Engels/Morgan's works on ancient societies [Archive]

View Full Version : Engels/Morgan's works on ancient societies

Guardia Rossa

30th June 2015, 18:19

tuwix

1st July 2015, 05:56

Are "Origins of the Private Propriety, the Family and the State" and "Ancient society", books by Engels and Morgan, still considered "right" by modern antropologists?

Morgan - yes, Engels - no. due to ideological issues. However, nobody criticizes that. It's just an attempt to forget it.

Are there any other works, by other [marxist or not] antropologists/historians on the same matter?

Yes, but they don't focus on terms of property. But there are exceptions. This is a fragment of movie made by Polish anthropologist and right-wing activist Wojciech Cejrowski

E88gOuI3XJQ

will franklin

1st July 2015, 06:22

The generic scheme under which Morgan and Tyler wrote is called 'unilineal evolution' --all societies evolve in the same basic manner.

This, of course, served as the underpinning for not only Engels, but also Marx's 'Modes of production'. As such it's the basic conceptual biology of Darwin as applied to social science--at least during the late 19th century.

But unilineal schemes were the target of Boas and Lowie in the early part of the 20th. Among their other contributions, they demonstrated that the Morgan/Tyler/Marx/Engels stuff was based upon here-say and armchair speculation--not hard observation. In other words, it was junk science that selected 'facts' to retrofit a postulated theory.

Present-day Anthropology considers Morgan and Tyler to be historical figures whose (lack of) method is precisely what was overcome. In other words, Morgan and Tyler are anecdotes that demonstrate what Anthropolgy is not.

As for Marx and Engels, in its Morgonian form it cannot be supported in any other way than by state ideology backed by force.

Asero

1st July 2015, 11:06

This, of course, served as the underpinning for not only Engels, but also Marx's 'Modes of production'.

"Present-day society" is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the "present-day state" changes with a country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United States. The "present-day state" is therefore a fiction.

Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm

Each society hitherto in history was born out of the previous society. The point is to find trends within the sphere of social production and its relation with the other facets of society, such as the state, which culminates in a concept of a 'mode of production' in the abstract. Of course, only in an abstract sense. The Mode of Production is just the social relations within society taken in totality. Concrete analysis on the development of society into what it is now is absolutely necessary. The structure of capitalism in one country is different than another, and so on. Stageism and the materialist conception of history are not wholly synonymous. The thing is with capitalism is that it breaks all barriers; by the very nature of its structure capital cannot help but conquer new markets, to spread the system of generalized commodity production to all spheres of the globe.

What made socialism a science is through materialist analysis that posits the revolutionary movement in an ever growing dynamic society. Sadly, nowadays that's rarely the case.

As for Marx and Engels, in its Morgonian form it cannot be supported in any other way than by state ideology backed by force.
Well, sort of. Stageism as a simplified dogma was perpetuated because of influence from the Eastern Bloc, but there are the less educated that continue to believe in despite of 1989. Though of course, anti-communist ideologues with their caricatured visions of Marxism will continue to exist because of the hegemonic ideology backed by the bourgeois state.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

1st July 2015, 12:54

I would say there is definite pressure on anthropologists to ignore the demonstrable fact of technical-organisational advancement, much as there is pressure on economists to continue to use unworkable supply-demand models. If you would like to know more, I imagine Blake's Baby knows quite a bit about the situation in modern anthropology.

(Which is not to say that we should ignore modern anthropology, quite the opposite; there is serious empirical work being done, which we should study carefully even though we should remain cautious about the ideological assumptions being made.)

The question is not whether "On the Origin..." is accepted, the question is whether it stands up. I would say it stands up quite well, even after more than a century of new discoveries in archaeology etc.

The generic scheme under which Morgan and Tyler wrote is called 'unilineal evolution' --all societies evolve in the same basic manner.

This, of course, served as the underpinning for not only Engels, but also Marx's 'Modes of production'. As such it's the basic conceptual biology of Darwin as applied to social science--at least during the late 19th century.

But unilineal schemes were the target of Boas and Lowie in the early part of the 20th. Among their other contributions, they demonstrated that the Morgan/Tyler/Marx/Engels stuff was based upon here-say and armchair speculation--not hard observation. In other words, it was junk science that selected 'facts' to retrofit a postulated theory.

Present-day Anthropology considers Morgan and Tyler to be historical figures whose (lack of) method is precisely what was overcome. In other words, Morgan and Tyler are anecdotes that demonstrate what Anthropolgy is not.

As for Marx and Engels, in its Morgonian form it cannot be supported in any other way than by state ideology backed by force.

I'm sorry, but if you think "the Morgan stuff" was based on hearsay "and armchair speculation", you simply aren't aware of Morgan's extensive field work. Field work Boas spent a lot of time reassessing, so you've managed to not only misrepresent Morgan, but also Boas. (As for Lowie, "state ideology backed by force" and "hearsay" are quite good descriptors of his "work" on Germany.)

Boas was reacting to the perceived moralism in Morgan's work (I say "perceived" because, despite using moralistic terms like "savagery", Morgan was not at all hostile to early forms of social organisation and would in fact come close to scientific socialism in calling for a "return to the freedom, brotherhood and equality of the ancient gentes" on the basis of modern technology). There is no such moralism in Engels, and definitely no theory of linear evolution. In fact both Marx and Engels accepted that the development of societies can sometimes proceed along different paths (feudalism as opposed to the Asiatic mode of production) and that history never retraces its steps, so to speak (so that there was no question of India developing capitalism in isolation from the world, by the same process by which capitalist society developed in Britain).

Guardia Rossa

1st July 2015, 17:08

On asiatic mode of production: Ain't it centralized servilism, while feudalism is decentralized servilism?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

1st July 2015, 17:13

Rafiq

1st July 2015, 17:31

The nonsense regarding allegations of a 'stageist' conception of history amounted to what is essentially a misunderstanding that could only be one without Hegel. The Hegelian logic was that after something occurs, only then does it become inevitable - and that everything proceeding the present-day follows a "linear, rational" trajectory only with the reference point of present day conditions in place - i.e. if things did not occur the way they did, things would now be different, and so on.

The accusation that Marx and Engels ascribed to a "linear" model of historical development is so disgustingly blasphemous that it almost is not even worth addressing, for it was the philistine positivists who conceived a "linear" conception of not only historical development, but thought. Hegel's, and later Marx's conception of history was anything but linear, in fact quite the opposite was true, it went through spirals, zig-zags (as Lenin put it) and so on.

LuÃs Henrique

1st July 2015, 20:27

Are there any other works, by other [marxist or not] antropologists/historians on the same matter?

V. Gordon Childe comes to mind.

Luís Henrique

Guardia Rossa

1st July 2015, 23:25

By servilism I meant a Servant - Clergy [IdeologicalClass] - Aristocracy/Nobility society.

Different from a slave society.

Guardia Rossa

1st July 2015, 23:27

False friends are not friendly.

Spectre of Spartacism

1st July 2015, 23:40

The facts that Engels had to work with have been advanced over the last 100 years. Engels had the methodology and basic outline correct, though. His account should be supplemented, not undermined.

QueerVanguard

2nd July 2015, 03:06

V. Gordon Childe comes to mind.

Luís Henrique

Childe was a racist, not Marxist http://archive.org/details/TheAryansAStudyOfIndo-europeanOrigins

will franklin

2nd July 2015, 03:56

Bad metaphor aside, to say that a society was 'born' denotes that it wasn't present prior--that there was 'another'. This, of course begs the question: all you're really doing is form-fitting the lived reality of certain years different categories.

For example, ancient Greeks and Romans most certainly possessed factories. They likewise paid (exploitative) wages. Armies that won enslaved the losers to work in mines to extract metals for weapons, and in fields depleted by males serving in the army of conquest. In this respect, i believe that it's far more informative to see how exploitation and capitalism (the comodification of labor) changes throughout the years.

It's likewise important to observe that, today, raw materials that enable factory production are not 'capitalistic'. Like the raw materials of Rome's foundries of 200BC, Paris' Atliers of 1550, much of what we consume today is produced by virtual slave labor.

To say that the stage-ism of Engels was perpetrated by the Soviet Bloc is to fundamentally agree with Koliakowski: without the appearance of the soviet state, both Engels and Marx would have been long-forgotten.

will franklin

2nd July 2015, 04:26

will franklin

2nd July 2015, 08:33

The issue we're discussing correctly assumes that Engels cited Morgan, whose scheme was unilinear.

The nonsense regarding allegations of a 'stageist' conception of history amounted to what is essentially a misunderstanding that could only be one without Hegel. The Hegelian logic was that after something occurs, only then does it become inevitable - and that everything proceeding the present-day follows a "linear, rational" trajectory only with the reference point of present day conditions in place - i.e. if things did not occur the way they did, things would now be different, and so on.

The accusation that Marx and Engels ascribed to a "linear" model of historical development is so disgustingly blasphemous that it almost is not even worth addressing, for it was the philistine positivists who conceived a "linear" conception of not only historical development, but thought. Hegel's, and later Marx's conception of history was anything but linear, in fact quite the opposite was true, it went through spirals, zig-zags (as Lenin put it) and so on.

LuÃs Henrique

2nd July 2015, 15:48

Childe was a racist, not Marxist http://archive.org/details/TheAryansAStudyOfIndo-europeanOrigins

Being Marxist was not a requirement in the OP. But it is mistaken to suppose that Childe was racist because he uses the word Aryan - it is quite clear that he uses it as a linguistic definition, not a "racial" one.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

2nd July 2015, 15:51

By servilism I meant a Servant - Clergy [IdeologicalClass] - Aristocracy/Nobility society.

Different from a slave society.

Serfdom.

Luís Henrique

QueerVanguard

2nd July 2015, 23:14

Being Marxist was not a requirement in the OP. But it is mistaken to suppose that Childe was racist because he uses the word Aryan - it is quite clear that he uses it as a linguistic definition, not a "racial" one.

Luís Henrique

Read the book. It's all about the origins and culture of the oh so superior "Aryan race". It has fuck all to do with Aryanism as simply linguistics. Childe got into deep shit during and after WWII for publishing this crap and spent time trying to repent without disowning all the racist implications of shit work

khad

3rd July 2015, 00:06

I don't know because I don't know what "servilism" is.

The AMoP is characterised by (usually seasonal, because the workers are at the same time independent peasants) semi-free labour in the cities, in palatial and religious centres, sometimes for a wage, sometimes with the authority organising the labour taking care of the reproduction of the labour-power of the, well, labourers, with an emphasis on public works and large-scale agricultural labour. Crete, China, etc.
But then you run into the practice of royal land grants in Mesopotamia and Egypt, effectively dispersing economic and political control over land to hereditary nobility and military castes - making the "Asiatic" mode there more akin to the standard definition of feudalism.

