[Rafiq]

The problem with that last bit is, of course, that the evidence for Proudhon's "deep antisemitism" is mostly a couple of passages in his private notebooks, about which Bakunin could not even have known. And looking at the timing and contents of Bakunin's letter, it is pretty clear that it is a response to a series of personal and political attacks within the context of the International. There's no need to dismiss the comments, which even Bakunin himself characterized as rude and coarse, but more than this business about conspiracy theories is really needed to make the case that any of the rest of Bakunin's thought is compromised. After all, the various players struggling within the International were, in fact, conspiring, sometimes with and sometimes against one another.

Does this amount to a couple of marginal passages in his private notebooks?

Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicide. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. By steel or by fire or by expulsion the Jew must disappear.

This isn't simply the expression of Proudhon's private, non-political reservations about Jews, he is blatantly requesting for such an article to be written, publicly. Perhaps there is simply short supply of both Proudhon's and Bakunin's anti-semitism as far as their works go, because as petite-bourgeois socialists anti-semitism is a pre-supposition that seldom needs further elaboration. My point is not this ridiculous logic that - all of this is unrelated but that it "negates" the entirety of hte rest of their works. I say that such examples of deep rooted anti-semitism are more than anything the expression of what is already implicit in their works, what they are already pre-disposed to on a theoretical level. Bakunin might be given a free pass had only he resorted to personal attacks against Marx over the saltiness of being expelled from the first international, with some derogatory ant-Jewish slurs - but this was not the case. Bakunin overtly accused Marx of being a part of an international Jew-finance conspiracy, that Marxists who led Communist movements did so in the service of an international cabal of Jews. It does not mater if he etched this on the side of a prison cell - for someone to be CAPABLE of saying this, demonstrates something profoundly deeper about their understanding of the world.

[The Disillusionist]

Disillusionist, might I ask: Do you even know what postmodernism is? Every time I see the word under your name, I want to fucking vomit. This incessant abuse of words you have absolutely no notion of.. I promise you we've been over this countless, countless fucking times. You, and other analytical dolts have created this dichotomy in the so-called science wars, wherein the entirety of the continental school was dismissed as "postmodernist". What you fail to understand is that self-proclaimed postmodernist ideologues (of which, as a Marxist, I am not among) are less postmodernist than the analytical philistines who attack them.

Because postmodernism is not simply a set of ideas, or some kindo f argumentative pattern, it is an ideological phenomena that encompasses the entirety of our language in the 21st century. The biggest culprit here is - yes, YOU, absolutely you. Only in a postmodern era can someone prattle of "picking and choosing" ideas in order to suit their "needs" - because you assume ideas to be self-sufficient unto themselves, you're incapable of questioning their function and origins - they are just an "opinion" or a "position".

The paradigm of Disillusionist's allegations of "postmodernism" only find this in common: Those who are unbound from prostrating before the legitimacy of the state-apparatus and such cheap buzzwords as 'science' which, as far as popscience garbage goes - has pretty much lost all meaning in the Anglo-Saxon world. You are infuriated by the fact that I can go on attacking you without waving about some kind of scepter of legitimacy, whether it's a peer reviewed article that supports my conclusion, or the display of some kind of token of "credential", you're horrified by this kind of freedom in our collective space of reason.

Of course for Communists, we seek the triumph of the commons - and this itself is not limited to our collective, common space of reason. You, in Kants words, are only capable of engaging in the private use of reason, this whole legacy of philistinism in the past three decades has been the privatization of the public use of reason.

Postmodernism, a definition: "A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."

You are definitely a postmodernist in the majority of your thinking. You're just a really crappy one because of your blind adherence to a singular, outdated ideology that you hold above all else. In your warped mind, only your own ideology is capable of being true, while you apply blind postmodernist skepticism to everything else. You have no framework of truth, you simply hold your own unsupported view above all else and claim that nothing else can truly be known.

Again, you are the worst kind of postmodernist, because rather than applying your blind skepticism evenly, like the nihilists, you adhere to a singular ideology which you spare from any kind of critical analysis while you reject the knowability of any other ideas. You claim that your version of Marxism is the only truly scientific social theory, and yet you don't even accept the scientific method that your theory is supposedly based on. Your entire thought process is egotistical garbage. Only a narcissist could think that it is possible to hold a monopoly on ideas without acknowledging any kind of actual framework to test them by.

So don't pretend that you have any kind of intellectual authority. Your constant slew of words is completely meaningless, even from a truly scientific Marxist perspective. You're a self-contradiction, a post-modernist ideologue, and it's only through an admirable feat of mental gymnastics that you manage to maintain your smug sense of self-superiority over everyone else.

If most of the people on this site were at all concerned with actual critical thought or progress, the majority of them would see right through you in a second. But they prefer to read your reassuring dogma and keep their heads in the sand, telling themselves that their hero worship and blind adherence to the Marxist prophecy will actually get them somewhere.

[Collective Reasons]

...for someone to be CAPABLE of saying this, demonstrates something profoundly deeper about their understanding of the world.

But this is the argument that you never seem to actually make. And it is the assertion that presumably shields you from any analysis of the events that took place. You clearly believe that Marx was the sort of person who can be excused potentially awful statements, while the anarchists are not, but in the end any reasoning is replaced by calling the latter "bourgeois" and moving on as if an argument has been made.

There is arguably a lot for radicals, of whatever tendency, to learn from the appearance of these apparently anomalous expressions of very un-radical ideas. We can tell immediately from what Proudhon and Bakunin actually said that their frustration was being driven by perceived failures in solidarity, and that the triggers in both cases were sectarian attacks by Marx and his faction. Why the focus shifted from that specific faction, who were conspirators in at least some sense, to "the Jews" more generally is the interesting question, but there are certainly multiple ways we might answer it, assuming we actually waded into the material and did not attempt to simply fall back on our own set of sectarian generalizations.

[Sewer Socialist]

The sheer irony here: the Disillusionist declaring the irrelevance of discussing socialist stances of the 19th century on homosexuality, and advocating for discussion of the modern, immediately after my post trying to discuss more recent stances, attempting to move into the second half of the 20th century and discuss the more recent efforts to unite the gay liberation movement with the left.

Presented with my post attempting to move into the second half of the 20th century and discuss the efforts to unite the gay liberation movement with the left, and RedWorker's, which is a discussion of Bakunin, the Disillusionist chooses to discuss Bakunin - the exact thing he just criticized as irrelevant! And now we have a discussion that centers on the Disillusionist's ideas. What a waste of discussion, and one that exists across two currently active threads on homosexuality, a derailment of both. I don't think we can get any more irrelevant.

[Rafiq]

I can't believe what a cowardly shit-talker he his - for fuck's sake!


Postmodernism, a definition: "A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."

So the deep insight you possess with regard to postmodernism amounts to a convenient link on the first page of the google search results in looking up a definition? Are you fucking kidding me? I almost feel bad for you at this point. What you don't fucking understand is that postmodernism and relativism are not interchangable. Neither of these are adequate as far as labeling the arguments I have leveled against you - but the latter has existed for a long fucking time, while postmodernism is certainly unique to the late 20th century up until now. Essentially, it would be like criticizing Lenin on the basis of "postmodernism" in Materialism and Empirio Criticsm when in fact he did precisely the same thing in de-throning alleged 'Scientists' from their seats of unquestioned legitimacy. That's what you don't fucking understand - this "tradition" of "postmodernism" has existed long before postmodernism has existed, and we have attacked the postmodern ideologues with almost he same ferocity as we do you analytical philistines. What you fail to understand is that postmodernism will never be able to be reducible to a single definition because it is, ultimately, a phenomena and not a consciously refined concept. An idea which coincided with the de-industrialization of western capitalist economies, the rise of finance and consumer-oriented production wherein the ideology of the individual consumer was given primacy. Now, all ideas are reducible unto themselves, no "absolute" truth can exist, and that all ideas are valid insofar as they express the idiosynchrasies, preferences of the consumer. For the first time in history, political belief is conceived in terms of preference, adherence to ideology is now something that pertains to individual personalities. The biggest culprits here are the analytical philistine 'science' fetishists like yourself because they precisely adhere to the notion that - for example politics, is REDUCIBLE to 'individual opinion'. The mere notion that "ideology" obscufates science IS ITSELF A POSTMODERN NOTION, the exceptional nature of it is that relations of power - manifested in the 'scientific apparatus' is given LEGITIMACY BY MERIT OF APPEARANCE, REGARDLESS OF CONTENT. It is postmodernist IN ESSENCE but religious-like IN PRACTICE.

This is what you don't FUCKING understand - instead, you trot around leveling against anyone who rejects such philistinism accusations of "postmodernism" desperately trying to pinpoint exactly what sustains us - what, in other words, gives us the "audacity" to question the unquestionable. You are as confused as a fucking clergymen accusing the men of the enlightenment of "satanism", incapable of attacking them by merit of the substance of their affronts, designating them only in terms of what can be understood within the narrow framework of Catholic theology. But ultimately, Satanism is a phenomena unique to Christianity, and likewise postmodernism is unique only to bourgeois theology.

We know just how full of shit you are from statements like these:


You are definitely a postmodernist in the majority of your thinking. You're just a really crappy one because of your blind adherence to a singular, outdated ideology that you hold above all else. In your warped mind, only your own ideology is capable of being true, while you apply blind postmodernist skepticism to everything else. You have no framework of truth, you simply hold your own unsupported view above all else and claim that nothing else can truly be known.

Again, you are the worst kind of postmodernist, because rather than applying your blind skepticism evenly, like the nihilists, you adhere to a singular ideology which you spare from any kind of critical analysis while you reject the knowability of any other ideas. You claim that your version of Marxism is the only truly scientific social theory, and yet you don't even accept the scientific method that your theory is supposedly based on. Your entire thought process is egotistical garbage. Only a narcissist could think that it is possible to hold a monopoly on ideas without acknowledging any kind of actual framework to test them by.


What is FUCKING idiotic about this, is the fact that it is akin to accusing Darwin of relativism in demonstrating that Lamarckism is not true. The fact that I demonstrate that you are absolutely, fully and utterly full of shit has fuck all to do with any pretenses to postmodernism - and for all the criticisms of hypocrisy, why don't you ACTUALLY FUCKING EVALUATE THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRITICISMS I'VE LEVELED AT YOU AND YOUR SO-CALLED "SCIENCE" AND SEE IF THEY CAN ACTUALLY BE TURNED AGAINST MY UNWAVERING FAITH IN "MARXIST DOGMA"! SEE how hypocritical I am you worm - you accuse me of unwavering faith in Marxism, while retaining a double-standard when it comes to criticizing your filth, but what you don't understand is that ALL OF MY CRITICISMS are logical extensions of the omnipotent theoretical power of Marxism, and NOTHING more. I DEMAND you show otherwise - give me ONE fucking example that demonstrates otherwise - and if you can't, you better admit before everyone here how fucking full of shit you are.

You claim I have "no framework of truth", but this is solely YOUR confusion, not mine. I have regularly laid out a consistent epistemological, and theoretical basis for the scienticity of Marxism, I have regularly asserted the practical nature of truth above all else (And so much of a fucking "darwinist" you are - apparently the first hominids cared about such matters of "truth" for reasons divorced from the practical necessity of survival, as some kind of scholastic question). YOU are the one who has refused to thoroughly confront me, YOU are the one whose dismissed my tireless attempts to explain this to you with "Oh my god, ur so ridiculous omg go read a book" and other such cack. Don't FUCKING tell me I have no framework of truth when your framework literally amounts to nothing more than a few meaningless cheap buzzwords that are supposed to intimidate us. Let's prostrate before the idols of evolutionary psychology, because apparently it's "science" - this word has lost all meaning thanks to philistines like you, in the 21st century. It because of this scummy, shit-infested attitude that we have garbage like pop-science, garbage like "is science compatible with faith?" and so on. The fact of the matter is that Marxism has consistently subject to the same critical evaluation as anything else for as long as I've been on this fucking website, which is the FUCKING point - that the ideology of Communism sustains Marxism, that Marxism concerns the scientific evaluation of the social, and so on. All bourgeois ideologues who have attempted to cynically denounce Marxism's omnipotence by reducing it to the private usage of reason, from allegations of power-hungry megalomaniacs to some kind of Jewish conspiracy cannot stand on two feet from the point of critical scientific inquiry. Because Marxists openly recongize that we are proletarian ideologues, that our power derives from the emancipatory potential of the proletariat - just as you analytical philistines are of the bourgeoisie. We have not denied this. It is YOUR epistemology, which seeks to divorce truth from practice, which bemoans in confusion with stupid questions like "Why is the proletariat any more 'true' than the bourgeoisie in undestanding the world?" incapable of understanding that the proletariat has nothing to lose but its fucking chains, it is unbound from having to perpetuate a false conception of the social in approximation to real material conditions of existence.

You allege that I do not accept the "scientific method", but the only point of criticism I have leveled against you is that you were incapable for controlling for other fucking variables, which negated for the so-called explanatory power of your "experiments" and the only reason you were ignorant of such variables was because they were phenomena that was designated ideologically, as a given, but apparently we are led to believe that I'M THE ONE REJECTING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD? YOU FUCKING PHILISTINE? What OUTRAGES you is the fact that I reject the FORMAL APPEARANCE which is apparently supposed to DENOTE LEGITIMACY, it does not matter that this "scientific method" actually conforms to its own rules, it matters that it's a fucking piece of paper that's peer reviewed and all decked out with the royal seal of approval by capital - just like how the fucking scumfucker piece of shit behavioral geneticists assume that an "environment" is some kind of abstract background, passive domain that which men and women do not actually constitute socially, which is why they fetishize "culture" while at the same time being able to form absolutely no means of correlation between phenotypes "cross-culturally" (in the meaningful sense, i.e. a remote Amazonian tribe to an urban setting) and the exact same genes.

The fact of the matter is that by merit of being a "crappy postmodernist", BY MERIT OF THE QUALIFICATIONS FOR POSTMODERNISM YOU YOURSELF GAVE US, I cannot, by default - be a fucking postmodernist! This is the definition YOU linked, not me!



If most of the people on this site were at all concerned with actual critical thought or progress, the majority of them would see right through you in a second. But they prefer to read your reassuring dogma and keep their heads in the sand, telling themselves that their hero worship and blind adherence to the Marxist prophecy will actually get them somewhere.


Our progress is not yours, and I might laugh to death at the fucking idea that your criticisms constitute "critical thought" - are you fucking kidding me? READ your own fucking posts, does that look like critical thought to you? It's like saying that those who don't prostrate themselves before the Muslim call to prayer lack critical thought - in fact it is EXACTLY like that.

But nevermind all of that. You don't like the people on this site? You think that all of this is useless? THEN GET THE FUCK OUT. If I had a semblance of authority, something I will never strive for on this website, I would do everything in my power to AT THE LEAST restrict all evolutionary psychologist pieces of shit. It's worth fantasizing about a bloody cultural revolution to sweep the universities - Bio-Philistines a la lanterne!

[Rafiq]

But this is the argument that you never seem to actually make. And it is the assertion that presumably shields you from any analysis of the events that took place. You clearly believe that Marx was the sort of person who can be excused potentially awful statements, while the anarchists are not, but in the end any reasoning is replaced by calling the latter "bourgeois" and moving on as if an argument has been made.


It does not matter whether I would personally excuse Marx for his political incorrectness, this is certainly something that would not be acceptable by our standards. But the difference is that, if given a politically correct makeover, there is nothing in Marx or Engels which is inherently "awful", and I mean this. Even the harsh treatment of the "slavs" was owed to some sloppy, careless usage of terminology, Marx and Engels never spoke of Slavs being genetically inferior, but that the social formations that developed in Slavic countries was inherently backward and a hindrance to modernization. When Engels spoke of the "annihilation of backward peoples" who would not survive the revolution, he most certainly meant that as a people they would not survive, i.e. in the same way that the Celts or Gauls did not survive as a people but whose ancestors would go on to become part of newly formed nations. The point is that many traditions, and so on would disappear. This is not an unlikely assessment.

The reason Bakunin receives no slack is because - unlike Marx or Engels - Bakunin can go through with all the political correctness he wants, the statement would still be pathologically anti-semitic.


Why the focus shifted from that specific faction, who were conspirators in at least some sense, to "the Jews" more generally is the interesting question, but there are certainly multiple ways we might answer it, assuming we actually waded into the material and did not attempt to simply fall back on our own set of sectarian generalizations.

Proudhon's statement regarding the Jews pre-dated the schism by decades. And the problem with this argument is that Bakunin did not go short of claiming things that would have been interchangeable with the phrase "Marxist faction". He literally claimed that the Jews's prerogatives extended beyond 'political belief'. No, there was no conspiring among the Marxist faction, none the less with leading banks like the Rothschilds. It is even more ironic that Bakunin himself was expelled from the International solely because he attempted usurp it undemocratically, that he himself conspired against the unity between the black and red. It makes no sense that he would be expelled for any other reason, for the anarchist camp wouldn't have been tolerated for as long as they did if it was purely a matter of disagreement over opinion. It is clear that he attempted to cover his traps by alleging that his expulsion was part of a greater conspiracy, when in fact the only conspiracy of pertinence was that of his own: and it failed.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

What Draper book you referred to, 870?

"Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution". Sorry for responding late.

On that note...


I think that, in addition to criticizing socialists' inadequate and / or incorrect stances on homosexuality, it would be a nice balance to make more of an effort to point out those who were ahead of their time, those who helped to progress the left's stance on the issue.

Huey Newton gave a speech on the left and gay liberation in 1970, one year after Stonewall, and I think it was a significant part of the movement's history and relationship with the left, comparing it to the struggles of people of color. The speech also addresses the importance of women's struggle, as well as the importance of the direction, unity and co-operation of all these struggles against capital.

http://www.workers.org/2012/us/huey_p_newton_0524/

I'm not sure when Angela Davis (a lesbian) joined the Black Panthers, but if it predates the speech, she may have been an influence. She seems likely to have been an important part of the left's inclusion of homosexual struggle, but I don't know precisely.

I don't think we can talk about "the left" here. Newton and Davis were undoubtedly important for the Marxists-Leninists - except the doctrinaire Maoists and Hoxhaists, who openly called for the persecution of homosexuals until the late nineties - but there were other currents who came to terms with homosexuality much earlier, from a fairly rotten start with the left wing of the SP, the early CP and the SWP, none of them explicitly homophobic, but none of them particularly interested in fighting the state persecution of homosexuals either. The WWP, for example, had a pro-gay stance almost from the time it was formed as a split from the SWP, despite their generally "Brezhnevist" politics. The Spartacist League, particularly after the supporters of the Lutte Ouvriere (an organisation that still can't stand gay rights) left, was also pro-gay since the start, and one of its first major actions was a merger with the Red Flag Union, a gay socialist organisation. Draper's "left" Shachtmanist group, for all their bad politics, had a pretty spotless record on civil rights, civil rights for homosexuals included, and this applies to later developments and splits like the LRP and Love and Rage (arguably the SL is also a "later development and split"!).

[The Disillusionist]

Rafiq, provide one single grounded criticism of this slew of criticisms that you've supposedly created. Out of alllllllll your hot air, you haven't made one worthwhile point. You can't oppose me on any kind of scientific, data based level, so you simply claim that science is moot, thus trying to elevate your opinon based disagreements to the level of legitimate criticism, which they are not. Again, the issue with a post modernist is they don't recognize a general knowledge of any kind, thus excusing their ignorance. Also, Im not outraged, you attribute far too much emotion to me. I would say that you are outraged, but you seem to be permanently outraged, so it would be a meaningless statement. Also, science can be shaped by ideology...no one ever argued against that. But if phenomena exist, they must be explained, you can't just ignore all the scientific data that doesn't support your own ungrounded opinions.

Everyone reading this.... From what I've read of his posts, Rafiq has NEVER even once acknowledged a dissenting point as being legitimate, he has never changed his mind about anything, and he has never even once opened himself up to real discussion, he always very clearly has his mind made up before the discussion even starts, and he supports that decision with walls of obnoxious text, gaudy text-size changes, and bullying insults. What bothers me isn't that he's like this... there's one in every group... what bothers me is that you're eating out of his hands! He can't shovel this dogma fast enough for you all to absorb it. Use some critical thought... please, I beg of you.

Also, sewersocialist, what do you want from me? Are you mad that I didn't give you the attention you deserve? I didn't comment on your post because it seemed like it was on the right track. Agreeing with people isnt my style, its an unproductive waste of words. Unfortunately, I got sucked into another discussion with rafiq, which was also an unproductive waste of words.

[Sewer Socialist]

Well, insisting on the irrelevance of famous dead guys is a good way to make sure we discuss them; I guess I'm disappointed nearly no one at all (which does include you) has tried very much to point out the positive contributions of socialists to queer liberation, and this topic has been terribly derailed.

Anyway, I also have heard that many German socialists of the early twentieth century also held favorable views and positions, but does anyone have more specific information?

[The Disillusionist]

Well, insisting on the irrelevance of famous dead guys is a good way to make sure we discuss them; I guess I'm disappointed nearly no one at all (which does include you) has tried very much to point out the positive contributions of socialists to queer liberation, and this topic has been terribly derailed.

Anyway, I also have heard that many German socialists of the early twentieth century also held favorable views and positions, but does anyone have more specific information?

Alright, you're right, we should move the topic in a more productive direction, because the dead guys subject has definitely been done to death. As I said, I thought you were on the right track. Honestly, I don't know that much about socialism and queer liberation together. I'm guessing not many other people do either, which is probably why it got neglected.

I do know that queer liberation is a part of the anarchist agenda, at least for most anarchists, not because it is inherently a focus for most, but because anarchists universally seek the liberation of everyone through the abolition of government. It's hard to oppress someone without power. Pro-government leftists are more likely to expect their fantasy government to support their own ideologies, whether those ideologies be pro or anti homosexual.

[Rafiq]

Also, science can be shaped by ideology...no one ever argued against that. But if phenomena exist, they must be explained, you can't just ignore all the scientific data that doesn't support your own ungrounded opinions.

Did you even read my fucking post? I did not say that science is shaped by ideology, I have been arguing the OPPOSITE. Ideology occupies a place where science can NEVER permeate, hence, variables will be dismissed as a given that should be controlled for, because they are designated BY IDEOLOGY. This has been the whole fucking POINT of my epistemology, and it is not even mine - it was laid down decades ago by Louis Althusser. My point was NEVER that one shouldn't try to explain phenomena, but that one can't go about prattling of "postmodernism" and other such cack when they realize that other explanations are more comprehensive, more consistent, and more powerful insofar as they can account for other considerations that would otherwise not be. That has been my whole fucking point. THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC DATA WHICH "DOES NOT SUPPORT MY OPINION" BECAUSE DATA IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT THE CONCLUSIONS PEOPLE DRAW FROM IT. FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS. IF DATA DOES NOT SUFFICIENTLY SUPPORT THE CONCLUSIONS, THEN THE SO-CALLED "SCIENTIFIC DATA" IS MEANINGLESS IN PERTINENCE TO THE HYPOTHESIS. I can say that "If god is real, then there will be a higher frequency of mosquitoes outside" and no matter if the data I collect supports the reality that indeed, there are more mosquitoes outside - IT DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CONCLUSION THAT A GOD IS REAL. Again, you don't even know what SCIENCE is, it's a cheap buzzword you use in order to command blind prostration, it's no different from a fucking papal scepter. Scum like you discourage critical thinking precisely by trying to subsitutte it with - your words - "general knowledge".

This is only abusing words though. Do you know how fucking hilarious it is for you to attack a Marxist on the grounds that they do not ascribe to any form of general knowledge? Did you even read my fucking post?: You allege that I do not accept the "scientific method", but the only point of criticism I have leveled against you is that you were incapable for controlling for other fucking variables, which negated for the so-called explanatory power of your "experiments" and the only reason you were ignorant of such variables was because they were phenomena that was designated ideologically, as a given, but apparently we are led to believe that I'M THE ONE REJECTING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD? YOU FUCKING PHILISTINE? What OUTRAGES you is the fact that I reject the FORMAL APPEARANCE which is apparently supposed to DENOTE LEGITIMACY, it does not matter that this "scientific method" actually conforms to its own rules, it matters that it's a fucking piece of paper that's peer reviewed and all decked out with the royal seal of approval by capital



Everyone reading this.... From what I've read of his posts, Rafiq has NEVER even once acknowledged a dissenting point as being legitimate, he has never changed his mind about anything, and he has never even once opened himself up to real discussion, he always very clearly has his mind made up before the discussion even starts,

That's fucking cute. Are you actually trying to make the point htat - somehow - it is a point of significance that I have never once conceded anything to you, that I "always start a discussion having made up my mind"? Well to this, I am 100% guilty. I've been on this fucking website for five years. I do not engage in discussions to learn, I engage in discussions SO THAT OTHERS CAN LEARN. Why the fuck would I change my mind? There has been no discussion we've had that would warrant this, as I've sufficiently explained. Surely there are more theoretically sophisticated, more adept and ideologically austere individuals than I which I could learn much from, but it is your arrogance which assumes that you are among them.

Even then, this whole DICHOTOMY of "changing my mind" is something YOU care about, not me. I could give fuck all about this - CONSEQUENTIALLY from a discussion with you I will not "change my mind", but that does not mean this is the foundation substance of my arguments. And even if they were, that would mean nothing - because your arrogant philistinism is what prompts you to convert everything I'm saying into meaningless denial: "NO you're wrong". I put a lot of care, and consideration into my posts no matter who I'm talking to, because frankly these arguments concern things that are beyond you and I as individuals. The fact that YOU'RE too much of a FUCKING COWARD to address these is not my problem, so you're in no position to go around whining about how I'm not being fair when you can't even fucking properly engage in a discussion.

[Rafiq]

Even if one is SOLELY critical of "general knowledge" that still constitutes CONSIDERATION of "general knowledge", but from a critical basis. What you fail to understand is that it does not matter if I reject any form of "general knowledge", it doesn't matter if I'm a robot and not a human. Everything that I am saying is conceivable within the domain of our collective space of reason. You have failed to properly address it.

[The Disillusionist]

My point was NEVER that one shouldn't try to explain phenomena, but that one can't go about prattling of "postmodernism" and other such cack when they realize that other explanations are more comprehensive, more consistent, and more powerful insofar as they can account for other considerations that would otherwise not be. That has been my whole fucking point. THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC DATA WHICH "DOES NOT SUPPORT MY OPINION" BECAUSE DATA IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT THE CONCLUSIONS PEOPLE DRAW FROM IT. FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS. IF DATA DOES NOT SUFFICIENTLY SUPPORT THE CONCLUSIONS, THEN THE SO-CALLED "SCIENTIFIC DATA" IS MEANINGLESS IN PERTINENCE TO THE HYPOTHESIS. I can say that "If god is real, then there will be a higher frequency of mosquitoes outside" and no matter if the data I collect supports the reality that indeed, there are more mosquitoes outside - IT DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CONCLUSION THAT A GOD IS REAL. Again, you don't even know what SCIENCE is, it's a cheap buzzword you use in order to command blind prostration, it's no different from a fucking papal scepter. Scum like you discourage critical thinking precisely by trying to subsitutte it with - your words - "general knowledge".


Orrrrr.... you could just learn how to properly use the scientific method to distinguish these things. Look up words like induction, and deduction. Learn what a theory is. You claim to be oh-so-scientific now, and yet your rejection of 95% of the scientific data I posted was entirely arbitrary. No one is claiming that mosquitos prove the existence of god, you are trying to prove that no mosquitos in one square inch of space proves that mosquitos don't exist, because it must not be an entirely supportable conclusion.

As I've said, time and time again, I have the mountains of data, I have the strongly-supported conclusions, you simply have arbitrary criticisms that aren't backed up by anything. If you want to participate in this whole science thing, you need data, you need reasoning. Blind faith that evidence must not support the conclusion because Marx said otherwise 100 years ago does not count. It's all about probabilities. Sure, there's a probability that any scientific theory is wrong. There's a probability that the sun isn't real, and it's an alien ship growing life on earth like a petri dish, but you're on the wrong side of the probability spectrum, and odds are highly weighed against you. You just refuse to see that because of your blind adherence to outdated, unscientific ideologies. Marx was not scientific, he was speculative. He had no real data to support his assertion that the family would be abolished, he just speculated anyway. Materialism, divorced from Marx, can be scientific, but even then, it is not capable of explaining things that other theories, developed since Marx, are capable of explaining. For example, I keep mentioning Human Behavioral Ecology, and you've supposedly refuted that in all your infinite wisdom by claiming that humans have moved beyond ecology, because Marx said so. You have no basis for that claim, it's not scientific. In fact, mountains of scientific data contradict that. Again, you're only a "scientist" when it suits you. Any other time, you're just a crappy post-modernist.




That's fucking cute. Are you actually trying to make the point htat - somehow - it is a point of significance that I have never once conceded anything to you, that I "always start a discussion having made up my mind"? Well to this, I am 100% guilty. I've been on this fucking website for five years. I do not engage in discussions to learn, I engage in discussions SO THAT OTHERS CAN LEARN. Why the fuck would I change my mind? There has been no discussion we've had that would warrant this, as I've sufficiently explained. Surely there are more theoretically sophisticated, more adept and ideologically austere individuals than I which I could learn much from, but it is your arrogance which assumes that you are among them.

Even then, this whole DICHOTOMY of "changing my mind" is something YOU care about, not me. I could give fuck all about this - CONSEQUENTIALLY from a discussion with you I will not "change my mind", but that does not mean this is the foundation substance of my arguments. And even if they were, that would mean nothing - because your arrogant philistinism is what prompts you to convert everything I'm saying into meaningless denial: "NO you're wrong". I put a lot of care, and consideration into my posts no matter who I'm talking to, because frankly these arguments concern things that are beyond you and I as individuals. The fact that YOU'RE too much of a FUCKING COWARD to address these is not my problem, so you're in no position to go around whining about how I'm not being fair when you can't even fucking properly engage in a discussion.

You said absolutely nothing of any real meaning here. This is two paragraphs of absolutely wasted language.

Oh, and this quote....



I do not engage in discussions to learn, I engage in discussions SO THAT OTHERS CAN LEARN.


...demonstrates my previous post perfectly. Thank you. Thank you for displaying your profound arrogance for all to see.

[Guardia Rossa]

...demonstrates my previous post perfectly. Thank you. Thank you for displaying your profound arrogance for all to see.

I have to agree with Rafiq. He IS more studied than me and a lot of other marxists. His views ARE more consistent then yours and he does arguments, not only provokes and claims knowing a lot of shit by "scientific method" (Wich, if we followed it blindly, would disqualify a LOT of our modern science.)

[Rafiq]

Orrrrr.... you could just learn how to properly use the scientific method to distinguish these things. Look up words like induction, and deduction. Learn what a theory is. You claim to be oh-so-scientific now, and yet your rejection of 95% of the scientific data I posted was entirely arbitrary. No one is claiming that mosquitos prove the existence of god, you are trying to prove that no mosquitos in one square inch of space proves that mosquitos don't exist, because it must not be an entirely supportable conclusion.

As I've said, time and time again, I have the mountains of data, I have the strongly-supported conclusions, you simply have arbitrary criticisms that aren't backed up by anything. If you want to participate in this whole science thing, you need data, you need reasoning. Blind faith that evidence must not support the conclusion because Marx said otherwise 100 years ago does not count. It's all about probabilities. Sure, there's a probability that any scientific theory is wrong. There's a probability that the sun isn't real, and it's an alien ship growing life on earth like a petri dish, but you're on the wrong side of the probability spectrum, and odds are highly weighed against you. You just refuse to see that because of your blind adherence to outdated, unscientific ideologies. Marx was not scientific, he was speculative. He had no real data to support his assertion that the family would be abolished, he just speculated anyway. Materialism, divorced from Marx, can be scientific, but even then, it is not capable of explaining things that other theories, developed since Marx, are capable of explaining. For example, I keep mentioning Human Behavioral Ecology, and you've supposedly refuted that in all your infinite wisdom by claiming that humans have moved beyond ecology, because Marx said so. You have no basis for that claim, it's not scientific. In fact, mountains of scientific data contradict that. Again, you're only a "scientist" when it suits you. Any other time, you're just a crappy post-modernist.