The entire concept of the Asiatic mode was ultimately half-baked, and people interpreting Marx cannot seem to agree whether it was a historical tangent, a variant of feudalism, or a process of transition from primitive communism to slavery.

It's best not to get caught up with strict typologies for modes of production. The facts are often more complicated than the gloss of theory.

Rafiq

3rd July 2015, 01:18

It refers to the social formation present before the Greek revolution after the mythic age, vis a vis the Persians. The near east and Persia before alexander

khad

3rd July 2015, 04:01

It refers to the social formation present before the Greek revolution after the mythic age, vis a vis the Persians. The near east and Persia before alexander

And based entirely on a false premise. The core assumption postulated by Marx and Engels in formulating the Asiatic mode was the supposed non-existence of private landed property.

Marx to Engels, 1853

Bernier rightly sees all the manifestations of the East – he mentions Turkey, Persia and Hindustan– as having a common basis, namely the absence of private landed property. This is the real key, even to the eastern heaven

Engels to Marx, 1853

The absence of landed property is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Therein lies its political and religious history. But how to explain the fact that orientals never reached the stage of landed property, not even the feudal kind? This is, I think, largely due to the climate, combined with the nature of the land, more especially the great stretches of desert extending from the Sahara right across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary to the highest of the Asiatic uplands. Here artificial irrigation is the first prerequisite for agriculture, and this is the responsibility either of the communes, the provinces or the central government’ (Engels 1853).

Marx

‘The stationary nature of this part of Asia, despite all the aimless activity on the political surface, can be completely explained by two mutually supporting circumstances: 1. The public works system of the central government and, 2. Alongside this, the entire Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is an agglomeration of villages, each with its own distinct organisation and each forming its own small world’http://sondmor.tripod.com/index-9.html

In a large number of early second-millennium texts recording the sale of small parcels of privately owned arable land in southern Babylonia, the vendors appear to be groups (not individuals) in only 30 percent of the cases. Although the eminent Soviet Assyriologist Diakonoff (1974b: 49, n.13) would like to identify these "groups" as "family communes," he admits that the "kinship relations of the individual vendors between themselves is in such cases not always indicated." He adds, with respect to the sale of date plantations and gardens, that in both the north and south the percentage of group vendors is insignificant. Along the same line, in seeking to relate inheritance laws to "underlying economic structures," Skaist (1975: 244-45) concludes, "the sale of land by more than one person, e.g. partners, is rare in comparison with the sale of land by one individual. Moreover, the sale of land by a single individual is made without reference to any permission that may have been granted by the members of the family that one would expect if we were dealing with joint property." In attempting to rebut this hard evidence, Skaist offers the thought that perhaps the sellers were acting as "trustees." This evidence discredits Diakonoff's (1974b: 51) claim that "private property in the modern sense was not known in any of the ancient societies." Exactly, what the "modern sense" is, of course, open to discussion.

In fact there are references to purchases of land by kings. To cite one example, in the Neo-Assyrian period king Sargon purchased land needed for his new capital: "the price of the field of that town I paid back to their owners according to the record of the purchase documents (ki pi tuppate sajjimanute), in silver and copper." (Fales 1996: 19) Apparently, some of the lands Sargon acquired had been purchased, not inherited, by the present owners. In this case, as in the others mentioned below, there is no evidence for the assertion that the king confiscated the land. Indeed, if all the land were his there would be no question of confiscation and no reason for the ruler to go through the motions of pretending to make a purchase. Surely, the fact that the king held "prior rights" over the land would have been no secret to the public!

A strong testimony to the idea of private property in arable land is provided by an Akkadian letter of the eighteenth century B.C.E. from Mari. The letter (number 45) was written by king Zimri-Lim to Yaqqim-Addu, governor of Saggaratum. A man protested to the king that a royal official had tried to take away his field in the following terms: "I hold 10 dikes of field (an item of) the last will (of my father) which my father purchased for me" (Heimpel 1997: 65, n.5). In other words, the individual believed that not even the king had a right to seize his land because he had inherited it from his father who had purchased it. Unless this man was a complete lunatic there is nothing "very recent" about the idea of private property! I hope this illustrates just how limited the archaeological dataset Marx was working with was.

will franklin

3rd July 2015, 05:55

Childe's book on the Ayrians emphasized cultural diffusion over a large area. Obviously, this has to do with the propagation of the Ayrian (indo-european language group.

In other words, that English, Sanskrit, Farsi and Armenian are related is now taken for granted via a series of transformation rules, such as f to p to v, etc. It was not, however, in the 1930's and 40's--we can thank Childe that now it is.

Today, archaeology uses methods invented by Childe, in particular his sites in the Scottish islands still serve as role models

Part of Childe's theoretical legacy concerns his descriptions of neolithic village settlements, that extended the 'agricultural revolution' back in time some 5000 years. That this glaringly contradicts Marxian Mo Pro is just to bad for Marx. That's because archaeology as a science is all about finding data, then theorizing. Only zionists and orthodox Marxists cannot understand this.

Yet numerous sources indicate his influence from Marx, which he freely admitted. to this end, the growth of material culture can be classified by levels of achievement that are empirically verified.

Lastly, Childe did hold views that so-called genetic groups--based upon crude phenotypes such as skin color--progressed at different inherent rates. Hence, he was a racist. For him, Ayrians, semitics, and Chinese possessed better genes, which would account for their 'progress'.

in short, while Childe's racism is an embarrassment of sorts, his contributions remain central to the development of archaeology as a science.

Read the book. It's all about the origins and culture of the oh so superior "Aryan race". It has fuck all to do with Aryanism as simply linguistics. Childe got into deep shit during and after WWII for publishing this crap and spent time trying to repent without disowning all the racist implications of shit work

Rafiq

3rd July 2015, 07:15

The problem, however, is the misunderstanding of private property and private landed property as one and the same. Marx states in volume 3 of Capital that:

Should the direct producers not be confronted by a private landowner, but rather, as in Asia, under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. But, on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land

The point is not so much that no private "possession" of land as such exists, but that the utilization of the land is subordinate to a centralized public works system (i.e. for example an irrigation system), rather than merely as property. Hence, there wasn't such a thing as "landlords", but there obviously existed private property.

Taken from a source, the following sums up Marx and Engels' conception of oriental despoitsm:

1. Natural economy based on the unity of agriculture and handicrafts with a fixed division of labour. In the case of India and Egypt the division of labour is based on a caste system.
2. Communal (state) ownership with communal and individual possession of the land
3. Public works as a precondition for settled agriculture forming the basis of the state.
4. Surplus appropriation by the state from villages in the form of a tribute (unity of tax and rent)

This was as true for Akkadian civilization (with #2 being more confused) as it was most certainly and unequivocally true for Persia, India and China. Even in Ancient Egypt, which is known to almost have been something akin to a command economy, small plots of land existed and were owned "privately". The problem however is how one defines "private property" in pertinence to landed property. Certainly it was property, but not landed property in pertinence to the whole basis of production. The ability to own land entailed certain privileges and a kind of ceremonial, socially recognized honor, but it was still heavily regulated in a centralized manner so much so to the point where it might be more akin to an administrator than some kind of autonomous farmer. If such a categorization remains insufficient, then these societies can hardly be conceived as "Feudal" for the same reason that Marx dismissed the idea that India was a feudal society, because of the absence of serfdom among a plethora of other reasons, namely the exaltation of land.

If the notion of the Asiatic mode of production did not apply to these civilizations, that is very well - but neither could feudalism. The Asiatic mode of production, in addition largely did apply to the societies that received its label by Marx and Engels, but Marxists obviously could not go about dismissing the intricacies of each according society with such a broad term, for there was obviously quite a difference between the Indus River Valley civilization and the later Indian society, and likewise an abundance of differences between ancient Persian society and Persia under the Safavids. The usefulness of the term was never to dismissively designate societies as following a certain 'stage' and leave it at that, but to broadly describe certain societies with similar characteristics, that were likewise at a similar stage of development.

Rafiq

3rd July 2015, 07:28

The issue we're discussing correctly assumes that Engels cited Morgan, whose scheme was unilinear.

That Engels cited Morgan's empirical findings has nothing to do with whether Engels adhered to a "unilinear" scheme of social development. Engels described the evolution towards present day society, not some kind of abstract model which designates that all social formations will lead to 19th century industrial capitalism. That is beyond vulgar.

For example, ancient Greeks and Romans most certainly possessed factories. They likewise paid (exploitative) wages. Armies that won enslaved the losers to work in mines to extract metals for weapons, and in fields depleted by males serving in the army of conquest. In this respect, i believe that it's far more informative to see how exploitation and capitalism (the comodification of labor) changes throughout the years.

What is ridiculous here is that wages probably more or less existed in every social formation following the advent of private property, your notion of "exploitation" is versed solely on moral, rather than scientific grounds. No there was nothing capitalist about this exploitation, given the absence of generalized commodity production. Such an understanding is contingent upon the notion that history does not exist, that it merely denotes the evolution of everything that presently exists "manifesting" through different forms. We end up with "exploitation" and "capitalism" being timeless historical facts that simply "evolve" differently. But these are merely abstractions we inaccurately project onto previous historic epochs. We might be able to find several "apparent" similarities, but these will only ever be appearances - we will never get an iota closer to understanding these societies by their own merits and function.

To say that the stage-ism of Engels was perpetrated by the Soviet Bloc is to fundamentally agree with Koliakowski: without the appearance of the soviet state, both Engels and Marx would have been long-forgotten.

The reason this is a rather desperate assertion, one that might flatter us Marxists, is the fact that Marx and Engels's popularity in the west had grown so large even before the Bolshevik revolution in such fields as sociology that Lenin himself spoke of how liberals were on to white-washing his vitality. Western Marxism took an entirely different course than did official Soviet doctrine, and it is patently obvious that if anything the existence of the former greatly hindered the ability for those in the west to correctly recall Marx and Engels. The idea that Marx and Engels were somehow forgettable, irrelevant thinkers that merely became the bizarre idiosyncrasy of the Soviet state is a special kind of bullshit that could only possibly be cooked up in the minds of those desperate bourgeois ideologues who try to discredit, de-legitimize and slander them in every way fathom possible.

khad

3rd July 2015, 11:18

This was as true for Akkadian civilization (with #2 being more confused) as it was most certainly and unequivocally true for Persia, India and China. Even in Ancient Egypt, which is known to almost have been something akin to a command economy, small plots of land existed and were owned "privately". The problem however is how one defines "private property" in pertinence to landed property. Certainly it was property, but not landed property in pertinence to the whole basis of production. The ability to own land entailed certain privileges and a kind of ceremonial, socially recognized honor, but it was still heavily regulated in a centralized manner so much so to the point where it might be more akin to an administrator than some kind of autonomous farmer. If such a categorization remains insufficient, then these societies can hardly be conceived as "Feudal" for the same reason that Marx dismissed the idea that India was a feudal society, because of the absence of serfdom among a plethora of other reasons, namely the exaltation of land.

Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale.
Yeah, how about no. Tax exemptions and exclusive franchises were a feature of "private" land ownership across ancient economies.

From Silver, Economic Structures of Antiquity:

Royal decrees granting tax exemption to this or another temple or priest are known from all periods of Egyptian history. An outstanding illustration provided by a decree of Pepi II (2275-2185) from the temple of Min at Coptos. Pepi's decree only exempted "Min-makes-the-foundation-of-Neferkare-to-flourish" from various requisitions and corvees but even forbade officials to issue or receive orders referring to the personnel or activities of this foundation. A later example of this is the Nauri decree of Seti I, which richly endowed a "House" of Osiris in Nubia (where it might collect the coveted southern products) and also prohibited "interference" with its people, goods, and land. Its personnel might not be transported outside of the district for the corvee, and its ships might not be stopped to collect duties.Gruyter, Reallexikon D Assyriologie
re: Kassite fief grants and the diffusion of land transactions into the private sphere

Under the Second Isin dynasty, the scope of the genre broadened considerably. Royal land grants continued, but they were proportionately fewer and the king was often described as working through local officials. The king also granted tax-exemption charters for land already possessed. Transactions between private individuals were recorded; sales of land, gifts of land as part of a dowry, etc.

After the Second Isin Dynasty, although almost all kudurrus were still concerned in some way with real estate, the emphasis shifted. Royal grants became less common. Transactions dealing with house lots, orchards, and small plots of city land were recorded in increasing numbers...

The sealed clay document was the formal legal proof or registration of the transaction; it was kept in the custody of the owner of the property. The kudurru, on the other hand, was a documentary monument intended to strengthen or confirm the efficacy of the legal action; it was essentially for display. Even if the king himself had originally been responsible for enacting the transaction, the landowner in many instances wished to obtain futher security by putting his title to the property under additional special protection of the gods: by fashioning a monument out of a relatively uncommon material, by engraving on it on both symbols of the gods and curses invoking divine power against any transgressor...this enhanced the religious dimension and more effectively put the property and its owner under the protection of the gods.

The point is not so much that no private "possession" of land as such exists, but that the utilization of the land is subordinate to a centralized public works system (i.e. for example an irrigation system), rather than merely as property. Hence, there wasn't such a thing as "landlords", but there obviously existed private property.

Section on agriculture from the Code of Hammurabi, among other things detailing the distinction between sale and rent, private responsibility for sections of the irrigation system, and landlord-tenant relations.

18 A woman, merchant or other property holder may sell a field, garden or house. The purchaser shall conduct the business of the field, garden or house which he has purchased. 40

19 If a man rent a field for cultivation and do not produce any grain in the field, they shall call him to account, because he has not performed the work required on the field, and he shall give the owner of the field grain on the basis of the yield of adjacent fields. 41

20 If a man owe a debt and the river inundate his field and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall not pay the interest for that year. 48

21 If a man neglect to strengthen his dike and do not strengthen it, and a break be made in his dike and the water carry away the farmland, the man in whose dike the break has been made shall restore the grain which he has damaged. 53

22 If he be not able to restore the grain, they shall sell him and his goods, and the farmers whose grain the water has carried away shall share (the results of the sale). 54

23 If a man cut down a tree in a man’s orchard, without the consent of the owner of the orchard, he shall pay thirty shekels [one-half pound of silver]. 59

24 If a man give his orchard to a gardener to manage, the gardener shall give to the owner of the orchard two-thirds of the produce of the orchard, as long as he is in possession of the orchard; he himself shall take one-third. 64

25 If the gardener do not properly manage the orchard and he diminish the produce, the gardener shall measure out the produce of the orchard on the basis of the adjacent orchards. 65

Rafiq

3rd July 2015, 17:26

But again, this is a misunderstanding of what constitutes private property, rather than possession, which Marx acknowledged existed in societies characterized by the Asiatic mode of production. No one doubts that there was fluidity in transactions between possession of land, but it was not "property" insofar as one could do as they pleased with it, or use it for the sole purpose of self-aggrandizement. Generally, land use was subservient to national prerogatives, which you yourself show in the Code of Hammurabi. The reason for this was the precariousness of agriculture, but this was not approached in an indirect manner - centralized powers, whether royalty or temples, directly recognized and acted upon the holistic implications land use had for the nation. In feudalism, "this" generally did not amount to much more than Trinoda necessitas. Keep in mind that the Asiatic mode of production was only conceived vis-a-vis both ancient and feudal societies, wherein private ownership of land directly formed the foundation of the economies.

Of course there were exceptions in the scale of interference by centralized powers - but the example you provided for Egypt concerned what appeared to be two religious institutions, and it is well known that the religious powers in Asiatic societies were directly responsible for processes of production - in fact, this was so much so that initially anthropologists were led to believe that all land was directly owned by the respective temples and religious institutions in Asiatic societies. The fact that such exemptions were made in the first place suggests that it was not a widespread, generalized condition of production but exceptional. Land could be bought and sold, but this might be more akin to selling and buying the rights to administrate something if anything (though not an entirely accurate generalization, of course) - and there were many privileges in doing so, high social stature, etc.

When conceiving a mode of production, one must focus on the foundational basis of all production, which in this case was the organized agricultural basis that was dependent and subservient to the public works irrigation system.

Spectre of Spartacism

3rd July 2015, 22:38

The functional duty performed by the Asiatic mode in Marx's works was to explain the slightly different trajectory of the East as opposed to the West as far as the development of capitalism is concerned.

He did that through stressing that there was no private property among the exploited classes, though as khad points out there was private property and tenured land ownership among segments of the ruling classes in these societies. The greater preservation of the commune among the peasantry, the relative lack of importance of private ownership of land as far as their resistance to exploitation, was the result of the hydraulic projects already mentioned in the thread, necessitating the need for a stronger centralized bureaucracy.

These characteristics made this mode of production, if you want to call it that, different than the feudalism that existed in Europe, where greater decentralization permitted private allotment of lands and the development of a wealthy peasantry that functioned as incipient capitalists.

Marx never got the Asiatic mode down to a precise definition as he did with capitalism or feudalism. IMO his writing was something of a mixture of empirical descriptions of various forms of exploitation that were leading to a class society, combined with descriptions of a form of feudalism in which state exercised greater control over the nobility, preventing that nobility from delegating tenure to various segments of the peasantry.

khad

4th July 2015, 02:15

He did that through stressing that there was no private property among the exploited classes, though as khad points out there was private property and tenured land ownership among segments of the ruling classes in these societies. The greater preservation of the commune among the peasantry, the relative lack of importance of private ownership of land as far as their resistance to exploitation, was the result of the hydraulic projects already mentioned in the thread, necessitating the need for a stronger centralized bureaucracy.
Again, the so-called "strong" bureaucracy...Qing China at its height (18th century) had one civilian official per 11,250 people compared to one per 4,000 for 16th century England (D.H. Sacks, "The paradox of taxation: fiscal crises, parliament, and liberty in England"). Louis XIV had 1 official for every 7,700 subjects for tax purposes alone (Collis, The State in Early Modern France).

There's a reason why Hammurabi's code included individual property liability for dike failures - throughout most of human history bureaucracies and state capabilities were so laughably small that they had virtually no means of direct year-long administration of territory, leading to a de facto decentralization of sovereignty. A month-long corvee might dig some canals, but the day-to-day inspection and maintenance of the infrastructure was the responsibility of local communities and even individual landowners.

There are so many logical backflips people have done in this thread to justify Marx's incomplete and half-baked model of history, but I'm willing to just say that false premises lead to false results.

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 02:45

Again, the so-called "strong" bureaucracy...Qing China at its height (18th century) had one civilian official per 11,250 people compared to one per 4,000 for 16th century England (D.H. Sacks, "The paradox of taxation: fiscal crises, parliament, and liberty in England"). Louis XIV had 1 official for every 7,700 subjects for tax purposes alone (Collis, The State in Early Modern France).

There's a reason why Hammurabi's code included individual property liability for dike failures - throughout most of human history bureaucracies and state capabilities were so laughably small that they had virtually no means of direct year-long administration of territory, leading to a de facto decentralization of sovereignty. A month-long corvee might dig some canals, but the day-to-day inspection and maintenance of the infrastructure was the responsibility of local communities and even individual landowners.

There are so many logical backflips people have done in this thread to justify Marx's incomplete and half-baked model of history, but I'm willing to just say that false premises lead to false results.

If you reduce the concept of political strength purely to an abstract comparison of numbers, rather than assessing the issue on the basis of actual class and political relationships in the context of forces and relations of production, then there is no wonder that you find Marx's models of history wanting. I'm sure the US state's bureaucracy is, in per capita terms, weaker than those of far less developed societies. The focal point for analysis here shouldn't be the number of state officials, but the number of state officials in the context of the force and numbers necessary to extract the requisite surplus in light of how it extracts that surplus. I hope you see how trying to make a comparison in purely quantitative terms is misleading. If not, you fit right into the ostensibly leftist milieu that insists on talking about power divorced from class.

In the "asiatic societies," as I have already indicated, tribute was often extracted by a bureaucracy from a distance, so that the bureaucracy had less day-to-day control over the peasantry in a way that permitted the continuation of the peasant communal forms of production. None of this contradicts what you have shared in this thread.

Centralized doesn't mean strong. The opposite is actually the case: the Asiatic mode has variously been interpreted as a transition to a full class state. Or in other cases it has been interpreted as a state that is only "strong" in relation to its ability to curb the landed aristocracy, not in its ability to control the peasantry. That ability would reflect a lesser developed state that isn't as able to assert confidently its control over landed aristocrats without compromising its control over the surplus taken from peasants.

The fact it can't diffuse its power in a stable way over a wider territory is a sign of its weakness as a state, though the centralized agents have more power than its outlying officials and gentry.

khad

4th July 2015, 02:58

I'm sure the US state's bureaucracy is, in per capita terms, weaker than those of far less developed societies.
https://www.boundless.com/political-science/textbooks/boundless-political-science-textbook/bureaucracy-13/bureaucracy-86/size-of-the-federal-bureaucracy-472-8009/

Political officials often pledge to shrink the size of federal bureaucracy while at the same time promising to enhance its efficiency. The number of civilian federal employees, at least, has not increased since the 1960s.

There are 16.2 million state and local government workers, meaning federal government does not need to hire approximately 4.05 million workers to carry out its policies.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the number of senior executives and political appointees in federal bureaucracy quintupled.

The average number of layers between president and street-level bureaucrats swelled from 17 in 1960 to 32 in 1992.