What you don't understand is that this rests upon a philistine notion of science that is entirely continent upon an ideologically sustained epistemology. This epistemology, which places primacy upon "blind data" HAS A PLETHORA OF BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS THAT ARE SIMPLY ASSUMED - NOT EVEN SUBJECT TO "SPECULATION" BUT DEEMED AS A FUCKING GIVEN". This has been the entirety of the basis of our rejection of your fucking "data", as i've said countless, countless fucking times. NO science is not an aesthetic, no the aesthetic presence of "data" does not make or break something as 'scientific' because above all, science ONLY EXISTS vis-a-vis ideology, against it, as a means of designating something as consistently and systemically knowable. None of the data you've offered COMES CLOSE to supporting ANY of the conclusions you've given us, and this is why no matter where this fucking discussion goes, you're going to keep returning, and dismissing the substance of my rebuttals on the basis of your arrogant FAITH in your UNSUPPORTED and INFERIOR epistemology. The fact of the matter is that you do not have a monopoly as to what constitutes science, and that's simply ALL THERE IS TO IT. Certain claims warrant certain empirical evidence, certain claims warrant "data", but to critically attack the idea that humans have an "ecology" does not require data because THERE WOULD BE NO FUCKING WAY TO PRODUCE NUMBERS. In reality, you don't understand that the scientific qualifications for "proof" and for "data" are already well-grounded and implicit in critical theory, you are incapable of understanding this because in your mind, data is AESTHETIC, it amounts to NUMBERS and nothing more. You're a fucking philistine precisely for this reason: And we can see your utterly hilarious weakness in even attempting to ground "why" I have the audacity to disagree with you, which is why we get stupid fucking platitudes like "You only do this because you're forced to agree with Marx". But the fact of the matter is that Marx DID NOT just "speculate" about things, in fact, everything Marx claimed that warranted empirical evidence was substantiated, because in case you didn't fucking know - Marx was incredibly careful about his claims, he gave what he published extensive consideration. That is why, low and behold, you fucking dolt, Marx changed throughout the entirety of his years as a thinker. The ASSERTION that the abolition of the family would follow Communism is not "speculation", because the data required to make such a claim, by the qualifications of the empiricist philistine, would be numbers and data. Believe it or fucking not, the background of those assumptions which support converting those numbers into conceivable ideas rests upon playing with "speculations", if not ideological designations which are not even known to be epistemologically significant. But nevermind that. The forces which sustain the idea that the family, or war, or class is inevitable ARE NOT ROOTED IN SCIENCE or any "empirical data" but in IDEOLOGY. That is why people talk about "Marx predicted humans would act in X way in Communism" but the reality is that Marx never made such idiotic predictions - because such a dichotomy is already just as "scientific" as a theological one. WHY WOULD war continue to exist? WHY WOULD the family continue to exist? Is their existence owed to some kind of magical, metaphysical force? No evidence supports the notion that it has a physiological basis. So where do you have to run to now? What SUSTAINS such ideas is fundamentally rooted in pre-conceived notions, and assumptions, that are outside the domain of critical thought and scientific inquiry, much like the idea of a god. If they were subject to the qualifications of scientific inquiry, they would no longer exist. The linguistic demand to offer "evidence" that the family would be abolished is therefore ridiculous, because it is knowingly an impossible, hysterical demand to retain the legitimacy and trans-historic character of the family that is rooted in ruling ideology. The arrogance displayed here is that if something is conceived in terms of "probability", then the linguistic designation of something as TRUE or NOT true is ALREADY implicit in the language which prattles of it! But probability can NEVER be an infinitely provisional reality, probability concerns something which is assumed to be known in the future.

There is absolutely no probability that an "alien ship" is growing life on earth, or that the sun does not exist, because to reject these things must have a definite grounding - or in other words, to conceive this "probability" requires an inclination to. We can critically evaluate the language which hypothesizes about "alien ships" that exist over Earth, or the in-existence of the sun, but none of these are probable AT ALL, not even to a minor degree, because there is nothing implicit in our linguistic conception of the Earth, or the cosmos, which would make us an iota inclined to think this unless we're trying to make a stupid fucking point. The fact of the matter is that this claim warrants specific empirical evidence to support it, just as the claim that the "family" is physiologically inevitable does. But if we're dealing purely with probabilities, then you don't have a monopoly as to what constitutes "evidence" because as it happens, it is not true that you have evidence to support this conclusion, instead you claim it is more "probable". But what sustains this probability isn't the hollow evidence but the ideological power behind the family! An alternative explanation for the basis of the family, which rests upon no metaphysical presumptions like "it's always existed", is not equivalent as far as an alternative explanation for the color of the sky being an alien smoke screen, because there requires a theoretical presumption to support any of these notions. So we're not dealing "just" with "probabilities" or what can be consistently possible theoretically, but what explanation HAS to be true in approximation to our standards of reason. All that sustains your shit notion of the family is a vulgarization of Darwinism and false theoretical presumptions which have no basis in scientific inquiry - i.e. "Come on guys, we're animals, this HAS to be true". The answer to an alien ship colonizing the Earth would be - in thought, it could be consistency true, if it fits the qualifications correctly, but we have no scientific reason to think it is true. This isn't the same as probability, which concerns scientific prediction, because it is a question of "what COULD" be true. That does not mean it is probable, it means that it is "theoretically" possible. Theologians can talk about how it is "theoretically possible" for a god to exist, but that does not make the existence of a god even slightly "probable". You need to control for variables for something to be "probable". Probability requires a solid basis of causality.

Finally, my point that "humans are ecologically unbound" not only isn't contradicted by any data, it is COMMON FUCKING SENSE. I asked you to produce the trans-historic, eternally existing human ecology which has not changed, and yet you didn't answer this in a previous thread. That is because humans DON'T have a static fucking ecology, they CREATE their own "ecological conditions". The reason you dabble in abstractions pathetically is because you don't understand that a means of survival and life CONSTITUTE AN ECOLOGY, and these things CHANGE for humans. We only call something ecological in pertinence to animals because, low and behold, these things do not change - the food source, the behaviors and practices, the paradigms in behavior do not change in animals and all of these have a practical effect in pertinence to the survival and continual reproduction fo the animal. But what you're doing is fundamentally divorcing, ignoring, and ideologically designating human social reality, precisely our means of life and survival, from behavior. The logic you're employing is a VULGARIZATION of Darwinism - it is basically that all the behaviors we exhibit, today and prior to today, are merely quantitative extensions, within complex intricacies of interaction, of behaviors that were adapted for in our Savannah ancestors. You "concede" that there is variance in how such behavior is expressed, "cross-culturally" but none the less as an abstraction, it is all an extension of a fundamentally innate ecological behavior. But the behaviors exhibited by our Savannah ancestors had a practical purpose in pertinence to their way of life and survival - which - as everyone concedes, has NOT remained static. We are no longer hunter-gatherers. So you're ignoring the behaviors that are practically necessitated by each according mode of production and means of survival throughout history, you're divorcing these things, which fundamentally shape what it means to be a fucking human in the first place, from their practical effects. It is this theoretical error that breathes life into your "data", and if this theoretical PRESUMPTION, that humans are animals - that humans have a set, definite and innate ecology, then all the so-called "data" which is nothing more than fanciful masturbation loses any meaning whatsoever and falls apart, and you know that very well - which is why you love to avoid such hard discussions in the first place! Hence, you draw conclusions like how "capitalism uses behavior that was adapted for by primates like reciprocal altruism" as though capitalism is some kind of background which "uses" our biology, rather than a definite mode of production compromised solely of humans and their relations to production. I then attack you by claiming that, in fact, all that tautologically demonstrates is that capitalism is not incompatible with us physiologically, because we're the ones who fucking constituted its existence, and you ignored this.

[Collective Reasons]

Proudhon's statement regarding the Jews pre-dated the schism by decades.

Well, it predated the schism between Marx and Bakunin, but closely followed the schism between Marx and Proudhon. Given your denial of Marx's well-documented conspiratorial behavior in the International, this is obviously not going to go anywhere as a conversation, but we might as well at least get this sort of error corrected.

[Rafiq]

It does not stand that Proudhon was regarding Marx in the statement, and he further more expressed outrage at those Jews who would not assimilate. This hardly has any pertinence to Marx, whose family had assimilated long before.

[The Disillusionist]

I have to agree with Rafiq. He IS more studied than me and a lot of other marxists. His views ARE more consistent then yours and he does arguments, not only provokes and claims knowing a lot of shit by "scientific method" (Wich, if we followed it blindly, would disqualify a LOT of our modern science.)

The core basis of the scientific method is simply observation, testing, and verification. Relying on that as a basis of knowing is not "blindly following" anything, it is simply making sure something is backed by reality before blindly believing it. Modern science would not be science without an epistemology that seeks to verify phenomena before considering them as truth.

Also, I don't care if Rafiq has read every book in the Library of Congress, he's wrong, and he's misleading people.

[The Disillusionist]

Jesus Christ, this gives me a headache. I can't read this, it's unreadable. Seriously, use one well-written sentence and you won't have to write 12 rambling ones. But I'll try to sift through it.



What you don't understand is that this rests upon a philistine notion of science that is entirely continent upon an ideologically sustained epistemology. This epistemology, which places primacy upon "blind data" HAS A PLETHORA OF BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS THAT ARE SIMPLY ASSUMED - NOT EVEN SUBJECT TO "SPECULATION" BUT DEEMED AS A FUCKING GIVEN". This has been the entirety of the basis of our rejection of your fucking "data", as i've said countless, countless fucking times.


All epistemology is ideologically sustained at some point. You have to believe in your way of knowing. Marxism isn't free from this either. I could always be a nihilist and choose to believe that nothing is believable. Philosophically, that is also a valid perspective, but it isn't productive. If this is your way of claiming that the scientific method is inherently capitalist again, that's just stupid. Humans have used the scientific method in some form or another to learn things since the dawn of human existence. Science is self-correcting... people might try to introduce capitalist ideology, or any other ideology, into it, but those ideologies cannot stand up to scientific scrutiny. Science is concerned as much as possible with the way things really are, not the way people think things should be. By presenting scientific data that the family has a basis in human biology and psychology, I am not making the ideological argument that family should exist... for the billionth time, that would be invoking the naturalistic fallacy... I am simply saying that the scientific data supports the theory that family will not likely be abolished, there is a low probability of that happening. Specific evidence to support this includes the existence of maternal and paternal bonding hormones that stimulate parental care of a child, development of psychological and hormonal attachments during childhood, and the development of psychological and hormonal attachments in romantic relationships. These scientific phenomena have been shown to manifest themselves in cultural structures such as marriage, which is present in some form in every recorded culture. That is the underlying cause, which I've explained several times. The relationship between these data and the conclusions is very well connected.

Then you come along with your oh-so-sophisticated argument, "Hurr-durr, Marx said something else, so your science must be wrong. Marx's unsubstantiated claims couldn't possibly be false."



NO science is not an aesthetic, no the aesthetic presence of "data" does not make or break something as 'scientific' because above all, science ONLY EXISTS vis-a-vis ideology, against it, as a means of designating something as consistently and systemically knowable.

Data is the means by which science verifies itself. Data is the gate between ideology and scientific theory. Unverified science is just speculation....pseudo-science. I don't actually think we're disagreeing to a major extent here.... Data is the measure by which paradigms are evaluated and compared. And data is not just numbers, it is any kind of observable and measurable phenomena.



None of the data you've offered COMES CLOSE to supporting ANY of the conclusions you've given us, and this is why no matter where this fucking discussion goes, you're going to keep returning, and dismissing the substance of my rebuttals on the basis of your arrogant FAITH in your UNSUPPORTED and INFERIOR epistemology.


I've given a LOT of data that supports my conclusions very well. You are doing the same thing you accuse me of in response to my initial conclusions... dismissing them on the basis of your arrogant faith in your unsupported and inferior epistemology. If you want to dismiss my conclusions, the burden of proof is on you. I have supported my conclusions, you can't just say I haven't, you have to show that I haven't, which you haven't done. I'll demonstrate once I get to the part of your post about ecology.



The fact of the matter is that you do not have a monopoly as to what constitutes science, and that's simply ALL THERE IS TO IT.


I don't have a monopoly... no one does... that's why the scientific method was developed, to prevent anyone from creating that monopoly in the first place.



Certain claims warrant certain empirical evidence, certain claims warrant "data", but to critically attack the idea that humans have an "ecology" does not require data because THERE WOULD BE NO FUCKING WAY TO PRODUCE NUMBERS.


Again, data does not have to just be numbers. The relationship between humans and the environment is very well studied and thoroughly supported by the information that has been collected. I really don't understand how you could possibly argue that humans don't have an ecology... you don't think that global warming is going to change human society? You don't think that human society is built around the surrounding ecology? You don't think that ecology played a part in our evolution? I can't even comprehend how anyone could ignore that, the evidence is overwhelming. For example, big cities tend to be built near water sources. Humans adapt their material strategies based on their ecology... the Incan tribes built a thriving, complex society using little more technology than potato-digging sticks because their ecology was particularly favorable to large populations. African tribes, on the other hand, have been forced to develop very complex technology and subsistence strategies just to survive in nomadic bands, because the ecology is very unfavorable to large populations.

Again, the evidence that humans have an ecology, and are shaped by it, is just so overwhelming, it's absurd to try to argue against it.



In reality, you don't understand that the scientific qualifications for "proof" and for "data" are already well-grounded and implicit in critical theory, you are incapable of understanding this because in your mind, data is AESTHETIC, it amounts to NUMBERS and nothing more.


So if we just think hard enough and critically enough, we don't have to worry about grounding our ideas in measurable reality? That sounds very convenient.



You're a fucking philistine precisely for this reason: And we can see your utterly hilarious weakness in even attempting to ground "why" I have the audacity to disagree with you, which is why we get stupid fucking platitudes like "You only do this because you're forced to agree with Marx". But the fact of the matter is that Marx DID NOT just "speculate" about things, in fact, everything Marx claimed that warranted empirical evidence was substantiated, because in case you didn't fucking know - Marx was incredibly careful about his claims, he gave what he published extensive consideration. That is why, low and behold, you fucking dolt, Marx changed throughout the entirety of his years as a thinker. The ASSERTION that the abolition of the family would follow Communism is not "speculation", because the data required to make such a claim, by the qualifications of the empiricist philistine, would be numbers and data. Believe it or fucking not, the background of those assumptions which support converting those numbers into conceivable ideas rests upon playing with "speculations", if not ideological designations which are not even known to be epistemologically significant.


So because Marx put careful consideration into his theories and changed his mind over time, that must make him permanently right? His claims don't need to be supported by data? Marx's claims about the abolition of family are not supported by data, at least not data that would be considered legitimate in the context of modern scientific knowledge. The reasoning by which Marx figured that the family would be abolished was incorrect... he didn't understand the context fully.



But nevermind that. The forces which sustain the idea that the family, or war, or class is inevitable ARE NOT ROOTED IN SCIENCE or any "empirical data" but in IDEOLOGY. That is why people talk about "Marx predicted humans would act in X way in Communism" but the reality is that Marx never made such idiotic predictions - because such a dichotomy is already just as "scientific" as a theological one. WHY WOULD war continue to exist? WHY WOULD the family continue to exist? Is their existence owed to some kind of magical, metaphysical force? No evidence supports the notion that it has a physiological basis. So where do you have to run to now?


The forces which sustain the idea of family are indeed rooted in science. There are scientific and behavioral reasons why war and class exist as well, often being linked to competition for resources or labor in a resource-limited ecological environment, and these reasons are very well supported by the evidence. But again, that does NOT MEAN that war and class should exist, it simply means that we understand to some degree WHY they exist (on a scientific level, not just on a Marxist speculative/ideological level). Thus we understand war and class better today than Marx did in his time, and we are better able to formulate a response to it (at least, we would be, if leftists weren't stuck in the 1800's...). The scientific data that we have on war and class suggest that unless significant ecological AND material changes are made, human psychology will probably render the abolition of war and class a very difficult and improbable task. I suspect that the only reason you don't know about any of this modern scientific evidence is because you have confined yourself to reading only material from the historical past.

Also, even if there was no scientific basis for family, are you seriously arguing that the absence of evidence is justification for Marxist speculation? Marx had no real data to support his own theory that the family is a capitalist phenomena, he simply used what he saw to support his own ideology, the very thing that you accuse modern scientists of doing.



What SUSTAINS such ideas is fundamentally rooted in pre-conceived notions, and assumptions, that are outside the domain of critical thought and scientific inquiry, much like the idea of a god. If they were subject to the qualifications of scientific inquiry, they would no longer exist. The linguistic demand to offer "evidence" that the family would be abolished is therefore ridiculous, because it is knowingly an impossible, hysterical demand to retain the legitimacy and trans-historic character of the family that is rooted in ruling ideology. The arrogance displayed here is that if something is conceived in terms of "probability", then the linguistic designation of something as TRUE or NOT true is ALREADY implicit in the language which prattles of it! But probability can NEVER be an infinitely provisional reality, probability concerns something which is assumed to be known in the future.


It's not possible to just make assumptions based on the idea that "IF" an idea was subject to the qualifications of scientific inquiry, it would no longer exist. That is an unsubstantiated opinion. You have no real evidence of "the legitimacy and trans-historic character of the family that is rooted in ruling ideology." That's essentially just an opinion, which, again, does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Scientific research does suggest that the political nature of a society does affect the nature of families within it, as does the ecology of a society, but there is no data to suggest that family will ever be completely abolished. That's speculation, and the evidence suggests that it is very unlikely. I can't say with complete certainty that the family will never be abolished. I'm not dividing my language into assumptions of "true" vs. "untrue", but I can say that the probability of family being abolished is very low. Therefore, the rational decision is to bank on the much more likely outcome. Betting on the least probable outcome is a matter of faith, not of science.




There is absolutely no probability that an "alien ship" is growing life on earth, or that the sun does not exist, because to reject these things must have a definite grounding - or in other words, to conceive this "probability" requires an inclination to. We can critically evaluate the language which hypothesizes about "alien ships" that exist over Earth, or the in-existence of the sun, but none of these are probable AT ALL, not even to a minor degree, because there is nothing implicit in our linguistic conception of the Earth, or the cosmos, which would make us an iota inclined to think this unless we're trying to make a stupid fucking point.


This is funny, because your argument here almost exactly applies to your belief in the abolition of the family. So I have to almost play the other side here. The probability of the sun being an alien ship, based on our scientific knowledge about the sun, is very, very unlikely. But it is not absolutely zero. Without direct, measurable, testable observation, it cannot be proven that the sun is or is not an alien ship. It doesn't matter if humans have an inclination to conceive this probability. Human inclination has nothing to do with how the world really is. Basing our science around "inclination" is just leaving us subject to ideology, which was your own criticism of science in the first place. Maybe the reason you think science is crap is just because you're a crappy scientist?




The fact of the matter is that this claim warrants specific empirical evidence to support it, just as the claim that the "family" is physiologically inevitable does. But if we're dealing purely with probabilities, then you don't have a monopoly as to what constitutes "evidence" because as it happens, it is not true that you have evidence to support this conclusion, instead you claim it is more "probable". But what sustains this probability isn't the hollow evidence but the ideological power behind the family! An alternative explanation for the basis of the family, which rests upon no metaphysical presumptions like "it's always existed", is not equivalent as far as an alternative explanation for the color of the sky being an alien smoke screen, because there requires a theoretical presumption to support any of these notions. So we're not dealing "just" with "probabilities" or what can be consistently possible theoretically, but what explanation HAS to be true in approximation to our standards of reason.


Again, you have no real evidence for the ideological power behind the family, that's untestable speculation. The scientific explanation that I've already given for the existence of the family is far more than equivalent, it is superior. That being said, I didn't say that the existence of the family is physiologically inevitable, only that it is highly probable to continue in the future. I'm not the one trying to make everything black and white. No explanation HAS to be true, the world doesn't work that way. Trying to force everything to be completely true or untrue is just subjecting ourselves to human bias. Rationality always has to take doubt into consideration.




All that sustains your shit notion of the family is a vulgarization of Darwinism and false theoretical presumptions which have no basis in scientific inquiry - i.e. "Come on guys, we're animals, this HAS to be true". The answer to an alien ship colonizing the Earth would be - in thought, it could be consistency true, if it fits the qualifications correctly, but we have no scientific reason to think it is true. This isn't the same as probability, which concerns scientific prediction, because it is a question of "what COULD" be true. That does not mean it is probable, it means that it is "theoretically" possible. Theologians can talk about how it is "theoretically possible" for a god to exist, but that does not make the existence of a god even slightly "probable". You need to control for variables for something to be "probable". Probability requires a solid basis of causality.


Humans are animals... I don't think an argument can possibly be made to refute that on any scientific level. Science concerns itself with what is observable and measurable, not with speculation. The alien ship example... it isn't observable, therefore there is no possible scientific conclusion to be reached there... the best a rational scientist can do is approach the matter with skepticism and avoid reaching any conclusions until data can be gathered. If something could theoretically be true, then there is always a degree of probability associated with it. That probability just isn't worth worrying about.

Now, to relate all this back to the family... your own argument could very easily be used against your own claim that the family will be abolished. "Marxists can talk about how it is "theoretically possible" for the abolition of the family to occur, but that does not make such a phenomena even slightly "probable"."

However, things aren't that simple. As you've said, unlike alien ships, the existence of family is observable, and understandable. Therefore, a basis of causality can be developed. Your ideological basis does not have any real explanatory power aside from that reliant on faith. The scientific basis on the other hand, has considerable more explanatory power. As a result, the balance is shifted. It is still not possible to entirely refute the abolition of the family in the future, because that is not observable, but it is possible to evaluate the probability of that occurring based on a model of probability developed from our current scientific understanding. The conclusion is that the probability of the unsupported faith based conclusion overriding the scientific basis of causality is very small.



Finally, my point that "humans are ecologically unbound" not only isn't contradicted by any data, it is COMMON FUCKING SENSE.


Common sense is not a scientific argument. Humans are not ecologically unbound, as I've already demonstrated clearly.



I asked you to produce the trans-historic, eternally existing human ecology which has not changed, and yet you didn't answer this in a previous thread.



This is not how ecology works. Human ecology HAS changed, as has the ecology of every other animal. Humans exist in a feedback system with our ecologies... Our ecologies change, which cause us to change, but as we change, we also change our ecologies. This is not unique to humans... beavers change their ecologies by building dams... That does not mean that humans have completed liberated ourselves from ecology, we are still very much bound by it, though we have the power to change it somewhat as well.



That is because humans DON'T have a static fucking ecology, they CREATE their own "ecological conditions".


As I just explained, this is a very crude view of ecology. Ecology constantly changes, and humans do cause some of those changes. That doesn't mean that humans are not still subject to that ecology.



The reason you dabble in abstractions pathetically is because you don't understand that a means of survival and life CONSTITUTE AN ECOLOGY, and these things CHANGE for humans. We only call something ecological in pertinence to animals because, low and behold, these things do not change - the food source, the behaviors and practices, the paradigms in behavior do not change in animals and all of these have a practical effect in pertinence to the survival and continual reproduction fo the animal. But what you're doing is fundamentally divorcing, ignoring, and ideologically designating human social reality, precisely our means of life and survival, from behavior.


As I've already mentioned, these things do change for humans, just like they change for every other animal. That doesn't mean that humans are not still subject to them. Also, animals do change their behaviors in response to the environment, and on another level, change in the environment also causes long-term biological evolution. I'm not divorcing human social reality from behavior, I'm connecting them on a greater level, while broadening the perspective to include the environment.



The logic you're employing is a VULGARIZATION of Darwinism -it is basically that all the behaviors we exhibit, today and prior to today, are merely quantitative extensions, within complex intricacies of interaction, of behaviors that were adapted for in our Savannah ancestors. You "concede" that there is variance in how such behavior is expressed, "cross-culturally" but none the less as an abstraction, it is all an extension of a fundamentally innate ecological behavior.


This is a rather crude view of human psychology. To some extent this is correct, our behaviors are shaped by our evolutionary past. But they are not dictated by it. Modern human social reality also plays a strong part in our behavior, and to continue the circle, modern human social reality is influenced by our behavior and our evolutionary history. It's all interconnected, I'm not saying that one controls the others.



But the behaviors exhibited by our Savannah ancestors had a practical purpose in pertinence to their way of life and survival - which - as everyone concedes, has NOT remained static. We are no longer hunter-gatherers. So you're ignoring the behaviors that are practically necessitated by each according mode of production and means of survival throughout history, you're divorcing these things, which fundamentally shape what it means to be a fucking human in the first place, from their practical effects.


No I'm not divorcing these things. It was changing human ecology itself that prompted us to evolve larger brains and more complex problem solving, to better survive by addressing the problems associated with that changing ecology. We used those larger brains to better adapt our own societies and behaviors to our changing ecologies. Those adaptations, among them our various modes of production, then change our societies from within as well.

Humans are SO complex! This is what I keep trying to tell people when I say that Marxism is outdated. It lacks so much perspective! Your viewpoint is way too narrow, I'm not trying to replace one cause with another, I'm trying to broaden the perspective to include the whole picture.




It is this theoretical error that breathes life into your "data", and if this theoretical PRESUMPTION, that humans are animals - that humans have a set, definite and innate ecology, then all the so-called "data" which is nothing more than fanciful masturbation loses any meaning whatsoever and falls apart, and you know that very well - which is why you love to avoid such hard discussions in the first place!


Again, humans are animals. This conclusion is overwhelmingly supported by science. To reject that conclusion goes so far outside the realm of science that it has to be some kind of religion. But again, your view of ecology is way too limited, the relationship between humans and their ecologies is way more complex than that. I'm not trying to avoid hard discussions, it's just really, really hard to explain this stuff to narrow-minded Marxists.



Hence, you draw conclusions like how "capitalism uses behavior that was adapted for by primates like reciprocal altruism" as though capitalism is some kind of background which "uses" our biology, rather than a definite mode of production compromised solely of humans and their relations to production.

I never attributed any kind of consciousness to capitalism, you misunderstood my argument. Capitalism as a phenomena was able to develop AMONG humans, partially as a result of our pre-existing behavior and psychology. Again, I am not invoking the naturalistic fallacy, I am not saying that capitalism SHOULD exist, I'm just explaining one aspect of WHY it exists today.



I then attack you by claiming that, in fact, all that tautologically demonstrates is that capitalism is not incompatible with us physiologically, because we're the ones who fucking constituted its existence, and you ignored this.

Um.... yeah, actually, that is the exact argument I was making. I was explaining capitalism on a physiological and psychological level in the human context. If we explain it on a level beyond just that of Marxist ideology, we can better understand it, and thus we are more equipped to change it.

That was a LOT of work. I'm leaving my computer for the day now. I have stuff to do.

[The Feral Underclass]

It does not matter if it was a single letter - to possess the ability to claim that there's some big Jewish conspiracy is contingent upon a plethora of other positions - it is not something which you can "marginally" ascribe to, it reveals the ideological character of the author himself. The only way one could dismiss this is if one could demonstrate that Bakunin was joking, or temporarily went insane... Such an idea becomes almost impossible when you're confronted with the reality that, whom bakunin referred to as "our master", Prodhoun, was deeply anti-Semitic.

Explain to us all how Bakunin's critique of state and of hierarchy, his advocation of revolutionary discipline, minority organisation and his view on spontaneity, as well as his firm belief in Marx's analysis of capitalism and materialism is deeply rooted in this anti-Semitism. Please be specific.

[MethodMania]

Again, you are the worst kind of postmodernist, because rather than applying your blind skepticism evenly, like the nihilists, you adhere to a singular ideology which you spare from any kind of critical analysis while you reject the knowability of any other ideas. You claim that your version of Marxism is the only truly scientific social theory, and yet you don't even accept the scientific method that your theory is supposedly based on. Your entire thought process is egotistical garbage. Only a narcissist could think that it is possible to hold a monopoly on ideas without acknowledging any kind of actual framework to test them by.

and yet here you are, prattling on again about 'the' scientific method :rolleyes:

read some feyerabend

p.s. this isn't to defend rafiq. i don't read rafiq because his posts look like this. but you're still ridiculous, too

[Rafiq]

All epistemology is ideologically sustained at some point. You have to believe in your way of knowing. Marxism isn't free from this either. I could always be a nihilist and choose to believe that nothing is believable.

But no one has claimed this, in fact, I have consistently stressed that the scientific discourse that pertains to Marxism is ideologically sustained by the ideas of Communism. The difference is that Marxism opens up a space of knowledge that would previously not be subject to critical, scientific evaluation, and that domain is the domain of the social - hence the point of historical materialism. Biology, chemistry - are fundamentally materialist, but there is no need to prattle of "chemical materialism" or "biological materialism", because these are domains that - previously were reserved for religion or mysticism, have been opened up to the continent of scientific knowledge. History, the process of historical change, and the domain of the social has not - and the reason for this is purely owed to the fact that while capitalism might constantly revolutionize the means of production, instigate new was wherein capital's hunger is fulfilled, the social relations to production which sustain capitalism remain unaltered. My point has been that the designation by Communist ideology DOES NOT pertain to the social, because this is a domain that is converted into scientific knowledge - hence, more variables that were thought as a "given", are now converted into things which are critically up for evaluation, things which are knowable. That's the fucking point. You're still conceiving this epistemological criticism in terms of ideology "infecting" science, or science being used for "ideological" purposes but again, this still rests upon a false epistemological presumption that somehow, truth is reserved for the neutral and passive observer whose domain of experience, reality, is obstructed by UNDENIABLE facts, like the sun in the sky, and so on. But scientific questions that are a point of political controversy, which five hundred years ago would have been astronomical questions, are not so simple - they require vigorous ideological foundations that allow one to think outside of predominant, ideological structures. Does this FUCKING make sense to you? The ability to question the church was not some kind of natural instinct - people weren't born with this ability. The church was the only truth that they could ever know before the bourgeoisie, which challenged the social basis of the church and allowed for the ideological space that would allow one to think outside of it to open up.


Specific evidence to support this includes the existence of maternal and paternal bonding hormones that stimulate parental care of a child, development of psychological and hormonal attachments during childhood, and the development of psychological and hormonal attachments in romantic relationships. These scientific phenomena have been shown to manifest themselves in cultural structures such as marriage, which is present in some form in every recorded culture. That is the underlying cause, which I've explained several times. The relationship between these data and the conclusions is very well connected.


For the last fucking time, the fact that chemicals and hormones are INVOLVED with phenomena does not make the phenomena reducible to them. There are chemicals and hormones which are involved in watching a fucking movie - that does not mean that movies are encoded into our fucking DNA. Does this make sense to you? We've been over this thousands and thousands of fucking times. To repeat myself:

Even, if we play the devil's advocate, even if it is true that humans are "hormonally" predisposed to pair bonding, this enough does not sustain the structural mechanism of marriage! In present society, most people are capable of having multiple partners and "pair bonding" with multiple people. Communists do not argue that humans will somehow automatically have group-relationships, but that marriage has no biological basis and that only Communism is capable of destroying the foundations which sustain it. Marriage exists to control women's reproductive capacities, in order to reproduce the condition of life. A society that is socially self-conscious does not have to do this, and in addition, with modern day contraceptive methods the entire material basis for marriage in Communism will disappear.

If something is of political significance, it cannot be attributed to "biological mechanisms". Even so, humans do not have
"natural" mating practices. I mean, if anything all you reveal is a lack of imagination. Are you fucking kidding me? We go from the production of oxytocin to the institution of marriage? Oxytocin is not responsible for "committed" inter-sexual relations, it is involved in the facilitation of intimacy. Any idiot with a semblance of experience in matters of love know that intimacy alone cannot sustain not only marriage, but any relationship. The fact that you can't even imagine a world where intimacy between people can exist, but marriage would not, reveals the innate ignorance of the evolutionary psychologist. You simply doesn't understand the variation such biological mechanisms are capable of, you are completely limited by present standards of sexuality. In addition, 95% of marriages at the very least throughout history most likely didn't have a basis of direct intimacy in their inception but were pre-meditated by families. Oxytocin production, if you will, came afterwards as wives learned to adjust to their sexual slavery.

And yet, with all of this in mind, you claim "Marx was probably wrong in this regard". Because of course, during Marx's time, people just didn't know that oxytocin production was real. This philistine, ladies and gentlemen, would have us believe that if Marx and Engels were aware that there was a compound in the brain that was involved in the facilitation of intimacy and its usage in pair bonding, their entire conception of the family would have fallen to pieces. This perfectly encapsulates the sheer arrogance and naivety of those who attempt to challenge Marx in a way that only takes advantage of the fact that he know longer lives to respond, i.e. something that Marx could have been WELL AWARE OF and would have changed nothing.