To manage the growing federal bureaucracy, Presidents have gradually surrounded themselves with many layers of staff, who were eventually organized into the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

318.9m / 16.2m = 19.6

19.6 compared to 4000 for feudal England.

OK. The US has a weaker per capita bureaucracy. :rolleyes:

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 03:01

318.9m / 16.2m = 19.6

19.6 compared to 4000 for feudal England.

OK. The US has a weaker per capita bureaucracy. :rolleyes:

You ignore the main content of my post to engage in more quantitative comparisons. Your methodology has nothing to do with revolutionary politics, and everything to do with bourgeois accounting principles.

khad

4th July 2015, 03:25

You ignore the main content of my post to engage in more quantitative comparisons. Your methodology has nothing to do with revolutionary politics, and everything to do with bourgeois accounting principles.
And you're like the creationist who reads "the sky is purple" in the bible and then goes off to squint and stare at the sun until all you see is a kaleidoscope of colors, one of which *might* be purple. Satisfied, faith reaffirmed.

I have laid out plenty of evidence regarding the problems with the so-called Asiatic mode, namely the existence of private property, individual liability for supposed public goods, and the realities of pre-modern bureaucracies. Oh, and btw, historical studies of taxation in early modern Europe indicated that overall rates of taxation were actually much higher in Europe. France, which actually had one of the lowest per capita tax rates in the 17th century, was still much higher than in China.

Yet every line out of you is "blah blah juggernaut state owning everything blah blah taxing the shit out of peasants blah blah." Which, today, is a standard libertarian argument that was, ironically, first devised by so-called Marxists.

To quote economist David Landes:

China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights. The Chinese
state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise—to take over
certain activities, to prohibit and inhibit others, to manipulate prices, to exact
bribes.

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 03:32

And you're like the creationist who reads "the sky is purple" in the bible and then goes off to squint and stare at the sun until all you see is a kaleidoscope of colors, one of which *might* be purple. Satisfied, faith reaffirmed.

I have laid out plenty of evidence regarding the problems with the so-called Asiatic mode, namely the existence of private property, individual liability for supposed public goods, and the realities of pre-modern bureaucracies. Oh, and btw, historical studies of taxation in early modern Europe indicated that overall rates of taxation were actually much higher in Europe. France, which actually had one of the lowest per capita tax rates in the 17th century, was still much higher than in China.

Yet every line out of you is "blah blah juggernaut state owning everything blah blah taxing the shit out of peasants blah blah stifling innovation blah blah." Which, today, is a standard libertarian argument that was, ironically, first devised by so-called Marxists.

To quote economist David Landes:

You've laid out what you consider to be problems and I have responded to those assertions of yours. Your approach to class analysis has been laid bare for all to see. It consists of counting and quote mongering.

A Marxist would understand that fifty nodal points of surplus appropration over an expansive territory represents a state that is in Marxist terms stronger than a state with a single and more centralized authority that, while able to appropriate much more surplus than any of the other more localized powers, is actually far weaker in its overall ability to appropriate surplus...collectively as an interlocking group of enfiefed officials. How this relates to geographical specificity of different ancient civilizations should be obvious. It represents a starting point for materialist analysis of history. you don't appear to be aware of this, and it is troubling.

Marxists would not do as you have done and strip state power out of the context of how and where it exercised, or over what forces of production it is exercised.

For Marx the asiatic mode is a concept used to explain politically how capitalism developed first on the european continent, though it was on the verge of beginning to break through in parts of Asia. With your model of the world, we are left with no explanation. If you have one, I would like to hear it.

khad

4th July 2015, 04:06

For Marx the asiatic mode is a concept used to explain politically how capitalism developed first on the european continent, though it was on the verge of beginning to break through in parts of Asia. With your model of the world, we are left with no explanation. If you have one, I would like to hear it.
Then I truly feel sorry for you, as you apparently lack the imagination to process historical variables sitting outside of your holy text.

Anyone dealing with a history like China's has to be aware of the dynastic cycle, and anyone with a cursory understanding of the topic would realize, unlike Marx, that the process of history was alive and well and that for example during the later Ming, we saw the abolition of the corvee, the growth of the merchant caste (with the privatization of formerly state industries like tea and salt), and the proliferation of wage labor. Of course, these developments were slowed or even frozen in the mass violence that ended the Ming period. The new Qing overlords, being a foreign imposition, did the standard thing of prizing stability over development.

There's a compelling case to be made - through mathematical models, even - that a large empire, while much better at driving the factors of production during times of relative peace, is more vulnerable to systemic shocks and violent total collapses than agglomerations of smaller states. A dynasty falling typically resulted in the extermination of 20-50% of the population. Imagine this happening periodically every couple of hundred years, and one can begin to see how that might be an impediment to the accumulation of technical knowledge and sustained economic growth.

http://i.imgur.com/FVxWKsC.png

But please, do go whack off some more to Marx and Engels letters. If you want your philosophy without one empirical fact about the last thousand years of Asian history, then who am I to stop you?

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 04:46

Then I truly feel sorry for you, as you apparently lack the imagination to process historical variables sitting outside of your holy text.

I understand you are angry you don't have much of an argument, but there's really no reason to flame.

Anyone dealing with a history like China's has to be aware of the dynastic cycle, and anyone with a cursory understanding of the topic would realize, unlike Marx, that the process of history was alive and well and that for example during the later Ming, we saw the abolition of the corvee, the growth of the merchant caste (with the privatization of formerly state industries like tea and salt), and the proliferation of wage labor. Of course, these developments were slowed or even frozen in the mass violence that ended the Ming period. The new Qing overlords, being a foreign imposition, did the standard thing of prizing stability over development.Do you mind showing wearing Marx claimed that history was not alive and well in China or in any other society? Marx commented that there was a kind of stagnation, a stagnation in the development of the integration of tenured private property into the framework of state power. That was a correct statement, and it helps to explain the different historical trajectory of the eastern civilizations.

I affirmed earlier that Marx was working with a dramatically circumscribed and underdeveloped body of empirical information regarding ancient Chinese civilization, but it is another thing to invent Cold War strawmen that misrepresent Marx as an outdated Eurocentric thinker.

Basic familiarity with ancient Chinese history acknowledges the dynastic cycles, with bureaucrats undermining their tax-farming state by attempting to invest in movable property then later land, attempting to merge with the gentry, as a result decreasing the income of the peasantry and provoking political resistance that would lead to the destruction of the dynasty.

None of this contradicts Marx's statements about what he sloppily called Asiatic society. Where what you've said is right, you're using the benefit of two hundred years of historical and archaeological research to unknowingly devleop points that Marx was struggling to make with the shards of empirical information he had at hand. That point is that Eastern societies were less conducive to the development of the forces of production. They were hindered by a political apparatus that developed out of a definite configuration of the forces and relations of production specific to the geography of those civilizations. That configuration has often been referred to as hydraulic.

There's a compelling case to be made - through mathematical models, even - that a large empire, while much better at driving the factors of production during times of relative peace, is more vulnerable to shocks and violent total collapses than agglomerations of smaller states. A dynasty falling typically resulted in the extermination of 20-50% of the population. Imagine this happening periodically every couple of hundred years, and one can begin to see how that might be an impediment to the accumulation of technical knowledge and sustained economic growth.Lo and behold, you're accidentally making an argument that I've been suggesting, although you are a framing it in an entirely ahistorical way divorced from the development of the forces of production. What determines a time of relative peace and a time of turmoil is what you, in your bourgeois prejudice, refuse to account for: class struggle and its links to material production.

The dynastic cycles in ancient China revolved around a specific political framework that developed out of a definite level of technology and could not countenance a higher level of technology without collapsing. The effort by bureaucrats to push outward and diffuse their power throughout the empire by gobbling up land would have, in theory, permitted a greater development of the productive forces much as feudalism had in Europe. The division of peasant land into alienable tracts under private tenure to maximize the appropriation of surplus by local gentry would have given an impetus to generate newer technology by the peasantry. The difference is that in China, unlike in medieval England, the aristocracy was not able to achieve this level of independence to involve itself in peasant land tenure. Why it wasn't able to was that concentrated, large-scale projects were more important to the survival of people within those societies. An accident of history determined by the contingency of geographical distribution of resources.

But please, do go whack off some more to Marx and Engels letters. If you want your philosophy without one empirical fact about the last thousand years of Asian history, then who am I to stop you?How do you conclude that I am not interested in empirical data? Is it that I don't agree with your strawman misrepresentations of Marx? Intellectually dishonest nonsense like this was common during the Cold War. It's a shame for you that the current political climate makes it impossible to make a career of flouting it, so that you are forced to peddle it to unsuspecting victims on an Internet forum instead.

RedMaterialist

4th July 2015, 05:00

For example, ancient Greeks and Romans most certainly possessed factories. They likewise paid (exploitative) wages. Armies that won enslaved the losers to work in mines to extract metals for weapons, and in fields depleted by males serving in the army of conquest. In this respect, i believe that it's far more informative to see how exploitation and capitalism (the comodification of labor) changes throughout the years.

Marx demolished this argument in the Introduction to a Contribution.... in 1859 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm#205):

Marx:...For instance, on failure to perceive this fact depends the entire wisdom of modern economists who prove the eternity and harmony of existing social relations. For example, no production is possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is simply the hand. It is not possible without past, accumulated labour, even if this labour is only the skill acquired by repeated practice and concentrated in the hand of a savage. Capital is among other things also an instrument of production, and also past, materialised labour. Consequently capital is a universal and eternal relation given by nature that is, provided one omits precisely those specific factors which turn the “instrument of production” or “accumulated labour” into capital.

What you attempt to prove is the eternity of existing economic relations. Capitalistic factories existed in 200 BC Rome, and ancient slavery exists today. The modern capitalist really doesn't care about slavery of any kind; what he needs are useful idiots like you who assure the public that capitalism is really nothing new in human history, it has always been present, therefore we can't do anything about it.

It's likewise important to observe that, today, raw materials that enable factory production are not 'capitalistic'. Like the raw materials of Rome's foundries of 200BC, Paris' Atliers of 1550, much of what we consume today is produced by virtual slave labor.

Raw materials produced by virtual (what is a virtual slave, anyway) slave labor? Some of the best paid wage-"slaves" are oil production workers, fisheries production, coal, iron production, etc. You may consider this work dangerous and dirty, but to say it is slavery is ridiculous. Which is not to say that slavery doesn't exist, sex-slaves, for instance.

without the appearance of the soviet state, both Engels and Marx would have been long-forgotten.

You, von Mises, Bohm-Bahwerk (who?) and Ronald Reagan have consigned Marxism to the dustbin of history. Is the anthropology field so completely infected with bourgeois ideology?

will franklin

4th July 2015, 05:48

will franklin

4th July 2015, 08:21

….and only a useless idiot such as your self would dare assume, idiotically, that labeling a phenomena ‘transient’ would make it more amenable to change than permanence. Translated into Red-diaperese, this means that Marx’s ‘assurance’ that Capitalism is a passing stage only endows history with a teleology that far more resembles god-is-coming mumbo-jumbo than naturalism.