I mean, even in animals, you're telling me they're monogamous? Let me ask you a very basic question: If marriage 'probably will not disappear' (which is not interchangeable with committed relationships) because we are biologically predisposed to it, why then were societies for thousands of years able to sustain a system of polygamy, i.e. men possessing multiple wives? The question is rather simple: If humans are naturally predisposed to fuck each other solely in pairs, how was this possible? Then comes the hypocrisy: They'll say - "Well men have more sex cells, so it was a biological mechanism all along". They will justify and legitimize any institution which embodies the sexual domination of the female sex, even if it violates their immediate conception of "natural" marriage. So explain away, Dillusionist. Tell us all how humans are "biologically" predisposed to marriage. "It's existed in every human culture". Let's assume this is true (And it's NOT for the last time! There are recorded cultures that simply did not have marriage) - this does not mean it has a biological basis. The fallacy is rather pathetic because hunter-gatherer societies were not the 'natural state' of man, there is no 'natural' state of man wherein he is reducible to an animal. If marriage existed in those societies, it was because it was materially necessiated. Societies that live in a precarious existence, which cannot produce enough food to feed more than small groups, could be posited to have to regulate reproduction in some way. Again, there is no feasible evidence to suggest marriage in any form existed in hunter-gatherer societies.


But to address this in a more pertinent manner, though the "family" has always existed (and let's take a minute to actually think about this - why wouldn't it have existed in pre-civilzied societies? One would have to actually, intentionally go out of their way to dump their fucking kids in the wilderness to prevent some kind of 'family' formation - these were societies that engaged in communal rearing, the idea that they constituted a "family" is beyond fucking stupid), never has the family remained the same trans-historically. If the family continually changes, so much so that it is completely transform wherein all that remains is the abstraction called "the family", what element physiologically is responsible for the structural variance experienced on a historic level? In addition, the family unit is not reducible to "cultural" difference across history, because again, culture in the sense that you employ it is solely a cosmetic, an aesthetic category wherein the same behaviors are mediated but in ways that constituted different appearances. This might be true for historically identical societies - capitalist societies across "cultures" but it is not true for societies in different historic epochs. As I've already mentioned, we cannot be physiologically predisposed to marriage because the various forms marriage has taken throughout history have changed. You mention chemicals involved with "pair bonding" but this is hardly enough to sustain the institution of marraige, for fuck's sake. Those same chemicals are used during one night stands, and yet how many of those end in marriage?

For the last fucking time, the metaphysical and superstitious nature to the argument is that it assumes that just because the institution of marriage - something irreducible to any biological organism on an individual level, might involve certain chemicals, or that just because the nuclear family and raising children individually might stimulate certain chemicals, does not mean that marriage or the nuclear family are somehow an "expression" of some kind of innate biological imperative to raise kids. This makes no sense, because the IMPERATIVE cannot be divorced from the EXPRESSION without constituting an abstraction, an abstraction whose definite grounding is inconceivable on a scientific level. Does that FUCKING make sense to you? The fact that the gun was constructed with conforming to the hands in mind, does not mean that the gun is an "expression" of the innateness of our hands, our hands do not "manifest" in guns, because guns aren't the only means by which we can use our hands. It would be just as worthwhile for you to make the claim that the existence of the Penis and the Vagina, or the ability to procreate demonstrates that "marriage" is inevitable, because these things are heavily involved in marriage, and in predominant sexual relations. It is beyond fucking idiotic to claim this though, because we know very well there are infinitely many other ways one can have children (i.e. outside a marriage) and that there are infinitely many ways one can use their penis, or vagina respectively. The idea that social structures somehow "manifest" this or that "innate" phenomena is METAPHYSICAL, it is not a scientific claim, it is a METAPHYSICAL one, because it assumes that a concept - an abstraction - somehow uses material forms in order so that it can be expressed, when the OPPOSITE is true. You cannot conceive the object of pertinence, in this case marriage, without evaluating the means by which it is expressed, because there is no dissonance between them. So in fact, the relationship between the data and the conclusions drawn from it are only solidly grounded if one does not take these considerations into account, and for a bourgeois ideologue - these would NEVER be taken into account because the ideological framework that would ALLOW you to critically question such practices is not present. Hence Communism allows one to THINK BEYOND that which is systemically necessitated. I mean, do you understand your STUPID fucking logic? The Aztecs did not perform human sacrifices because they were "empirically misguided", or they weren't at the right stage on the linear train of scientific progress, they did so because it correctly approximated their relationships to production and their conditions of life. For an Aztec to question this, they would have to be able to think OUTSIDE of the Aztec ruling ideology, which without a contending opposing class, would have been an impossibility.



Then you come along with your oh-so-sophisticated argument, "Hurr-durr, Marx said something else, so your science must be wrong. Marx's unsubstantiated claims couldn't possibly be false."


Again, to reiterate: If someone were to violently defend Darwin against a slew of fucking nonsense and garbage, the fact that their arguments are testament to Darwin's correctness has nothing to do with whether those arguments are made with the point of reference in blindly defending him or not. In fact, even if they were, that would do nothing to negate the reality that Darwin's conception of natural history was correct. You're a fucking idiot because, as it happens, you can't even follow YOUR OWN empiricist qualifications for "substantiation" because you fail to control for other variables. You there are stuck in terms of dealing with "probabilities" which again, I have already fucking decimated as a conclusion. The only conclusion you're left with is one of agnosticism - that we cna never possibly know because we can't produce numbers in pertinence to it that would properly control for the correct variables.


And data is not just numbers, it is any kind of observable and measurable phenomena.

So claim the vulgar empiricists, who fail to take into account the reality that language itself is an ends which is "observable", that making a definite claim is itself something which is "observable" and within the scope of conception. What constitutes measurability and observability is therefore limited in the eyes of the empiricist solely to what OBSTRUCTS their field of vision, irreversibly. This is why evolutionary psychology, even by merit of Popperian standards, is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. So no, science is not reducible to the presence of "data", it is the ability to make something systemically knowable - and before you hark on about how "theology" and new age cack might constitute systemic knowability, it most certainly does not, because it rests upon a variety of - otherwise knowable - unknown assumptions to substantiate it. Empirical data only regards, and only pertains to claims which warrant them, definite empirical claims. But if you're abiding by a paradigm, like evolutionary psychology, then there is no "data" which is going to support your theoretical framework - instead, abiding by the presuppositions you have, you're going to make sense of the data within that paradigm. This itself is not the problem, because the same goes for Darwin's theory of evolution - it required the pre-supposition of unfalsifiable theoretical presumptions which was solidified through the building of empirical data which conformed to it. The difference is that evolutionary psychologists have by in part failed to defend their theoretical framework in a scientific manner, which is why, unsurprisingly, the bulk of 21st century pseudo-science exclusivity concerns domains that regard the social, that regard consciousness. Whether that amounts to evolutionary psychology, or the pseudo-scientific misinterpretations of quantum physics that regard the relationship between "objective reality" and consciousness - these are all things which fundamentally pertain to the SOCIAL. That is the reason the ONLY scientific conception of the social, the only scientific conception of history, is historical materialism.


[...] your arrogant faith in your unsupported and inferior epistemology. If you want to dismiss my conclusions, the burden of proof is on you. I have supported my conclusions, you can't just say I haven't, you have to show that I haven't, which you haven't done. I'll demonstrate once I get to the part of your post about ecology.


The Marxist epistemology I have offered is anything but "unsupported", in fact, I have gone at extensive lengths to demonstrate the basis of its support - you haven't even been able to confront it, address it, or properly respond to it. The burden of proof is most certainly NOT upon me any more than the burden of proof was upon the atheist who rejected the idea of a god, because even though at one point it might have been fashionable to think there was a god, the burden of proof does not regard the predominance or popularity of an idea, but its scienticity, how much unknown designations it relies on that would otherwise be conceivable scientifically but are not by merit of ideology. Why don't you take a fucking step back at my responses - does this constitute "dismissing" your ideas blindly? NO! I have THOROUGHLY demonstrated how they are erroneous and what have you responded with? "Oh my god, you're not even normal, that's not how you're supposed to respond" and so on and so on. You haven't attacked the SUBSTANCE of my rebuttals, which is why it's so OUTRAGEOUS to see you fucking repeat the same thing over and over again. It's not because I despise those who disagree, it's because you haven't even REGARDED by rebuttals, they are not even implicit in your post - you're like a broken fucking record. Meanwhile, in every one of my encounters with you, and in every response I've given you, I've THOROUGHLY addressed your fucking claims for what they were. I don't even need to have any affirmative conclusions of my own (though I do) in order to attack yours, because ultimately what I've pointed out is that even by your standards, you have not PROPERLY supported your conclusions, because you cannot control for other variables. I don't even need to offer an alternative explanation, the POSSIBILITY that there can be one is all that is necessary. Which in fact means that - from the same data you provide, i can draw ANY other conclusion I want and offer that data as in fact confirming whatever random conclusion I want, rather than yours. That's the point of so-called "falsifiability". Again, your epistemological standards, not mine. I have in fact countlessly stressed that you're in no position to hide behind data, because this is a theoretical controversy, not one of "data", none of the "evidence" has been rejected, the conclusions drawn from it have been. I have thoroughly demonstrated why those conclusion were drawn, and how the unscientific presumptions which sustain them are invalid, and what you have you done in turn? You just claim that "You're just saying that because you think Max HAS to be true". But again, that's lazy thinking - that's not a fucking explanation, it is a personal attack that you couldn't draw just from looking at my posts. The reason that we Marxists might "appear" like we think Marx is infallible is because Marx did not publish works which he thought were not 100% correct. Engels did not share this trait, which is why there are some flimsy mathematical, and metaphysical errors in some of his works (trivial errors, none the less). The errors that Marx might have made - perhaps in his Mathematical manuscripts, were not "official" errors because he was not confident in them enough to publish them.


I don't have a monopoly...

You misunderstand the basic point: It is not that you personally have a monopoly, indeed no one cares for you personally. It is that YOU empiricist philistines, you of the analytical school do not have a monopoly as to what constitutes science. Do you understand? So your notion of "science" is not based on solid foundations. Hence, when you regularly criticize me on the basis of "rejecting science", you're abusing words. When you criticize me for a lack of scientific vigor, you're not actually laying out definite, systemic qualifications for what constitute science, you're expressing the power of the state-apparatus of science: I.e. "Science does not agree with you!" rather than saying "This is not a scientific claim, because... X" and so on. You attribute science almost personal characteristics because it embodies a thing-beyond-itself, as a word, embodied in it is a legitimate means by which truth is conceived in proportion to the ideological state apparatus. Has it ever occurred to you that not only do you "reject" the idea that the family can disappear because you find it "unscientific" but because you actually have an aversion to the notion, ideologically? Is it not wild, grotesque and bizarre to you, the idea? Because there is power behind the family, and the idea of it, which is irreducible to "science". You are frustrated insofar as you cannot express this power in a way that would express scienticity, so instead you retort to a bunch of Freudian slips about how such an idea is "ridiculous", about how it "manifests in every culture" (So abstractions can "manifest" in things like this?).


Again, data does not have to just be numbers. The relationship between humans and the environment is very well studied and thoroughly supported by the information that has been collected. I really don't understand how you could possibly argue that humans don't have an ecology... you don't think that global warming is going to change human society? You don't think that human society is built around the surrounding ecology? You don't think that ecology played a part in our evolution?


You misunderstand the point. I did not claim that humans have nothing to do with ecologies, but that humans are not biologically predisposed to any one ecology. This is not a point of controversy apparently, because as I've repeatedly fucking asked you - you cannot ground this "trans-historic" ecology even into a consistent abstraction. Evolutionary psychologists, in one way or another, make the presumption that because humans are animals, and do not have souls, that we must have adapted for an ecology hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that hunter-gatherer society constituted a definite "ecology". This stems from the error in thinking that hunter-gatherer societies were the natural state of man, when in fact there was nothing spontaneous at all about them - they were all sustained ritualistically, with intricate social coordination and regular, constant mobility in such a way that would make the idea of a pre-defined "ecology" ridiculous. Animals that engage in mass migrations do so in a way ONLY that follows a definite pattern, and it only changes insofar as their biological constitution changes. What is being ignored and dismissed is the reality that social change is not fostered by some kind of magical externality - that our "environments" are actually shaped by men and women themselves, and that historic changes constitute definite reciprocal changes in 'human nature' out of the necessity to practically conform to them. The claim that "humans have no ecology" simply means that we are not biologically predisposed to one, that our relationship to survival regularly changes, in a way that is only scientifically predictable through what was later called historical materialism. That means no behaviors were "selected for" ecologically. This background process called "history" is outside the domain of scientific inquiry by ALL non-Marxist sociologists, anthropolists and the irk. The grand majority of them will specialize in studying only one epoch, or one peculiarity - the whole process of historic change remains a complete enigma to them.

Global warming has ecological implications, certainly in ways that might affect human society, but this "ecology" amounts to what, Disillusionist? Breathing air, adequate temperature, a constant fresh water source, and so on? These ecological factors are not enough to warrant the specifialities of adaptive traits that pertain to human behavior. Well, let me be clear: When people refer to an "ecology" they tend to refer to the peculiarity of an animal's relationship between its survival, and its environment. The whole fucking Earth cannot in any meaningful sense constitute an 'ecology', because so long as we can suit our basic, axiomatic physiological means - something no doubt may be susceptible to change with the introduction of bio-engineering (not to mention the prospect of space-colonization), which do not amount to much besides everything that we need to keep our bodies ticking, water, air, and nutrition - and even emotional means - our environment does not matter. Contrast that with the Gorilla, who could not in any meaningful sense properly develop beyond his specific ecological environment... Humans might RELY on ecological processes, no doubt - but we do not have an ecology. It's plain and fucking simple. If we did, we would already be dead by merit of driving much of the vital hunting game to extinction by destroying most of their land for industrial-agrarian purposes as well as confining ourselves to concrete environments which make the peculiarities of mobility to work much easier. As it happens, walking on a smooth surface is much easier for mobility - does that mean desiring it was "selected for"? Was concrete, in fact, intristic in us all along? And this leads us to our conclusion regarding this "ecology" business - ecology may have played a part in the evolution of man, but not insofar as it constituted man "adapting" for certain behaviors, for this would be unsuitable for the bare subsistence, highly mobile band societies humans found themselves in. Instead, precisely the opposite - the absence of ecologically-based ecological predispositions was more likely to have been selected for, and we can see this today in the reality of neuroplasticity and the reality of human history. The necessity for humans to be physiologically malleable by merit of their relationships to nature, their ability to transform it with labor, was selected for and the evidence for this shows the dramatic physiological changes in the brain structure that occurred from the transition between ape and man. One might be inclined to go as far as to say that the reason other hominids may have died out is precisely because they lacked the physiological flexibility that humans did, but we do not know this for sure .

The argument can only retreat to the idea that implicit in our DNA was the inevitability of modern industrial society and that all of human history was merely the drive to reach our "true" ecology. But this makes no fucking sense, never-mind being a completely anti-scientific assertion.



For example, big cities tend to be built near water sources. Humans adapt their material strategies based on their ecology... the Incan tribes built a thriving, complex society using little more technology than potato-digging sticks because their ecology was particularly favorable to large populations. African tribes, on the other hand, have been forced to develop very complex technology and subsistence strategies just to survive in nomadic bands, because the ecology is very unfavorable to large populations.


That isn't going to cut it much either, because the notion that environmental changes constituted the basis of historical changes has long been discredited by historians, and anthropologists alike. The basis of Incan civilization was not the reality that their "ecology" was favorable to them because as it happens, there have been plenty of large, and successful African Empires throughout the whole continent, and while the Incan Empire reigned there were equally many subsistence based hunter-gatherers who also existed in virtually the SAME environments. Environmental changes, for example, more temperate areas might be able to instigate historical changes in a faster manner, because they allow room for social development in a way that is unbound by the harsh precariousness of the icy cold or the blazing south, and yet - the era we are living in, and have been living in, is that of the Germanic, i.e. civilization was brought to peoples of both of these harsh precarious environments because social developments which occurred elsewhere were able to instigate them into a wider social totality, which didn't make them simply a dependent colonized people but gave them a history of their own (I.e. The Romans, who invaded Northern and Western Europe, could not have known that it is precisely northern and western Europe that would go on to inherit the world). What changed about the environment in Germania, in Britonny, that supported such large populations? Don't tell me "technology", because that doesn't explain why it developed. If humans adapted their "material strategies based on their ecology", why has human history confined itself to only 5% of our existence as a species, i.e. are you suggesting that patterns in the Earth's temperature, for example, account for a causal basis for how humans "adapt their material strategies"? I asked you for this trans-historical ecology, you told me the Earth. Are we to now believe that human history coincides with "natural" changes in the Earth itself? Surely some have tried to argue this, and all have failed miserably thus far. But you already lose the argument because you recognize that both the Incans and "Africans" (my fucking god, really? Is there some homogeneity between Africans now?) had different "ecologies". Well then, were Incas and Africans both respectively a different species all together? You claimed that "race has long been discredited by darwinists" in a previous thread. Care to protract this? Do these ecological differences reflect in the biologically based behavior of both Africans and descendants of Incas respectively? "Racialists" have tried to argue this, no doubt.

Ladies and gentlemen, Disillusionist wants us to actually believe that the civilizations that developed in South America were owed to the static, natural "ecology" of South America. Never-mind the intricacies of social development. That's what he actually wants us to think.



So if we just think hard enough and critically enough, we don't have to worry about grounding our ideas in measurable reality? That sounds very convenient.


If ideas warrant measurements, then of course that is true. But what constitutes a measurement cannot be grounded in numbers alone, as I already said: The process of truth is rooted in PRACTICE, truth itself is nothing more than a practical question, it is not some static enigma. And you miss hte opint. The point was not that empirical facts do not matter. the point is that they do not matter TO YOU for what they are - they matter as an AESTHETIC that signifies legitimacy. Only the philistine believes truth is reducible to numbers, because he ideologically DESIGNATES that which would otherwise be knowable not in the form of numbers - a critical understanding of the world around him, as a result of his SOCIAL BEING, i.e. and the ideological ramifications this entails. Again, the Aztecs did not sacrifice humans because they were "empirically limited" in their knowledge, they did it because it was an exaltation of their social relations to production, and to question this practice as effective would therefore also have social implications that are implicit in Aztec society. My point is that there are fundemental theoretical points of controversy which you are DODGING, while hiding behind numbers of which WITHOUT those theoretical presumptions (of course, which are not up to debate to you because they are ideologically grounded) would mean nothing. The point is not that empirical facts do not matter, but that the framework from which they are properly conceived cannot itself be subject, or reducible to numbers because it concerns SOCIAL considerations. You understand? Working with numbers requires AXIOMATIC PRESUMPTIONS about what they entail. The basis of having those can either be grounded scientifically, or ideologically. Because truth is a practical question, it only becomes contrastable when it is converted into the domain of the knowable - which is exactly what I'm doing now.


So because Marx put careful consideration into his theories and changed his mind over time, that must make him permanently right? His claims don't need to be supported by data? Marx's claims about the abolition of family are not supported by data, at least not data that would be considered legitimate in the context of modern scientific knowledge. The reasoning by which Marx figured that the family would be abolished was incorrect... he didn't understand the context fully.


No, I'm merely explaining why Marx himself was able to remain rigorous, consistent and correct in his theoretical foundations and, therefore, the conclsuiosn he drew from them. This alone does not demonstrate Marx's viability, in fact.... YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO FUCKING MENTIONED MARX, IF I FRAMED THE ARGUMENT IN TERMS OF "Marx said this, so it is true" YOUR ARGUMENT MIGHT HAVE SOME BASIS IN REALITY, BUT THIS WASN'T MY FUCKING ARGUMENT. YOU JUMPED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT I WAS ARGUING BY SOME EXTERNAL AUTHORITY BECAUSE YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF GROUNDING WHERE I DERIVE THE AUDACITY TO "QUESTION" YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT, WHICH YOU ASSUME TO BE SOME KIND OF BLIND FAITH IN MARX - A STUPID, INCONSISTENT AND LAZY EXPLANATION! You keep repeating the same fucking arguments over and over again, without actually addressing my rebuttals - the fact of the matter is that the claim doesn't WARRANT FUCKING NUMBERS BECAUSE IT COULDN'T WARRANT NUMBERS, DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND? YOU ARE WELL AWARE OF THAT. That's why your qualifications for PROOF could only ever amount to Communist society coming into fruition, but what you fail understand is that the basis of Marx's understanding of the family is rooted in an ANALYSIS OF THE CHANGES in the family structure in approximation to different historic epochs, something that was studied vigorously by both Marx AND Engels, and in evaluating these changes its causal basis is wrought out - so I demand, I ask you again - what DATA are you fucking looking for? The reason this process warrants a correct understanding of the basis of the family is becasue, wherein each according epoch is analyzed in terms of its own individual means of perpetuation and function, each causal basis of the family is understood in terms of class formations. For example, if the family was rooted in anything but class formations, then the feudal family, and the vestigial family relations of it in Catholic countries in the 19th century would have remained more or less identical to the nuclear family. If the family was an extension of "behavioral ecology", i.e. biology, then the family would change in approximation to precisely that. Instead, the family changes in approximation to man's relationship to production, of which the regulation of reproductive capacities is approximated towards. In the Origins of the Family, Engels sources ALL of his empirically necessitated claims in "data", that doesn't mean the data speaks for itself - only if you have your fucking head up your ass so far that you can't question anything does data actually speak for itself. You claim that it would not be "legitimate in the context of modern scientific knowledge" but that is an argument BY AUTHORITY, because this "modern scientific knowledge" is not simply the "neutral" and linear evolution of science, it is the specific ideological, and political monopoly on the philosophy of science held by empiricists and anglo-philistines - if you're going to draw that in, you're going to have to vigorously defend it, which you have so far absolutely and utterly failed at doing.


The forces which sustain the idea of family are indeed rooted in science. There are scientific and behavioral reasons why war and class exist as well, often being linked to competition for resources or labor in a resource-limited ecological environment, and these reasons are very well supported by the evidence. But again, that does NOT MEAN that war and class should exist, it simply means that we understand to some degree WHY they exist.

First, let's start with your hypocritical "moral" conclusions. I HAVE ALREADY FUCKING ADDRESSED THIS COUNTLESS TIMES BEFORE. But let me re-quote myself:

It has nothing to do with any moral pretense about what ought to be, or what not ought to be. That is your own error. We Marxist,s on the contrary, recognize that obscufating the origins of a problem itself reproduce the problem. Richard Lynn and the authors of IQ and Wealth of Nations are absolutely opposed to third world poverty - they oppose its existence. But by grounding its basis in genetically based IQ differences, the solution they come up with is for "Western nations to give those countries more aid" or the implementation of a eugenics program in those countries. Can you not see how these "solutions" exemplify existing relationships of power between the impoverished brown people and international capital?, i.e. the white man's burden, and so on?


It has nothing to do with what OUTWARDLY moral pretenses you declare for yourself, for in trying to demonstrating the casualty you isolate PRECISELY what it is about war that you oppose - evidently, you ARE morally justifying war- you simply politely choose to excuse other sides of the phenomena as something morally disdainful. But any sane person will oppose war in principle - the biggest war mongerers will hark on about their love of peace in the same manner that the drivers of blacks used to hark on about liberty. The reality is that as abstractions, as general ideological rules, no one wants to "justify" war, but in providing a causal basis of it in such a way that does not actually challenge its foundations, you legitimize it and reduce it to a timeless inevitability of "human instinct" or other such cack. But never-mind such worthless moral questions - indeed I do not care one bit about what you think about war, or the existence of class. There are indeed scientific explanations for the basis of war and class, but you have failed to provide any - STUPID fucking abstractions like "competition for resources or labor in a resource-limited ecological environment" is FUCKING idiotic because the OPPOSITE has been shown to be a general phenomena, that is, classes and war developed at a time precisely when RESOURCES WERE NO LONGER "ECOLOGICALLY LIMITED". That is why bare-subsistence hunter-gatherer societies, IN CONTRAST to so-called "complex hunter-gatherer societies" which are either mutated enigmas or transitional stages to agriculture, were EGALITARIAN and not predisposed to war. That alone discredits the idea, but to go further, the reality is that an explanation for phenomena that arose during a time when fundamentally SOCIAL processes entered into the thresher into development in terms of "ecology" makes NO FUCKING SENSE WHATSOEVER, considering, as you will admit later on, that ecology CHANGES - that humans actually SHAPE their ecological being (in such a way that negates it all together) on a SOCIAL level. It's absolutely fucking hilarious, absolutely pathetic almost to the point where it's not even worth addressing to attempt to conceive such complex matters as war and class in terms of fucking zoology.

For fuck's sake, is this the culmination of civilization? Fucking INSANITY is what it is. I demand you bring forth the "evidence" which supports this conclusion though - HOW does this sufficiently explain the basis of war and class you fucking philistine piece of shit? What's hilarious is that it is PRECISELY speculation that has led various authors, writers and "anthropologists" to come to this conclusion, but NONE OF IT IS SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE SUFFICIENTLY. It's so fucking ironic that you talk about speculation, when that is EXACTLY speculation - namely, observing phenomena that does actually exist, but providing a causal explanation for it because it "might" make sense in terms of the framework of Darwinism. That sums up the entirety of evolutionary psychology. But tell me again about how the proletariat, the petite bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie were wrought out into existence because of "competition over scarce resources in an ecological environment", for fuck's sake, did the environment magically change to conform to capitalism, independently of social processes or something? Do you know how FUCKING STUPID you sound? The proletariat were NEVER in competition with the bourgeoisie, in fact the onset of capitalist relations had FUCK ALL to do with competition. The proletariat, rather than being the "losers" of some kind of competitive war for resources with the bourgeoisie, largely derived from the then freed serf population, and in the case of England and most countries, the displaced land-owning peasant population. Competition over resources is hardly a "natural" phenomena between states, because it serves a practical, self-sufficiently social purpose (you don't need a biological imperative towards it!). The haughty, bourgeois character of this philistine is not even up for debate when he prattles of "competition for labor" as though the laboring masses are just as passive to the whims of the "active organisms", the bourgeoisie, and their biological imperatives. What is fucking idioitc is that the bourgeoisie are all brothers in contempt, it is THEY who compete amongst each other, and yet they remain identical as members of the same class. Frankly your reductionism is VOMIT inducing, I can't even believe someone can produce such fucking CACK.



Thus we understand war and class better today than Marx did in his time, and we are better able to formulate a response to it (at least, we would be, if leftists weren't stuck in the 1800's...). The scientific data that we have on war and class suggest that unless significant ecological AND material changes are made, human psychology will probably render the abolition of war and class a very difficult and improbable task. I suspect that the only reason you don't know about any of this modern scientific evidence is because you have confined yourself to reading only material from the historical past.


GIVE ME THE DATA THAT SUFFICIENTLY DEMONSTRATES WAR HAS ITS BASIS IN "ECOLOGICAL PROCESSES" THAT WASN'T AVAILABLE IN THE 1800's - nay, the 1700's! You make the mistake of assuming that the fact that war is physiologically compatible with humans biologically, that the latter contains in it ENOUGH for the former, but this is akin to saying that you're biologically predisposed to have a fucking computer, because it involves your eyes and your hands! So what "evidence" is there? You want to FUCKING tell me that WW1 was waged for some kind of biological reason? Are you FUCKING stupid? The fact of the matter is that it is not DATA which led men to come to such conclusion, it was the ideological necessity of LEGITIMIZING something as ALIEN and grotesque to the lived experiences of the working people as WAR. You deal SOLELY in fucking abstractions - do you even HEAR yourself and how fucking STUPID you sound? All of the things you're talking about CONCERN INDIVIDUAL, BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS. Put your fucking metaphysics side and think for a second: Are the immediate spoils of war, somehow, the basis of motivation for the individual soldier pulling the trigger, or dropping the fucking bombs? If so, why are the conditioned fundamentally in a way that IGNORES what "material" benefits the individual soldier might reap from war IN PERTINENCE TO THE RESOURCES WHICH ARE BEING WON. Even for the nomadic Muslim or Mongol barbarians who could have been promised the spoils of war, or the peasant soldiers who were promised land of their own in the near east - in the case of the former, ONLY the ruling merchant barons and castes had anything to gain from the act of war itself, which is what separated the soldiers from petty bandits merely looking for loot - the expansion of trade routes, to expand a safer environment for the caravans free from banditry, or other empires. Again, these STRUCTURAL considerations are so large, so profound and complex, that it would be laughable to reduce them to individual biological imperatives of organisms. But again, the reason this is itself a worthless ABSTRACTION is because the notion of war itself is more or less an abstraction if it is conceived for reasons that require a causal basis. There are different causal reasons for war in each according epoch, NONE OF WHICH find a least commoner denominator suitable enough to produce a causal basis for war itself on a trans-historic level. For example, the possibility of conflicts among subsistence based hunter-gatherer bands (which there is no archaeological evidence for) vying for "resources" (i.e. big game) draws no equivalency between the conflicts between various imperialist powers during the second world war, regardless of whatever kinds of abstractions you'd like to draw, because again, there are self-sufficiently causal explanations for the conflicts that are explicable SOLELY in terms of the conditions of each according epoch, there does not hae to be a metaphysical, trans-historical "high probability of conflict" because these things are explicable by their own merits.


Also, even if there was no scientific basis for family, are you seriously arguing that the absence of evidence is justification for Marxist speculation?

Precisely what is speculation are your "ecological" explanations for the existence of the family, having some kind of biological or physiological basis. THIS is speculation because you have not empirically ISOLATED that basis. If you fail to provide EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE for some kind of extra-social structure that is responsible for the arrival of the family, you actually have to ISOLATE IT physically. Meanwhile, the empirical existence of our social reality, and of the family in approximation to it, ALREADY EXISTS. Marx makes no extra-empirical claims here, but YOU ARE. Hence, even by empiricist standards, it is YOU who is engaging in speculation, not Marx. Marx and Engels did not claim there was some kind of secret, internal mechanism in the human body which made the family inevitable, YOU are saying that, and this requires AFFIRMATIVE empirical evidence to support itself! We do not need to provide evidence for a claim VIS A VIS your baseless claim, because you cannot disprove what is already an unsubstantiated claim. You however have not demanded qualifications for proof, regarding Marx's explanation for the origins of the family that he has somehow been unable to produce. Instead, you attack us Marxists for not being able to properly disprove you. But if you can't even fucking stand on two feet, how is it our business to knock you the fuck down? Furthermore, the fact that social processes reflect physiologically is consistent with Engels's materialism itself - which is why cognitivist philistines miss the point - behavior HAS to reflect physiologically, because there isn't a fucking ghost inside of the human body that's controlling our actions, there is no soul. Engels, whose metaphysical dabbling even led him to being attacked for claiming that "The brain is the organ of the mind", a profoundly cognitivist statement - hardly would have disagreed with the reality that chemicals are involved in facilitating family bonds. But that doesn't give them a causal basis in the brain!

You don't explain why it HAS to be this way - but thanks for proving my point, that all you can do is retreat to agnosticism with your shitty and limited empiricism. "Even if there is no scientific basis for understanding the family, why would we resort to your explanation?" - So you admit that, in fact, the family's causal origins are not even knowable. This philistine is so bound by the ideological power of the bourgeois family that he would rather condemn it into the abyss of uncertainty than critically evaluate its foundations in a way that makes its existence not inevitable.


It's not possible to just make assumptions based on the idea that "IF" an idea was subject to the qualifications of scientific inquiry, it would no longer exist. That is an unsubstantiated opinion. You have no real evidence of "the legitimacy and trans-historic character of the family that is rooted in ruling ideology." That's essentially just an opinion, which, again, does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.