I also understand that belief in such drivel supports Stalinism. This is because Marxism says that because capitalism can be overturned, any means justifies this end. In this regard, my so-called affiliation with Austrian skool economiks looks pretty good: they’re far less wrong than you people.

So you’re absolutely daffy in writing that because something is eternal, we can’t do anything about it. That’s as dumb as saying that just because we cannot abolish gravity, planes won’t stay in the air; we’re all doomed to die at 30 because we can’t get rid of bacteria, etc…

Boas simply said that because Engels swallowed Morgan’s erroneous stuff for ulterior motives, he must be evil. To this extent, Boas, representing American anthropology as its founding father, clearly and rightly saw bourgeois thought as far superior to Marxism. To transform capitalism into workable socialism, first you need to rid yourselves of these Marxo-people.

Re your citation from Marx: an economist can say that social relations are ‘eternal’, yet with or without harmony. Marx, OTH, is saying nothing more than if and only if social relations are understood as transient (not eternal) will my theory of the overthrow of capitalism hold true. Well, gosh, we knew that already!

So you and Marx pitch verbal hissy-fits to make others feel that because you can click your heels three in your red slippers, you can make your theory come true! Kansas will become one big, happy collective farm, or whatever. The fact, however, is that ‘eternal/natural’ and ‘transient/evolutionary’ capitalism are counterpoised hypotheses which must be proven true of false by the facts. But again, you and Marx present only feel-good wishes.

My point as an anthropologist is that your ‘anthropological’ evidence is false, because Morgan’s thesis is unsupported. So maybe the Wizard of Oz can be of service?

Lastly, were the ‘specific factors’ as alluded to by Marx really that specific? This, again, circles back into the same evolutionary vs fixed argument as before. Strange to tell, Marx presents no facts, merely blustering, self-assertive rhetoric. Again, for socialism to succeed, it must rid itself of his genre.

What you attempt to prove is the eternity of existing economic relations. Capitalistic factories existed in 200 BC Rome, and ancient slavery exists today. The modern capitalist really doesn't care about slavery of any kind; what he needs are useful idiots like you who assure the public that capitalism is really nothing new in human history, it has always been present, therefore we can't do anything about it.

Raw materials produced by virtual (what is a virtual slave, anyway) slave labor? Some of the best paid wage-"slaves" are oil production workers, fisheries production, coal, iron production, etc. You may consider this work dangerous and dirty, but to say it is slavery is ridiculous. Which is not to say that slavery doesn't exist, sex-slaves, for instance.

You, von Mises, Bohm-Bahwerk (who?) and Ronald Reagan have consigned Marxism to the dustbin of history. Is the anthropology field so completely infected with bourgeois ideology?

The Garbage Disposal Unit

4th July 2015, 11:44

….and only a useless idiot such as your self [. . .]

Zero tolerance for flaming in the learning forum. Keep it clean please.
Please see the "Read before posting" sticky (http://www.revleft.com/vb/read-before-posting-t182306/index.html).

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

4th July 2015, 12:23

There is definite pressure on anthropologists not to assume without evidence that the introduction of new technology leads to 'advancement', or that the ensuing changes in social organization automatically leads to an 'advancement', either. You simply wouldn't get published.

This, in short, was precisely the error of Morgan: to assume an 'evolution' of kinship terms that indicated social evolution, in general. Again, this is called 'categorization before measurement'--the most fundamental of all scientific errors.

In passing, supply and demand models as such were devastated by Keynes between 19222 and 1929.

Re Morgan's fieldwork: Yes, he personally gathered information on kinship terminology from both the Iroquois and plains Indians. Strange to tell (!), theirs,while similar in many respects, fundamentally differed from ours in labeling our 'aunts' and 'uncles' by different names depending on laterality (father v mother's side).

Then he collated his own rather good work with the 'reports' of others. Voila a totally wrong scheme as to how he entirety of humanity is evolving towards our own system.

Boas, for his part, politely suggested to his own students that all data be verifiable. he also rather strongly felt that labeling others as 'savages' totally misses the point of 'cultural relativism'. First, derive an internal understanding prior to labeling. This, btw, is basic 101 which I had to teach as a grad student. Achieving a PhD meant instructing in 'theory' and 'method'--thankfully beyond the grasp of the marxo-paranoids.

It seems to be that time again. The appearance of self-appointed bringers of enlightenment, here to convince us of the Holy Trinty of the Eternal Markets, the Eternal State, and the Eternal Family, amen, on the basis of positivist myths, is indeed a regular occurrence on RL. And your posting here is particularly embarrassing. First you claim that Morgan's work was based on hearsay, then you yourself list some instances of his fieldwork. (If the use of reports counts as "hearsay", of course, much of anthropology would have to be discarded - but not Lowie, for example, who based his book on Germany, written at the request of the US government, pretty much on nothing at all.) You imply that Morgan had a negative view of those peoples he, following standard Victorian terminology, assigned to the state of savagery or barbarism, completely ignoring his own conclusions in "Ancient Society":

"Property and office were the foundations upon which aristocracy planted itself.
Whether this principle shall live or die has been one of the great problems with which modern society has been engaged through the intervening periods. As a question between equal rights and unequal rights, between equal laws and unequal laws, between the rights of wealth, of rank and of official position, and the power of justice and intelligence, there can be little doubt of the ultimate result. Although several thousand years have passed away without the overthrow of privileged classes, excepting in the United States, their burdensome character upon society has been demonstrated.

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanagable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations.

A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of its self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes."

But worst of all, despite blustering about your PhD, you show a complete misunderstanding of how science works. What you term "categorization before measurement" is called, in serious work on how science is done (although probably not in positivist fairly-tales) the theory-ladeness of data, and it is an inescapable aspect of scientific work. Without a prior theory, no experimental or observational reports would be possible. (If I don't accept classical electrodynamics, I won't "see" changes in the current if I look at an ampermetre; I will see a dial move, and ascribe it to some other cause.)

As for progress, articles get published all the time that demonstrate the progress in e.g. lithic technology in the Neolithic period, or the increase in productive forces with changes in the social organisation of labour. What is ideologically frowned upon is extending this to the entirety of human history. But it is demonstrable - the increase in the productive forces. Take any metric you want - the production of this or that commodity, maximum population sustainable, whatever. That is what progress means to Marxists. You're trying to read some moral nonsense into it, but that's your personal pathology. Nazi Germany, to a Marxist, entailed a more progressive mode of production than the first hunter-gatherers in Europe. This is not an endorsement of Nazi Germany, but an observation about the productive forces.

Oh, and Keynes of course continued to work with supply and demand models, even if he had to "fix" them a bit to make them seem to approximate the data.

But the real gem of this exchange is this:

Boas simply said that because Engels swallowed Morgan’s erroneous stuff for ulterior motives, he must be evil.

Now I challenge you to find one quotation in the entirety of Boas's work that says anything similar. I won't be holding my breath, though. It's obvious at this point you're just making things up so you can go on a great big cry-wank about how evil Marxists are. Well, yes, to people who think capitalism is eternal and can only be ameliorated we are evil. Boo.

khad

4th July 2015, 12:52

None of this contradicts Marx's statements about what he sloppily called Asiatic society. Where what you've said is right, you're using the benefit of two hundred years of historical and archaeological research to unknowingly devleop points that Marx was struggling to make with the shards of empirical information he had at hand. That point is that Eastern societies were less conducive to the development of the forces of production. They were hindered by a political apparatus that developed out of a definite configuration of the forces and relations of production specific to the geography of those civilizations. That configuration has often been referred to as hydraulic.
You keep on regurgitating your affirmations of the abstract, apparently incontrovertible premises that Marx laid out in the holy texts and regurgitated by Marxists-turned-anticommunists like Wittfogel. On your so-called hydraulic civilization, coined by Wittfogel:

According to Wittfogel, neither too little nor too much water leads necessarily to centralized water controls and governmental despotism. An economy, he says, must be neither too primitive nor too advanced to institute in a water-deficient landscape a “specific hydraulic order of life.” This order, he relates further, has its own type of division of labor and necessitates cooperation on a large scale. Irrigation and flood control, as well as roads, defense systems, palaces and tombs, are government enterprises demanding commandeered labor. Forced or corvée labor is not slave labor, but it is less free than wage-labor. The power of hydraulic states-China, ancient Mexico and Egypt-is greater than the power of government in free enterprise systems. It extends over society as a whole by limiting property rights, by taxation and confiscation and a variety of managerial measures that “prevent the nongovernmental forces of society from crystallizing into independent bodies strong enough to counterbalance and control the political machine” Often benevolent in form, hydraulic despotism is oppressive in content, and its “total power spells total corruption, total terror, total submission and total loneliness.”

It was apparently this "hindering" political apparatus in Ming China that fully endorsed the privatization of government industries and the establishment of wage labor (together with the attendant legal apparatus). There were also movements within the gentry and bureaucratic classes to push for constitutionality and equality before the law, in a very similar fashion to bourgeois reformism in Europe (a summary of these turn of the 16th century ideas can be found in the 1663 text Waiting for the Dawn, which suggested among other things the revival of the position of prime minister to limit the power of the emperor).

Lo and behold, you're accidentally making an argument that I've been suggesting, although you are a framing it in an entirely ahistorical way divorced from the development of the forces of production. What determines a time of relative peace and a time of turmoil is what you, in your bourgeois prejudice, refuse to account for: class struggle and its links to material production.
Yeah, I'm not sure where "northern nomads come in, genocide a bunch of population centers, and install ethno-supremacist settler rule" fits in with the Marxist theory of class struggle. Whatever the case may be, though, I'm sure that facts will just go in one ear and out the other, because who needs facts when all questions can be answered in the realm of theoretical abstraction?

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 17:18

Najibullah's ghost writes:

You keep on regurgitating your affirmations of the abstract, apparently incontrovertible premises that Marx laid out in the holy texts and regurgitated by Marxists-turned-anticommunists like Wittfogel. On your so-called hydraulic civilization, coined by Wittfogel: In your rule-breaking insistence on trying to flame me on the forum, you are having a serious problem distinguishing Wittfogel from Engels. The theory that Asiatic bureaucracies were an extension of a particular geography was spelled out by Engels long before Wittfogel attempted to build off of it with an overly static Weberian model that didn’t account for the possibility that similar forms of "despotism" could arise from of other centralizing projects like nomadic warfare (more on this later). Since you don’t have the knowledge to debate these matters in depth, you namedrop Wittfogel, note that he became an anti-communist, and hope that you can use that to conjure a dishonest association between my ideas and Wittfogel's later politics. Certainly that sort of behavior is not what users of this forum should expect in the learning section, from a moderator.