But what this basically amounts to is chance - even if the idea was true scientifically, the reasons as to why it is sustained, and the reasons as to why it holds power have nothing to do with science. Therefore, the inclination to think that if it was subject to scientific evaluation, it would be true, IS THE DEFINITION OF SUPERSTITION. But never mind that. The idea COULD NOT BE TRUE even then, INEVITABLY it could not be true, because the idea itself is CONTINGENT upon the absence of subjugating it to scientific inquiry. And by scientific inquiry, I very basically mean KNOWLEDGE itself - making the idea KNOWABLE. If the idea becomes knowable, then it becomes malleable, which therefore negates the power of the idea. That is how the subconscious itself works, that is how ideology works - when trying to understand your subconscious concisely, it no longer becomes your subconscious, it changes. It is very much not a matter of "opinion" solely because the act of something being KNOWABLE changes the very nature of the idea itself. The point is not that the idea itself, isolated - that the family has its basis in biological processes, is not subject to scientific inquiry, but that it is contingent upon the presence of a variety of ASSUMPTIONS which are themselves not capable of being converted scientifically insofar as they would be known consciously in thought. You are attempting to divorce the practical strive for truth, with this stupid "what-if" question of absolute truth that is isolated from our relationship to the material world around us, in other words, that something might be possible theoretically does not mean we have any inclination to think it is true. Let us take for example the idea of a god, which is fundamentally rooted in its ideological power. If the INTRICACIES of this ideological power became knowable, that is to say, how it is fundamentally rooted in social relations, how it encapsulates the sum-total of the state-apparatus, and so on - it could not in any meaningful sense continue to exist. But the ideological designations that are implicit in Communism are not knowable by anyone, for this becomes wrought out through the emergence of Communist society itself, and nothing more. What that means is that there are things which COULD be knowable, but which are not - that is the point of bourgeois ideology, that is why Communist ideology SUSTAINS an open domain of scientific inquiry in pertinence to the social where bourgeois ideology could not, and that is why bourgeois ideology could sustain the open domain of the natural sciences where theology could not, that is why the anti-mythic ideology of the ancient Greece could sustain the open domain of systematized Mathematics where mythology could not. The list goes on.

And in any case, as it happens, Greek mathematics dethroned the explanatory power of myths, bourgeois ideology dethroned the power of feudal religion, and - you get the fucking story. Surely, you don't mean to tell us that we are literally incapable of fathoming the reality that Greek myths could not be sustained if they were subject to scientific inquiry, could you? The fact of the matter is that the reason you don't take Greek mythology seriously is solely because the material predispositions which perpetuated the power of Greek mythology do not any longer exist. Likewise Roman Paganism is unnecessary in perpetuating the conditions of capitalism - so you don't have to take it seriously, because it - by in part- makes pretenses to the natural world which are IDEOLOGICAL. But the idea of a god, apparently, is given an exceptional character - wherein the burden of proof is upon we atheists, because the material foundations, bourgeois-idealism, which sustain the idea of a god remain in tact so much so that every new Atheist is a believer in practice, like the Atheist Jews who none the less think that god gave them Israel. Scientific inquiry most definitely DOES regard inclination, because truth is a PRACTICAL question, but we will save that for later.


Betting on the least probable outcome is a matter of faith, not of science.

Oh, that's so fucking convenient isn't it - we ought to "bet" on preserving the institution of the family and marriage because it is "more scientifically probable that it is an inevitability". But wait a second, you NEVER consistently put forward that the family's abolition would be "unlikely", you merely claimed that there is no evidence that would support the fact that it wouldn't have to exist. You have failed to properly explain why. You could at least entertain me by trying to say that it would have disastrous consequences, but that it would none the less be possible like any good conservative - you insist on claiming it is biologically inevitable, that the POSSIBILITY of its abolition couldn't be real. But wait a second, the so-called "basis" of the family has by in part, largely been destroyed for the working people fo the world - indeed, at this point in capitalism a real, stable family life is something of a luxury.

Today, 53% of women are employed in the United States, compared to 63% of men. This usually, hardly leaves time for "family life". The reality of public education, a very recent invention, has absolutely decimated the alleged "biological" role of the family because its only function - at this point in time - is in juxtaposition with private property. Anyone with a semblance of experience in conceiving working class communities, even ghettos, knows that the "closed' nature of the family is something reserved for the propertied classes, for in these open communities a space of commons has already been established wherein children live in association with each other, and without illusion, this can often take the form of gangs. The predispositions to the abolition of the family as such, as Marx and Engels noted, is something already present in capitalist society, for it is the basic condition of social stratification whelped upon the proletariat. That is why they claimed that the disparity between the family relations present among the working masses, and that among the ruling classes, has no bearing of similarity, and this is all the more true in our de-industrialized neoliberal economies. The family in present day capitalist society possesses an exclusively material role in this sense. If what you claimed about the family actually held up, then there would be a biological disparity between adopted children at birth, and those who raised them. But there have been plenty of examples of children who were completely unaware of that they were adopted until their later years, so if the family had some kind of physiological basis, then it would have to pertain to the biological parents themselves.

The ambiguity as to what constitutes a "family" remains infinitely fucking stupid though. If children were reared communally, on a local level, then they would be reared by a community that isn't the same as their neighboring community. We would then imagine Disillusionist, arriving in a time machine (because no one would be inclined to believe in such nonsense at that point), claiming that this is just "another manifestation of the family" selected for on an evolutionary level. So there is ambiguity as to what constitutes the family - certainly children will have to be nurtured, and cared for by adults, but why would it HAVE to be their biological parents, none the less exclusively? The ideological prejudice of this petite bourgeois rodent is all that makes him incapable of answering this.


This is funny, because your argument here almost exactly applies to your belief in the abolition of the family. So I have to almost play the other side here. The probability of the sun being an alien ship, based on our scientific knowledge about the sun, is very, very unlikely. But it is not absolutely zero. Without direct, measurable, testable observation, it cannot be proven that the sun is or is not an alien ship. It doesn't matter if humans have an inclination to conceive this probability.


No, in fact, it cannot - because one can consistently ground the basis for the abolition of the family in already existing conditions, by evaluating its role. Defending the family takes effort, just as believing in a god does - and doing so from the basis that "it has always existed in some form" is again metaphysical and meaningless. I have thoroughly explained the pathological basis for it, its complexity and its intricacies - regarding the inability to fathom qualitative change. This was in a previous thread. Regarding the probability of the sun being an alien ship, it is not simply "unlikely", it is not true at all - or more importantly, the predispositions to actually believing this is true are non-existent, insofar as it is implicit in the language which designates it. Your shitty epistemology, which conceives truth as existing separate from the process of practice, which includes observation, deals with worthless scholastic questions of "Could it be true"? Just like the subjective idealist deals with questions about "Is reality just a simulation"? Again, we don't have any scientific evidence which makes the claim unlikely, we simply don't have any evidence which makes the claim sufficiently believable by the standards of scientific inquiry. The question of belief is an inherently one-sided one, which is why something like Atheism is precisely merely the absence of a belief in a god - you either BELIEVE or you DO NOT, which is why every agnostic is a theist at heart - because to even entertain the idea is to render it into the domain of believability.

Not only does it matter if humans have the inclination to conceive this possibility, it is CONTINGENT upon such an inclination, because TRUTH IS A PRACTICAL QUESTION. See the disparity between your "hard" behavioral ecology and your fucking epistemology - because you conceive the process of acquiring knowledge itself as somehow divorced from "biological" imperatives. Shouldn't the process of acquiring knowledge have a practical purpose in pertinence to survival? If I don't have the inclination to think whether rubbing two rocks together is going to produce a fire, there would be no way for me to even entertain the fucking idea. So it SOLELY concerns inclination, because truth is PRACTICAL, there is no such thing as "truth" that is divorced from PRACTICE.



Human inclination has nothing to do with how the world really is. Basing our science around "inclination" is just leaving us subject to ideology, which was your own criticism of science in the first place.


Oh my god, this is beautiful! I love that you're admitting this, fucking FINALLY - after all this time, you ADMIT the fundamentally idealist foundations of your thought! The fact of the matter is that how the world "really is" is only knowable insofar as we interact with it, while we can know the axiom that it exists independently of us, our relationship to the world around us ITSELF CONSTITUTES A DEFINITE MATERIAL REALITY, i.e. how the world "really is" is ALSO shaped by our relationship to it, because WE ARE A PART OF REALITY (though we do not shape it). So that goes to say that our inclination has EVERYTHING to do with KNOWING the world, because we can only ever know the world IN APPROXIMATION TO US, wrought out through PRACTICE. That is the point - as Lenin said (in pertinence to Mach's idealism): Human practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of knowledge, said Marx and Engels, who dubbed all attempts to solve the fundamental question of epistemology without the aid of practice “scholastic” and “philosophical crotchets.” But for Mach practice is one thing and the theory of knowledge another. The point IS NOT THAT we humans are "corrupt", "subjective" and "biased" and ideological but that science is itself JUST AS MUCH a human phenomena, bound up with our practical inclinations (rooted INHERENTLY in ideological considerations). The error is assuming the idealist notion that a god is "pure" and embodies objective reality while we humans struggle to cope with it. But there is no disparity between objective reality and human subjectivity, because our attempts to conceive reality practically itself constitutes A PART of reality. That is why pseudo-nihilsits who take a god's eye view at the universe and prattle about the meaningless of life are the worst idiots - because the reference point for conceiving the vastness of space is in humans.

Surely for an evolutionary psychologist, you would provide a darwinist account for the origins of knowledge, no? You are an animal. You are an organism. That means that there cannot be a disparity between your ability to know the probability of "objective truth" and your biological imperatives as an organism, and if there is - where does it come from? A god? This is why you, as an evolutionary psychologist, WILL NEVER and CAN NEVER have a consistent epistemology. You are forced to admit that the question of truth is a practical one in pertinence to maximizing your evolutionary fitness - which alone destroys your bourgeois-empiricism.



Again, you have no real evidence for the ideological power behind the family, that's untestable speculation. The scientific explanation that I've already given for the existence of the family is far more than equivalent, it is superior. That being said, I didn't say that the existence of the family is physiologically inevitable, only that it is highly probable to continue in the future. I'm not the one trying to make everything black and white. No explanation HAS to be true, the world doesn't work that way. Trying to force everything to be completely true or untrue is just subjecting ourselves to human bias. Rationality always has to take doubt into consideration.


Ladies and gentlemen, Disillusionist... Accused me of postmodernism. I'm actually laughing hysterically right now. I swear to god I'm fucking choking to death. Holy shit! YES an explanation HAS to be true, just as the notion that Eric Hobsbawm died on 1 October 2012 HAS to be correct, without dispute. Because implicit in the claim is already a pretense to objectivity or a lack-of (or a prediction of it in the future) - that is the fucking point! For the record, in this context claiming that something is "highly probable" and that is inevitable might as well be the exact same thing. If it isn't, let me ask you a question: What separates this, rather than being "highly probable" from blatantly, inevitably true? Why WOULDN'T the family be inevitable, what constitutes - even if it is a low probability - its possibility? Because these are questions of BELIEF. You cannot make pretenses to COWARDLY agnosticism here. You can't say "I just know for sure that I cannot know for sure" in pertinence to the family, because the theoretical qualifications you have offered are meant to be compelling evidence for its physiological basis. So I ask you once more, what concerns this probability, and since we're dealing with ideas of "probability" in a scientific manner, I demand you quantify it. Meaning, is it a 80% probability, a 99% probability, etc. and so on and what constitutes the basis for the 20% probability? If you cannot answer these questions, you must DO AWAY with pretenses to "probability" and must stop making pretenses to "evidence", and admit hat you are just inclined to think so based on pure speculation. The predispositions for thinking so, I have already destroyed thoroughly.


Humans are animals... I don't think an argument can possibly be made to refute that on any scientific level.

Yeah, it can. Ready? The fact that we distinguish ourselves from animals, the fact that the category of the animal exists is alone enough to refute this fact. We are most certainly NOT animals, not in this context. I mean, in pertinence to some theological ideas, sure we're animals, sure we derive from animals, but we are not animals any more than animals are plants. The human is an entirely distinct, entirely new category, and we laugh at the attempts of pseudo-darwinist philistines to get on all fours growling while running around in attempting to construct an iota of a basis for an alternative explanation for humanity vis a vis religion.


If something could theoretically be true, then there is always a degree of probability associated with it. That probability just isn't worth worrying about.

This is the stupid, hypocritical fucking nature of your epistemology - because apparently we don't "have to worry about it" - this PERFECTLY encapsulates such philistinism. If something has even a slight probability of being true, then yes, we DO have to fucking worry about it you fucking dolt. The point is that the linguistic INCLINATION to think something is true could not be present - just because something is "theoretically true" DOES NOT mean there is a degree of probability to it, it means that something is theoretically true in the mind as a creative, abstract re-formation of what we already do know about the world. From this error do dolts draw idiotic conclusions like the many worlds theory, that "if something is possible, it exists" having to construct entirely different universes to conform to it - unable to realize that these are mere abstractions of what ALREADY exists. Probability fundamentally concerns prediction, if there is no inclination to believe something, there is no prediction implicit in it. It is theoretically possible that a men can have invisible tails on their arse, that no one can see - but this is only "theoretically" possible insofar as it is a CONSISTENT abstraction, there is no reason to think it is "probable" at all. The argument amounts to the idea that there might be disparity between what we actually, concretely fundamentally believe, and objective reality, the former is being construed as such by merit of its provisional nature. The problem is that, however, truth is a PRACTICAL question, and that to ponder as to whether it is "theoretically possible" for men to have invisible tails requires a practical inclination, which does not exist - it therefore becomes a useless, scholastic question - "could this be true", which it most certainly could not be, because again the predispositions toward thinking so do not entail an actual practical belief in it.

Which means there is a disparity between the assertion that "men have invisible tails", and the hypothetical possibility that it might be true, it is then just as true, just as probable as infinitely anything not yet practically wrought out from reality - that is, with zero probability. Let's say the ancient Greeks believed in heliocentricism, for example. It's not because heliocentricism is "probable", it is for entirely different reasons - and that we now know that the sun is the center of the Earth does not excuse the reality the Greeks (would have) believed this for entirely different reasons, ones divorced from astronomy. This does not make truth provisional, for it is only provisional insofar as our lived existence, and our relationship with the material world is provisional and changing, insofar as practice changes. So your problem essentially boils down to pretenses to absolute truth which concern the FUTURE, what we "might discover" as true. But we can never regard the future in this sense.

That is not to say all scientific conceptions of reality boil down to "absolute truths", but that the recognition of its provisionally must be implicit in the theoretical recognition it "could be possible" that this is not true. The claim "there is no absolute truth" is a pretense to absolute truth, wrought out from the practical reality that throughout our capitalist epoch, knowledge of the world has changed in approximation to it. This leads one to attempts to control for more experimental variables by more technologically sophisticated means. That is why quantum physics is only "provisional" because of the overwhelming lack of funding, and energy that is put into experimentation, by merit of the limitations of capital. All this reflects, is the lacking complete practical explanatory power of the science. So to reiterate, probability concerns a prediction with a pretense to absolute truth, i.e. the prediction that eventually this will be wrought out into the domain of truth, somehow, you cannot simply caste into the abyss, into the void that "oh well, because our understanding of the world is always changing, this is not black and white". That is a lazy way of thinking. If one understands HOW this changes, one conceives a paradigm of epistemological change. One that leaves no room for the silly notion that the sun being an alien spaceship is somehow, however small, partially "probable". If Communism is consciousness of class, it is also consciousness of the nature of scientific discovery and its practical reality, tied up with social considerations.


Now, to relate all this back to the family... your own argument could very easily be used against your own claim that the family will be abolished. "Marxists can talk about how it is "theoretically possible" for the abolition of the family to occur, but that does not make such a phenomena even slightly "probable"."


No, you couldn't draw this fucking conclusion, because unlike a stupid abstraction like the existence of an alien spaceship, we can conceive the basis of existence of the family, thoroughly, recognize WHY it exists and therefore draw the conclusion that without the conditions that necessitate its existence, it would not exist. We see this, again, and the predispositions to its abolition in present day capitalist society, because gain, in case you didn't know, Communism derives from the conditions WITHIN capitalism. The demand for the abolition of the family was implicit in the Communist movement itself, it was a fundamentally proletarian demand, and we can see this with the spontaneous demand for the state to pay for women's domestic works emerging among working people, recognizing the disparity between it and the material foundations of their life.


The scientific basis on the other hand, has considerable more explanatory power.

But as we've shown, this scientific basis has nothing to do with data at all, so we must assume that it has its groundings in theoretical superiority, which again is demonstrated to be nonsense because it rests upon false theoretical presumptions about Darwinsim. Again, it is not as though it would have to be a striking COINCIDENCE for the family not to have a physiological basis, it is that to draw the conclusion that it does have a physiological basis relies upon a set of presumptions which aren't put up for questioning.


It is still not possible to entirely refute the abolition of the family in the future, because that is not observable, but it is possible to evaluate the probability of that occurring based on a model of probability developed from our current scientific understanding.