It was apparently this "hindering" political apparatus in Ming China that fully endorsed the privatization of government industries and the establishment of wage labor (together with the attendant legal apparatus). There were also movements within the gentry and bureaucratic classes to push for constitutionality and equality before the law, in a very similar fashion to bourgeois reformism in Europe (a summary of these turn of the 16th century ideas can be found in the 1663 text Waiting for the Dawn, which suggested among other things the revival of the position of prime minister to limit the power of the emperor). You are also continuing to get entangled in easily avoidable confusions. Asiatic bureaucracies held a preponderance of power over outlying tax farmers and nobility in establishing or protecting the traditional land-tenure system that formed the basis of peasant production. In this respect, the bureaucracy was strong. In terms of the state it controlled, the Asiatic bureaucracy represented a weaker form of political power than the decentralized feudal state, for the very decentralization of the feudal state represented the ability of that state to diffuse its power throughout the capillaries of society. It represented a greater universal incorporation of the production process into the purview of a single state's control.

Foucault has noted the same phenomenon in relation to the difference between feudal, premodern power and modern capitalist power. Capitalist power is more diffuse, spread throughout a wider variety of institutions, not needing to rely on intermittent and highly centralized spectacles to attempt to impose stability on exploitative relationships. Both examples point to the link in conditions of scarcity between the parcellization of a state's sovereign powers on the one hand, and on the other the parcellization of the division of labor bringing with it the capacity for the growth of the forces of production within that state's territory.

In Medieval China, the three-way conflict between bureaucracy, aristocracy, and peasantry issued from a different configuration of power, one where the distributional conflicts that rose between local tax-farmers and centralized bureaucratic officials tended to favor the centralized bureaucracy. The result was not total stagnation in the forces of production, for the bureaucracy itself was capable, especially under external pressure, of attempting to stimulate private ownership and the breaking up of sclerotic forms of communal ownership (often by annexing that land themselves, as I have already explained). What it did do was hinder development by restraining private land tenure in the means of production. Remember: capitalism as a mode of production globally developed first in agriculture, not in the mercantile-oriented state "industries" whose privatization you pointed to in your previous post. In societies that bore the mark of what Marx called Asiatic governance, development did occur, but it was mediated through a layer of state officials whose positions would have been jeopardized by introducing large-scale privatization in land.

Failure to suss out these differences can be expected when knowledge about these issues is acquired from a superficial reading of a Wikipedia article or three.

Yeah, I'm not sure where "northern nomads come in, genocide a bunch of population centers, and install ethno-supremacist settler rule" fits in with the Marxist theory of class struggle. Whatever the case may be, though, I'm sure that facts will just go in one ear and out the other, because who needs facts when all questions can be answered in the realm of theoretical abstraction? If you were able to bring a serious materialist methodology to the discussion, you would see that the Mongol invasions are important to analyze through the prism of class structure and development. I know it might seem boring to a person who appears to come to leftism out of an interest in tank formations and oppressive intelligent apparatuses but a new book by Anievas draws from Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development to make a compelling argument that the Mongol empire's nomadic raiding (itself one big centralized Asiatic bureaucratic project) facilitated the geostrategic relationships essential to providing space for the development of capitalism in Western Europe.

This makes sense, as what Marx called Asiatic despotism could preside over social formations that were paying tribute but not yet incorporated into a class society, but could also preside over more developed class formations that were basically just bonapartist variants of feudalism in which the state had yet to be fully integrated into the nobility’s parcellization of power through layered sovereignties extending over vast territories. (Just as Lenin sometimes referred to semi-feudal capitalism, Lenin called this system semi-Asiatic feudalism; it was feudalism with forms of exploitation that resembled the tribute taking that drew local peoples into a wider empire of class exploitation.) These societies were developing, did have a history, and part of an incipient global network of trade and production. What was different about them was the persistence of archaic communal property forms.

It was just as Marx and Engels said, and this permitted them to do what you still have not done, and provide an explanation for the different trajectory of development in Eastern civilizations.

Rafiq

4th July 2015, 18:55

Morgan indeed described the ‘evolution towards modern-day society’ in terms that were rather concrete—not in any way abstract. Yet to say that Engels cited Morgan in his own work is to belabor the point: 60% of Engels’ text is a direct extrapolation of Morgan. In fact, it’s fair to say that Engels’ book is a gloss on Morgan, pure and simple; it’s a way for the Marxist to understand Morgan, as it were.

‘Unilinear Evolution’ is pejorative, pure and simple. It was Boas’ term for the rather hopeless task of ‘describing the “evolution towards modern society”. For him, it also meant conjuring up a particular scheme of evolution towards the present and cherry-picking data for proof.

What you fail to understand is what constitutes "evolution toward modern-day society". Now frankly, it doesn't fucking matter what Morgan believes, because Engels cited his DATA - he had no regard for Morgan's scheme of unilinear evolution. Frankly, this makes perfect sense, because the point of difference between Engels and Morgan was precisely along hte lines of how they conceived social development - the idea that because Engels may have cited Morgan's direct, empirical findings somehow constitutes an extrapolation of Mogan's IDEAS regarding the evolution of society is fucking nonsensical - because it would warrant the non-existence of historical materialism itself and it would have simply allowed Engels to adopt Morgan's conception of social change. Ultimately, while Morgan provided specific scientific insight vis a vis the social, that went beyond his empirical research - such as the profound insight with regard to kinship relations as well as his ability to demonstrate the connection between the "base" and "superstructure" to a minor extent, his conception of history - devoid of Hegel - was bourgeois to its core, it was inherently metaphysical prattling of "timeless facts" of life. If one actually READS Marx and Engels, one finds that the idea that there is a universal "scheme of development" is completely devoid in their works, it was a creative invention of later bourgeois-romantic "Marxists" in the Soviet Union and elsewhere who conceived this. The reality is that it is rather basic to Hegel's logic that only after something happens, does it become inevitable all along - things do not HAVE to happen, but because they did, they fit a general scheme of development that shapes present day society. And this philistine franklin, confronted with this basic fact, commits the unforgivable error that every haughty, arrogant and intellectually disabled bourgeois ideologue does in translating such complexity to some kind of bizarre platitude that they can easily dismiss.

The reality is that 'evolution towards modern day society' means PRECISELY that - how our general condition, here in now, has come to be. In fact, what is so painfully FUCKING stupid about your assertion is that not even Engels was naive enough to think this - the whole fucking POINT of the Asiatic mode of production was that these societies had no general, spontaneous tendency to follow the same path that Europe did in its historical development, and that only with association into the wider capitalist global totality, via free trade, were these societies able to change in such a way that would invoke historic synchronicity with Europe. It is beyond ironic that you level the accusation of "uni-linear development" when the pre-requisites to capitalist accumulation are DIRECTLY acknowledged to be non-existent in societies without association with capitalism in Europe, when even feudalism is acknowledged to not have taken afoot in such societies. Of course it rests on flimsy foundations to conceive Safavid Persia, India and China as all being historically on par with Ancient Egypt in terms of their social development - as these societies were clearly more advanced, but it warrants a specific understanding of social relations in those societies that does't have to conform to Europe's history, and no one made pretenses otherwise. That is why the term is so ambiguous in the first place - Marx simply was stressing that these societies in no meaningful sense could be conceived as feudal, and that the key to understanding their development laid in considerations that weren't found in Europe.

“Well, old-time anthropology had its roots in historicism that was founded by a generic zeitgeist of evolution. We, today, simply know better”.

Except that this could have been known, and was known in the 19th century, perhaps even before then by HEGEL, of whom both Marx and Engels were disciples. "We, today" if this is you, know infinitely less, because you're privileged with the ideological inclination to think that the 19th century has been cast into the dustbin of irrelevancy, that this epoch merely consisted of "figures", spectacles with no independent substance of their own - never mind the 40 years of tireless investigation and theoretical sophistication, all of this is now converted into a stupid aesthetic cliche' of "well back then everyone had metaphysical ideas about the evolution of society". You want to criticize Marx? Then you must do so in a way that meets him eye to eye - you must acknowledge that Marx, for his OWN time period was "wrong", that he COULD have known better but did not. What evidence demonstrates otherwise? And what is fucking idiotic is that Marx EXPLICITLY stated the congruency between his conception of history and Darwin's conception of natural history, which only the philistines conceived as some kind of "unilinear" universal scheme of development. The lesson of Darwin is that yes - a scheme of evolution in natural history is necessary, but ONLY in conceiving the natural world TODAY. This EXACTLY holds true for Marx and Engels. So what teleology is to be found here? The fact of the matter is that it is YOUR error in being unable to fathom this basic fact, that because something happens does not mean it HAD to happen, it does not mean that we must convert it into some kind of metaphysical-ontological platitude so you idealist philistines can comprehend it.

Now to a Marxoid, this might pass as a triviality--much as, say, stuffing little girls in a closet in Yekaterinburg and shooting them. But to an anthropologist, trotting out this nonsense discredits the trotter as a armchair speculator—much as a one who claimed to be a French historian would state that De Gaulle lost the Battle of Waterloo.

Thank you for revealing the inherently unscientific basis for your attacks on Engels, you worthless fucking philistine, thank you for revealing the inherent ideological, moral dimension behind your opposition to Marxism. This, however, could have been known to anyone with a careful eye, so perhaps I personally ought to thank you less than those viewing this thread. Yes, of course it is viewed as a "triviality" that Tsar's kids were killed to Marxists, that is why the executioner fell into a steep depression, was received with contempt even by ardent Bolsheviks, and remained remorseful about the act. But let's not pretend - it was necessary, and we are absolutely unashamed in condoning it, and only a fool who puts his sentimentality before his dedication to the holistic cause would have hesitated. I mean, tell me, would it have been worth strengthening the morale of the white butchers, who I can promise were responsible for the death, rape, and mutilation of children, conceiving it as a triviailty because they were doing god's work? Let me ask you a quick question, would your beloved system, and the ideology which sustains it for a second allow the life of a few little girls to not only hinder its EXISTENCE, but get in the way of profit in the immediate sense? The logic of us "Marxo-paranoids" is that we ought to make heavy sacrifices for the greater good, but the logic of capitalism is sexually enslaving little girls as an extension of the commodification of sexuality in general. You hypocritical piece of fucking shit, you're going ot sit here and lecture us about your moral qualms with the "ends justifies the means"? Well FUCK YOU, you SADISTIC scum are so morally depraved that you can't even follow through with THIS logic, i.e. there seldom even has to be justification for the bloody butchers of capital, it is a given that she must be fed annually with blood-sacrifice in war and in hell.

But as it is to say, it is absolutely FUCKING nonsensical to assume that because of the erroneous conclusion drawn by ANY scientist that it discredits the entirety of their work. All it would reveal is the specific error in the methodology they used in pertinence to the erroneous conclusion, that is how a critical thinker processes information, not a worthless philistine who makes over-reaching claims to make himself comfortable and call it a day, i.e. "Capitalism has always existed, same thing, same story". Are you LITERALLY a fucking idiot? For fuck's sake, was there never error in Darwin? Isaac Newton also dabbled in mystical nonsense, does this go to discredit him in his entirety? You could argue that the same methodological foundations which led to a pretense to the dietary habits of "savages", but how did he come to this conclsuion? First, you don't offer us what this means. If it concerns hunter-gatherers, it is not a far-reaching assumption to think that this was their diet, and how could it be? It depends on what is meant here by "savages" - any Marxist would know that the tribal, pre-civilized societies were not hunter-gatherers at all, and this was outlined very specifically, and very extensively in Engels' work. In pertinence to the designation of pre-neolithic peoples as savages, this had nothing to do with giving them inherently Hobbsean moral qualities (which, as it happens, Marx and Engels did not - by designating the epoch as one of primitive Communism, not post-apocalyptic free-for-all hell), because the term was deeply ingrained into any conception of pre-civilized societies in the west, most especially during the 19th century, it was not a point of controversy to speak of "savages" as it is today. This shoudl be very basic, if not for someone hell bent on distorting information and trying to discredit Marx and Engels in every which way possible.

But to reiterate, no, it is absolutely IDIOTIC to fucking claim this discredits him as an anthropologist, all it shows is how unscientifically you approach such issues, what a fucking intellectually lazy philistine you are. And for the record, no one gives a fuck about your "credentials", as far as we're concerned, you're full of shit - and if not, you're still objectively wrong. If you're not full of shit regarding your credentials, rather than bestowing upon you some kind of aura of legitimacy, it discredits the educational establishment in our society.

but far too little to construct an evolutionary scheme that would encompass all societies at all times.

The correlation was drawn from detailed accounts of pre-civilized Greece which was also largely based on kinship systems. As it happens, the phenomena extended far beyond the native Americans, which means that they had more to work with then them - detailed historical accounts which show a correlation.

Otherwise, marx was in error about ‘generalized commodity production’. If you convert England into one big factory, your raw materials and food will have to come from elsewhere-- from within a larger frame of reference. These probably won’t be produced by capitalism per se. Such is the modern insight of Negri & Hardt….capitalism has always existed.

So, in your inability to actually properly conceive generalized commodity production for what it means, therefore drawing a STUPID fucking abstraction, apparently this confirms that capitalism has always existed? Even if your stupid fucking abstraction worked, it would not mean that capitalism has always existed, it would mean that 'generalized commodity production' does not exist because within the frame of reference that we might call the global economic totality, it would constitute simple commodity production because now England can be converted into "a single factory" (but the point is that IT COULD NOT BE). The problem is that the global capitalist totality DID NOT ARISE until very recently in history, and any FUCKING idiot can know that England's imports from pre-capitalsit societies introduced capitalist relations to thsoe societies, and this was precisely the basis of Marx's support for the introduction of free trade, and the colonization of both India and in China (until the perpetual basis of previous social bonds was done away with - when we can clearly see Marx become more sympathetic toward Indian independence, as well as the independence of colonized peoples across the globe - on the condition that they would transform their project into a revolutionary one, lest they be "taken by the devil", in reference to the Algerians). The global economic totality, the "world economy" did not exist during antiquity, it did not exist during the Middle Ages either, it ONLY was wrought out into existence during the development and rise of capitalist production.

What is most especially fucking idiotic is that even if we take your BULLSHIT with a grain of seriousness - it is very well that England was an industrial capitalist society whose raw materials and resources came from non-capitalist social formations, but how the fuck does this work when THE ENTIRE WORLD EXISTS IN A GLOBAL TOTALITY in the 21st century, where virtually no society can be conceived as pre-capitalist? Please point out to me where our "resources" derive today, that "won't be produced by capitalism per se" (again, a FLIMSY assumption to begin with, because nothing can be "produced by capitalism", rather production is conducted in a specific way, which constitutes capitalist relations - which actually knocks your whole basis of argument to the fucking ground insofar as one cannot be "outside" capitalism if one is part of the totality, as was the case of colonized India and Africa, IT IS STILL PRODUCED BY "CAPITALISM"). But most of all, the most laughably stupid extrapolation we can draw from this is the idea that this sum how sums up Empire, which was written specifically to refer to our postmodern geopolitical epoch and not some timeless fucking fact of history. So no, capitalism has not always existed, and cannot have always existed, simply because capitalist relations themselves extend beyond mere abstractions like "wage labor", "markets" and the presence of factories, it amounts to a totality of specific relations to production, specific processes of production, which has never before been present in any historic epoch. For an empiricist idealist, this is impossible to grasp - the idea that one thing can change into another, you commit the predictable error of thinking that everything that exists, has to be some kind of quantitative extension of something which previously existed. That is not how the evolution of the mind, and reason works, nevermind the evolution of societies themselves.

The Marxist version of ‘exploitation’ is hardly ‘scientific’. Rather, ontological-speculative. Otherwise, some really smart Marxist would have been able to covert labor values into prices, as LTV demands. This is the infamous ‘transformation problem’, btw.
On second thought, since really smart people would realize that the labor inputs have no quantitative values themselves, they wouldn’t be able to be transformed, after all. Then the really smart would say that Marxoid efforts to do so are similar to their efforts in conjuring up non-existent nut& berry foraging savages to support their version of unilinerar evolution…err…’evolution towards modern-day society’.

My version of ‘exploitation is the Ricardian of c+v+p=Cost. This gives an inverse relationship between ‘v and p, assuming you can do the algebra. All factory owners everywhere and at all times have used this, thereby causing an intellectual crisis within the ranks of the Marxo-paranoid.

As it happens, it does not turn out to be a problem at all - because the point of controversy, as is anything that pertains to Marx, rested in a fundamental MISUNDERSTANDING of the relationship between value and prices. In fact the whole basis of Bortkiewicz's critiicsms was the fatal assumptions of physicalism, that value ALWAYS corresponds to the quantifiable physical existence of the commodities, and Simultaneism, the notion that the prices of inputs and outputs are simultaneously determined. But never mind all of that, the Temporal Single System Interpretation did will to dispel this nonsense, but it's rather cute that you bring up arguments that Marx himself long-discredited in the midst of your inability to conceive Marx beyond the baseless criticisms of him. But nevermind any of that. Nevermind whether the transformation problem would have been problematic after all. Never-mind whether we need to re-work the foundations of our conception of value. IT DOES NOT STAND that this now somehow gives exploitation in capitalist society "moral" qualities that can be applied to pre-capitalsit social formations, IT DOES NOT STAND that the basis of Marx's understanding of exploitation was "speculation" ANY MORE THAN ANY OTHER ECONOMIC WORK IS SPECULATION, because in case you didn't fucking know, Marx was very careful about his methodology - nothing in Kapital amounts to mere "speculation", and if you want, I'll be happy to wipe my ass with you in pertinence to the "speculative" nature of the theory of value too, though I suspect this would be saved for a different thread. The fact of the matter is that exploitation still can only be conceived in a scientific manner in pertinence to its existence in capitalism, which STILL gives it a unique fucking character. As we will show bellow, you don't have the faintest idea as to what constitutes exploitation beyond stupid moral platitudes:

Fine roman brass was made in a roman factory by underpaid , ‘exploited’ workers. The copper, nickel and tin came from mines using slave labor. ‘Same old story.

Except for the fact that exploitation does not amount to being "underpaid", in fact, every idiot knows that in capitalism workers are paid their labor value - it has nothing to do with being "underpaid" as such, it is infinitely more complex. But nevermind that, the fact of the matter is that slave labor does not constitute the foundation of capitalist society, the atrocious conditions that which workers live in "developing" economies were present in industrial societies in western Europe as well, to conceive it as "slave labor" might be a cute analogy, but to have the audacity, the degree of stupidity to claim that it is exactly the same as slavery in ancient Rome is so fucking stupid I might laugh to death. here's a fucking hint, you philistine piece of shit - THE FACT THAT WE, IN A SELF-IRONIC WAY CALL IT SLAVERY WHEN IT IS SOLD TO US AS SOMETHING ELSE MEANS IT IS NOT SLAVERY. In Ancient Rome, you didn't have dumb fuckers talking about "Same old' thing, it's slavery" cynically, they KNEW it was slavery and it was institutionalized on that basis, not only in law, but in the public sphere of conceiving reality. You're drawing abstractions from present day society, digging deeply to try and find similarities in pre-capitalist social formations, and proclaiming that you've somehow struck gold when you manage to project your abstraction in such a vague, ambiguous way that there is a semblance of similarity. The fact of the matter is that it was not the "Same old story", it barely counts as a decent fictionalized allegory if anything. This is really the trick of ideology and reification- you find a semblance of similarity, divorced from its specific totality and context, and hark on about how "Yup, there it is, same old thing, we're just too stupid to see it!". You conceive the world cyclically, and for that reason you will never understand it. You DARE make pretenses to the "unscientific" nature of us Marxists? I mean, you DARE fucking attack us on this basis when your understanding of history LITERALLY amounts to "armchair" up the ass, 'Ol grandad drawn platitudes about life? I can't fucking believe what I'm talking to.

To de-legitimize and discredit Marx as credible on the left, yes.

Good luck you little shit, because I'm not going anywhere. So far, you've failed miserably, but let's see what you have to say yet. Either we're dealing with a bunch of sock-puppets, or there is somehow a general spontaneous inclination for people to join this site thinking they've magically discredited Marxism, but nevermind that. Keep trying to "dsicredit" Marx, I won't give you any room to breath, count on that.

Translated into Red-diaperese, this means that Marx’s ‘assurance’ that Capitalism is a passing stage only endows history with a teleology that far more resembles god-is-coming mumbo-jumbo than naturalism.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to adhere to some mystical idea of the "circle of life" in pertinence to scientifically conceiving historical development, whereby capitalism now constitutes some kind of timeless historic existence - where the FUCK do you draw the line? Because there was some limited trade between hunter-gatherer groups, did capitalism now exist in pre-history too? The only thread in common is the inability to conceive the reality of CHANGE, which is why all the vulgarists of Darwin metaphysically attempted to apply his ideas vis a vis biology to humans as though they were timeless laws, incapable of knowing that the biological cannot be a substitute for the social anymore than the atomic is a substitute for the biological. The fact of the matter is that only philistines as yourself can prattle of "teleology", but it is erroneous to say that "capitalism is a passing STAGE" anyway, becuase the whole point of Marx's understanding of capitalisms's destruction is that Communism derives from its premises, Communism is therefore a "part" of capitalism, not some far of, distant future that we will inevitably "gravitate" towards. That is why Marx said the first two classes in history are the proletariat and bourgeoisie, in a sense, because from their antagonism can the intricacies of ALL class warfare throughout history be understood, as a result of the precarious nature of capitalist relations, their regular destruction and creation, formal equality before the law where all that is solid melts into air, i.e. where class relations are no longer directly codified in law but dissonance between the formal democracy of the state and our capitalist relations is crated. All of this was outlined in marx's conception of the state very early on in his life, in distinguishing it from PREVIOUS forms. Because capitalism creates the foundations of a socially self-conscious society, which no society was ever capable of being - even in "planned" economies like Egypt, where fixed labor relations existed, this was mandated superstitiously and ritualistically.