But the claim is not an ABSTRACT, baseless claim wrought out of speculation, as though they merely pulled it out of their fucking ass. The claim has its basis in the recognition of the conditions of NOW and likewise, the CAPITALIST disintegration of family bonds, while being unable to socially account for what itself it necessitates via, for example, free state-run communal rearing centers and so on. Reducing women to the status of domestic slaves, a reactionary imperative, with "enough to support men and women" is also nonsensical insofar as the presence of women in the workforce has become just as much a necessity to sustain the technological, productive and politically advanced capacities of capitalist society almost as much as men (It's not as though women lived fine and dandy until 'capital' pushed them into the workforce away from their kids - the increase in their standard of living was contingent upon their entering in the workforce). The domestic slave is pertinent to the propertied classes, which is why the nuclear family among the working people, if it ever truly took a hold, disintegrated very quickly during the sexual revolution and the counter-culture, in coincidence with the rise in class struggle.


Common sense is not a scientific argument. Humans are not ecologically unbound, as I've already demonstrated clearly.

Very well. What is our "human ecology" and what is its trans-historical character.


This is not unique to humans... beavers change their ecologies by building dams...

And this is where I grab you by the fucking balls, because beavers DO NOT Change their ecologies, rather, their dam-building is a PART of their ecology, which is why they're hard wired to do it. is all of human history a part of a 'human ecology'? If it is, are you suggesting that the blueprints for historic development are in our DNA? It's like saying a fucking bee-hive constitutes similarity with humans changing their ecology, or the footprints left by wolves in the snow.. All of these follow a pattern which exists in approximation to the species biologically, which only changes in coincidence with BIOLOGICAL changes. But no biological changes had to happen for humans to go from mud-huts to apartment complexes. The same cannot be said for beavers.


That doesn't mean that humans are not still subject to that ecology.


It means they are in such a way that no "behavioral traits" can be adapted for an ecology that constantly fucking changes. When ecology changes for animals, they either die or traits are selected for in order to conform to it, because their behavior is mandated biologically - or they continue to exist by chance of being compatible with this new ecology (a rare occurrence) but they are never responsible for the ecological change itself, socially.


Also, animals do change their behaviors in response to the environment, and on another level, change in the environment also causes long-term biological evolution. I'm not divorcing human social reality from behavior, I'm connecting them on a greater level, while broadening the perspective to include the environment.


"On another level" is fucking METAPHYSICS, because changes in human "ecology" do not cause "long term evolution" or alternations in humans physiologically. For fuck's sake. So you are divorcing human social reality from behavior, because you're dismissing it as a "given". Animals do not change their environment, they conform to it. If the animal changes the environment in a way that alters conformity, the animal itself selects for traits which make it, itself, change. That's why it's a stupid fucking allegory, because the human species remains after 200,000 years. Our "ecology" hasn't because we didn't select for one on an evolutionary level beyond being land-based, air breathing animals. Behaviors which are social didn't have to be selected for.


To some extent this is correct, our behaviors are shaped by our evolutionary past. But they are not dictated by it. Modern human social reality also plays a strong part in our behavior, and to continue the circle, modern human social reality is influenced by our behavior and our evolutionary history. It's all interconnected, I'm not saying that one controls the others.


Just fucking concede you don't know shit at this point. For fuck's sake. Our behaviors are NOT shaped by our evolutionary past in a way that is pertinent on a historically significant level. I mean, it's fucking stupid because we also have two hands, and two legs- does that mean shit as far as how it "influences" social reality? Probably, but we don't have humans with three legs and three hands to compare ourselves to. So it is a stupid, and worthless fucking question to begin with - an entirely paradoxical one at that. So it's not "all inter-connected", because the biological is mandated on a social level. Most other animals are more or less individually autonomous as organisms, and the more social they are - as mammals - the less autonomous they are.


No I'm not divorcing these things. It was changing human ecology itself that prompted us to evolve larger brains and more complex problem solving, to better survive by addressing the problems associated with that changing ecology.

No, the OPPOSITE was hypothesized to be true, namely, the INABILITY to retain a constant, steady ecology is what prompted the physiological change in brain structure and size, to accommodate for social coordination in hunting and more malleable plasticity. Humans are, from an 'ecological' standpoint INHERENTLY insane animals, literally, - 'crazy', animals, compelled by an eternal dance of madness. The "ecology" itself did not change, the necessity for us to master it did. We know now, for example, that the brain changed to accommodate for LANGUAGE and the ability to communicate in a more cohesive, colonizing manner above all else, which laid the basis for problem solving. The brain changed to be socially malleable.


I'm not trying to replace one cause with another, I'm trying to broaden the perspective to include the whole picture.


Sais the philistine who claims that "Your cause is speculation, ours is more probable". Yes you are trying to replace the basis of causality. Saying otherwise is dishonesty, and it contradicts your previous arguments which made pretenses to "Well, this cause is more probable". Fuck off with your bullshit.


Capitalism as a phenomena was able to develop AMONG humans, partially as a result of our pre-existing behavior and psychology.

This alone rests on flimsy foundations, namely, because it abstractions the causality of capitalism. The capitalist totality was not willed by society, it formed by the conflation of wills into something that no one willed. It wasn't because it "used" pre-exsiting behavior, it became possible because of pre-existing social formations within feudalism. To argue beyond that is to claim that capitalism is physiologically compatible with human anatomy, again, a worthless claim. For example, the question of "why did capitalism develop rather than something else" would be the basis of the notion that it was because of our "psychology", but the reality is that we know capitalist relations developed for very specific reasons that are explicable within the context of feudalism, socially. Hence why nonsense like "rational choice theory" will never extend beyond our present standards of reason and rationality, because all we can do is abstract why humans in X situation do what they do and try to find common ground. The standards of what constitutes something as "more beneficial" or more desirable, of course, are not ingrained, but are relative to each according mode of production by merit of its reproduction (and therefore the reproduction of human beings). The fact that any community will inevitably place primacy upon survival in order to reproduce itself, for example, is only testament to the survival of such a community. Suicide cults like Jim Jones, and so on - while rare, have existed, even if they are confused elaborations of an already existing mode of production.


and thus we are more equipped to change it.

Oh, but we can't change it, Dissillusonist. All of the features we despise about capitalism are trans-historical and will continue to exist, "probably" in any future society. So why desire to change it? "Well, we can make it better, soften the bad effects of these things". Sure, disillusionist! Let me know when the momentum, spiritual energy of a movement that can rival that of a revolutionary movement can scare the ruling classes so shitless to the point where they'd make such concessions.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Congratulations, this entire thread has become a joke now. And the topic is important - both because the oppression of homosexuals is a crucial part of how capitalism is reproduced and because Stalinist types like to claim that everyone in the socialist movement was a raging homophobe in order to cover up their own ideological retreat. But no, let's have another Rafiq-Disillusionist thread, I'm sure that's important too.

And for the record, as I'm sure many members of this site are aware, I dislike Rafiq (or rather Rafiq's posts; I don't really know Rafiq the man and you know what, life's too damn short for that). I think his bluster and apocalyptic imagery are a cover for politics that are about as "left" as those of the IMT. And the less said about the "party-movement of the entire class" and Rafiq as a potential praetorian prefect to Augustus DNZ the better.

However...

You, Disillusionist, make the Messenger look good by comparison. And the joke is, you probably genuinely don't understand why we benighted fools react so negatively to your attempts to bring scientific enlightenment to our poor backward circles.

Except, of course, most of us are well aware of science, and several of us are pursuing a career in a scientific field. Far from being the Prometheus of Science, bringing the fire of truth to the Marxist hut-dwellers stuck in the 18th century, you're the one who doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to science. The studies you cite can be shown to be flawed by almost anyone with a basic grasp of how science works - which is why most of them have to be published in specialist journals - and the assumptions your beloved evo-psych makes go against everything known about primate neurology. Far from Marxists claiming humans are somehow above the animal kingdom, it is evo-psych fans that give them a special modular brain so that they can prove the stereotypes of the Clinton era are timeless biological truths. (This does not prevent them from "explaining" human behaviour using the sort of over-simplified gene-centric reasoning you might find in popular works by gene-selectionists.)

And all so that you can convince yourself that the family will continue to exist in perpetuity. Ick. And of course, you complain about "postmodernism" only to write:

" All epistemology is ideologically sustained at some point. You have to believe in your way of knowing. Marxism isn't free from this either. I could always be a nihilist and choose to believe that nothing is believable. Philosophically, that is also a valid perspective, but it isn't productive."

In other words, get off your high horse, get some perspective, and stop spamming the site with this personal evo-psych crusade of yours.

[Thirsty Crow]

C
And all so that you can convince yourself that the family will continue to exist in perpetuity. Ick. And of course, you complain about "postmodernism" only to write:

" All epistemology is ideologically sustained at some point. You have to believe in your way of knowing. Marxism isn't free from this either. I could always be a nihilist and choose to believe that nothing is believable. Philosophically, that is also a valid perspective, but it isn't productive."

In other words, get off your high horse, get some perspective, and stop spamming the site with this personal evo-psych crusade of yours.

To be fair, it seemed to me that, during the course of this trainwreck of a discussion, Disillusionist equivocated on the term "family" in the sense that they implied on at least one occasion (and no I won't dig for quotes and anyone who'd have me do that is unimaginably cruel:lol:) that any human sexual bonding (and I guess child upbringing) is part of the concept "family".

And you're right that this statement of all knowing being "ideologically sustained" reeks of extreme social constructivist garbage. The point isn't to believe in your way of knowing, but to consistently demonstrate its usefulness and correctness (which opens my argument to the tedium of defining "correct" and "truth"; I won't play that inane game) which means there are no reasonable doubts to be entertained.

[Rafiq]

Explain to us all how Bakunin's critique of state and of hierarchy, his advocation of revolutionary discipline, minority organisation and his view on spontaneity, as well as his firm belief in Marx's analysis of capitalism and materialism is deeply rooted in this anti-Semitism. Please be specific.

I have not claimed this. Instead, the opposite is true - his anti-semitism is deeply rooted, as a logical conclusion, of his petite-bourgeois apolitical sentiment - and this isn't to mention is reactionary agrarian fetishism.

It does not suffice to say that Bakunin built the entirety of his works in anti-semitism - that is ridiculous. The point is that his anti-semitism was not "anomalous" with regard to the sum-total of his character, it is logical.

[Rafiq]

And you're right that this statement of all knowing being "ideologically sustained" reeks of extreme social constructivist garbage. The point isn't to believe in your way of knowing, but to consistently demonstrate its usefulness and correctness (which opens my argument to the tedium of defining "correct" and "truth"; I won't play that inane game) which means there are no reasonable doubts to be entertained.

This was his bad reading of my initial assertion that science is ideologically sustained, insofar as it is necessarily contingent upon ideological presumptions that allow one to question hegemonic ideological presumptions (i.e. and replace them with science). For example, humanism vis a vis astronomy, thinking outside the church - and the mathematics of Greek antiquity thinking outside mythic.

The science itself is not ideological, but ideological space is necessary to sustain it, because ideology simply amounts to designating something, in the intricacies of language, and so on, without making it knowable in thought, i.e. assuming that it is a given that you can't even really question. So there's an inverse relationship - if something is scientific, it cannot be ideological, and vice versa, but ideology will always occupy a space of designation in the field of the actual "unknown". It's just that in societies without social-consciousness, things that could otherwise be knowable are rendered unknowable to reproduce them.

[Luís Henrique]

[I]Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women.

So Jewish women didn't count as individuals, would be expelled in any case, or would have to be lesbian to be allowed to stay?

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

The core basis of the scientific method is simply observation, testing, and verification.

But is it? What is the place of theory in such simplistic epistemology?

Luís Henrique

[Thirsty Crow]

But is it? What is the place of theory in such simplistic epistemology?

Luís Henrique

Theories are hypothesis generating machines - in one sense of the word. In another, they represent the conceptual framework which is defended on other grounds than empirical claims (but that framework is always dependent on precisely the empirical), and in yet another sense of the word, it represents validly tested and triumphant sets of hypotheses.

The epistemology outlined in short by Disillusionist is simplistic only because it refers to the very basic building blocks of materialism which is not a matter of faith and belief, but the only viable of such fundamental methodologies. As for how hypotheses are formed, this is left out of the picture but it is safe to assume that wild conjectures are not to be followed up. Anyway, it matters little how a hypothesis came about if it is successfully demonstrated to be actually correct. On the other hand, this would be a fruitful question if the opposite were the case.

[RedWorker]

Rafiq's point gets lost in his rhetoric. It's actually really simple.

There can be a study saying that black men are more likely to be violent. The study can be fully accurate, peer reviewed and take the form of a meta-study. The data can be fully accurate. We have no necessary disagreement with it.

Now, merely that this data is true means nothing by itself. Studies typically have a "discussion" and "conclusions" section. For example, the same study could, through very nice words and citations, argue that this behaviour is merely inevitable, innate black behaviour which goes down to the way black people naturally bring each other up in society.

But is that, or is it not true? That the study has concluded this means nothing. The data may be fully accurate, and it still means nothing. There is no evidence that this behaviour is "innate", and the only way this can be argued is convincing arguments, because this is the point where social science and natural science meet.

Another study may very well argue that black people are more violent because of conditions of social exclusion and alienation, including economic, that they face. It could reference points such as, for instance, that wealthy black people are just as violent as wealthy white people.

Now, what Rafiq argues is that people such as The Disillusionist pick-and-choose their explanations. When it is an issue in which being branded as a racist is a risk, they may very well argue that black people's behavior merely goes down to the exclusion they are faced with; yet, they may argue that human behaviours such as war are "innate" and are down to inevitable physical/chemical interactions. How do they choose which they argue? By "picking and choosing", Rafiq argues. What Rafiq argues is that The Disillusionist references real data and states a personal conclusion with no convincing arguments behind it, then when someone attempts to refute it with convincing arguments, he states that the person should "learn about science", because the data is real and can only result in his conclusion!

Therefore, if we are to take Rafiq's view, as far as this is regarded it is not an issue of even disagreement - it is an issue of The Disillusionist failing to reply to what Rafiq has actually stated.

[RedWorker]

Now, as for my personal opinion.

In no way is there any evidence that war and class are innate human behaviours. The Disillusionist goes in the realm of natural science by referencing that war is down to biological/chemical/physical phenomena - but, then he goes into the domain of social science by arguing that this is "innate" (that it has a natural explanation instead of a social explanation), and simply accuses all opposing arguments of "ignoring the data".

This is either intellectually dishonest or goes down to a misunderstanding of science and the connection between natural and social science.

In no way did Karl Marx ever argue that any form of relationships between people who are related by blood will completely disappear. He argued, however, that the bourgeois family, which is structured on private property, on social institutions such as marriage and the coercion against woman and child, will wither away as a result of the abolition of private property.

"What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.", F. Engels argued.



This is not down to 'speculation' but merely a conclusion within the social scientific framework that Karl Marx elaborated in order to explain society and its phenomena. It is not merely down to "ideology", because Karl Marx's arguments have a link to reality and depend on them. We could argue that "2+2=4" is merely an unfalsifiable, tautological conceptual model which has no link to reality. But then we'd be faced with the reality that if we put two and two apples together, we'll have four apples!

Now, The Disillusionist pretends to be in "the modern age", when his arguments are in fact the opposite - the old view of social understanding which argues that "it's always been this way, so it must be inevitable".

[Thirsty Crow]

We could argue that "2+2=4" is merely an unfalsifiable, tautological conceptual model which has no link to reality. But then we'd be faced with the reality that if we put two and two apples together, we'll have four apples!

But it is a "tautological" frame of representation; there's nothing empirically binding either to employ the mathematical operation of adding up or to stick "two" and "four" (or numerals) as significant elements of it. Unlike the Marxist analysis of the bourgeois family, which indeed must operate with empirical data (to be sure, in a way that is quite far from being direct), adding two and two doesn't even need a reference to any object. Thus failing to grasp that 2 + 2 = 4 would amount to failing to grasp the rules of the mathematical operation, and saying that 2 + 2 = 5 would amount either to a fanciful joke, maybe even inspired by Orwell, or the same kind of failure. Both cases would be different from failing to grasp the composition of the water molecule and at the same time arguing there are 12 oxygen atoms as part of the molecule - this would be demonstrably incorrect (and our responses to whomever makes these two kind of mistakes would vary in kind). I don't think mathematics is falsifiable in the same way that actual statements about the state of things in our world are - but that's not a defect of any kind.

But all in all, I think you're completely right about the fundamentally a) unscientific (relevant insofar as there's a claim for science) and b) ideological in the grand old philosophical sense of immutable essences (which can lead many people astray in search of the El Dorado of actual physical "bearers" of these essences) aspects of parts of this argument up til now.