If it offends your sensitivities that yes - life is not a circle, that we might very well be living in the end times, kindly go fuck yourself, use your tears as lubrication too. Take a look at the past one hundred years and tell me how this follows a fucking "cycle" seen before in history. How you philistines would love it if human population followed the same pattern historically - that every thousand years, 7 billion live on the Earth only to decline in an eternal boom and bust cycle. Such is the nature of the vulgar eastern spiritualism that encompasses the religious basis of capitalism in the 21st century.

I also understand that belief in such drivel supports Stalinism. This is because Marxism says that because capitalism can be overturned, any means justifies this end. In this regard, my so-called affiliation with Austrian skool economiks looks pretty good: they’re far less wrong than you people.

Are your morals somehow etched into the foundations of the cosmos? Go on, cry about "Stalinism" to cowardly excuse your dismissal of Marxism, we have nothing to apologize for. Capitalism can be overturned, this statement is self-evident once one does away with the metaphysical, superstitious ideas which sustain the idea that it cannot be. Left without that, you're left with some stupid and cheap agnosticism. The trick with that though, is that you either believe, or you don't, it is not a passive stance. Both have implications that concern science.

To transform capitalism into workable socialism, first you need to rid yourselves of these Marxo-people.

I begin to suspect you're not even a socialist, so it happens that it would be mighty convenient of us to "rid" ourselves of Marxism so we'd become the punching bag of you bourgeois ideologues, you scum, merely the "idealistic" yin of the "cold truths" bourgeois yang. But fuck you anyway: Marxism is here to stay, and this isn't a dispute between two fields of "respectable" gentlemen on the same page. Our goal is to annihilate you, to annihilate not only bourgeois society, but bourgeois thought, superstition and darkness. To you who oppose socialism, if we offend you, we plainly have nothing to say to you. Such is the nature of a class war. There can be no "compromise".

Re your citation from Marx: an economist can say that social relations are ‘eternal’, yet with or without harmony. Marx, OTH, is saying nothing more than if and only if social relations are understood as transient (not eternal) will my theory of the overthrow of capitalism hold true.

It does not matter if this is a "convenient" reality, for Marx did not have to justify his Communism with the reality that social relations change. Hegel, who was not a Communist, already understood this, as did the culmination of those dealing with history were able to see: Social relations DO objectively change, and to say otherwise means to dabble in abstractions with no regard for the substance of the changes themselves. In other words, you might be able to pathetically try and say Rome was capitalist, but you will never have the ability to scientifically assess how Roman society changed into feudal society, and how this changed into capitalist society - the basis of CHANGE will always be beyond you. The reality is that Marx's Communism allowed him to think OUTSIDE the bourgeois metaphysics in pertinence to the social in the same vein that the Humanism of the Renaissance allowed thinkers to understand reality outside the doctrine of the church. Social relations are not eternal, and even YOU acknowledge this, you merely base your point of reference in where the breaking point is. Social relations in hunter-gatherer societies are not identical with social relations in Ancient Egypt, not in any meaningful sense that would allow us to meaningfully approach those societies, so why didn't Marx just stick with the platitude from Rousseau, that it was between "pre-civilization" and civilization that was the point of change?

The idea that social relations change is unfounded even by its linguistic constitution. If you have the SAME THING in two different totalities, and contexts, it no longer is the same thing, because it possesses a different relation to the world. You can talk about how "society changes" but that categories intristic to societies do not change, but HOW THEN CAN WE CONCEIVE THE PROCESS OF CHANGE? How then does society "change"? Are you suggesting that man cyclically invents computers, only to lose the knowledge of them, and so on? This is nothing short of METAPHYSICAL ONTOLOGY, it has NO basis in science, it is merely a "scheme" of conceiving the universe in a way that allows you to avoid critically evaluating it for what it is. You cannot explain this process in a matter of depth that correlates with the depth of empirical difference between societies, you instead designate this through ideology, making things unknowable.

The fact, however, is that ‘eternal/natural’ and ‘transient/evolutionary’ capitalism are counterpoised hypotheses which must be proven true of false by the facts. But again, you and Marx present only feel-good wishes.

They are, because qualifications for capitalism are given, and those qualifications are followed through by distinguishing them from previously existing societies. The basis of these qualifications, in addition, is highlighting relations to production which previously did not exist. How the FUCK is manoralism, serfdom a form of capitasilm, for example? In trying to find the least common denominator, you LOSE SIGHT of the actual, independent BASIS of such societies, how they tick and so on - by digging for marginal militarists with our society. You don't need "proof" either, because it is assumed to be a given as it is designated ideologically. You might say that "Domination" or "classes" have always existed, that "laborers and the propertied" always existed (ignoring peasants, of course), but these are abstractions divorced from the essence of the according societies.

And you seem to have no fucking idea as to what constitutes a counter-imposed hypothesis. The idea that social relations change was always an ideological category, it was never subject to critical evaluation. Following your logic, the idea that the cosmos can be understood scientifically without astrology is also a counter-imposed hypothesis that must be proven with "facts". But it is a practical act, which contains its own proof, likewise so does the ability to critically understand societies by merit of their own doings. I mean, you can try to CALL, abuse the word "capitalism" to make it apply to previously existing societies, but what's left is the absence of a critical understanding of those societies, just a bunch of stupid fucking abstractions projected upon them which are alien to their substance and basis. The temporal nature of capitalism, is ALREADY proven by facts, because those differences in regards to the production process OBJECTIVELY EXIST, how one approaches them is not enshrined into their objective existence of course, but they exist OBJECTIVELY -so the question comes as to whether we approach them critically, or dismiss them with ideological platitudes. I do not have to justify doing the former any more than Kepler had to justify doing away with astrology, because IT IS A PRACTICAL ACT.

My point as an anthropologist is that your ‘anthropological’ evidence is false, because Morgan’s thesis is unsupported.

No, EVIDENCE is EVIDENCE, it can be false or true, but it basis of validity is NOT drawn from the conclusions drawn by the person who yielded the data. Are you literally that stupid? This is basic logic, that false conclusions are derived from data does not mean that the data is false, that evidence is false. For FUCK's sake.

Lastly, were the ‘specific factors’ as alluded to by Marx really that specific? This, again, circles back into the same evolutionary vs fixed argument as before. Strange to tell, Marx presents no facts, merely blustering, self-assertive rhetoric.

Yes, they were specific, how could they not be? Do you even understand words? Something is either specific or it is broad - did Marx make broad genralizations regarding the social? No, he critically provided a basis by which it can be evaluated and understood, yes the "specific factors" are specific to capitalism, because despite your desperate attempts to draw "some" similarities with previous societies, these similiariteis exist in an entirely different context in relation to an entirely different totality. It's as stupid as trying to say shoe production is timeless, because people always made shoes - HOW did they make shoes, what KIND of shoes, WHY, etc. and so on. These are all practical utilization of language and words - so WHAT DO YOU MEAN when you claim capitalism is timeless, and why? Did wage-labor form the basis of Roman production and the economy? No, slave labor did. Did wage labor form the foundation of agricultural production (therefore all production) in feudalism? No, again, serfdom did. Did wage labor exist in Roman society, and Feudal society? Yes, but was it the foundational basis of production? Did it constitute a UNIVERSAL basis of production in regard to labor? NO, IT DID NOT. Let's go on further. Did currency exist in Rome? Yes. Did UNIVERSAL currency exist in Rome? No, this is unique to CAPITALISM. Did profit exist in ancient societies? Yes. Does profit on the basis of M-C-M exist, rather than the opposite? NO, because a universal measurement of commodities DID NOT EXIST before capitalism. Your stupid fucking ABSTRACTIONS only work if we IGNORE the specifialities of what they entail. That's the trick.

But go on with your attempts to "discredit" Marx. I will be here, as always.

Rafiq

4th July 2015, 19:05

It's like saying only one species exists, because all share a common ancestor, all have "DNA, reproduction" and so on. Each according epoch outlines, and emphasizes the essential features of all previous history. Julius Caesar, Alexander, etc. were considered virtuous pagans and were portrayed in a manner that encapsulated ideas of chivalry, and yet today the qualities we admire in both of them are their "calculating" political prowess and so on, in other words, features and qualities that are respected for the capitalist. Ancient society was conceived in terms of duty and obligations. And yet we do not so much see this as the essential features of those societies - for even though "duty" and "obligation" have existed in every society, what makes them essential characteristics was the reality that they were the essential ideological virtues of feudalism.

Oh, and finally, if Marx believed in "god-is-coming-mumbo-jumbo" how then do you get off explaining the fact that Marx ACTIVELY participated in the workers' movement, in the Communist movement? If it is as you say, why wouldn't Marx simply decide to just sit back and let "history take its course"? Because he did NOT believe this - he recognized that the victory of Communism, though very possible, is contingent upon the conscious will, dedication and skill of Communists. The whole point of historic self-cosnciosuenss is that there is no "god is coming mumbo jumbo" and that there is, likewise, no metaphysical laws ingrained that demonstrate capitalism to be something timeless, that approximate our present struggle as one that fits within the general scheme of ALL WORLD-HISTORICAL POLITICS. According to you, we Communists have not only capital to fight, but some metaphysical entity designated as the "culmination of human civilization", as though the groundings of practices is somehow owed to how "old" - "they" are. Not aware in fact that capitalism self-sufficiently can sustain itself independently of what happened in the past in this sense, it does not need to consult the Patricians of Rome or the Pharaoh to reproduce itself, not directly, not indirectly, not at all.

RedMaterialist

4th July 2015, 21:10

Otherwise, marx was in error about ‘generalized commodity production’. If you convert England into one big factory, your raw materials and food will have to come from elsewhere-- from within a larger frame of reference. These probably won’t be produced by capitalism per se. Such is the modern insight of Negri & Hardt….capitalism has always existed[

So, not only is capitalism eternal, but also slavery because only slavery can produce the raw materials and food for modern industry. It may come as a surprise to you, but wheat is produced on gigantic industrial corporate agri-farms. Huge machinery, storage facilities, gigantic rail systems, monstrously big ocean-going container ships produce and deliver this commodity. You can trade, buy and sell, speculate in any conceivable kind of raw material commodity, in any amount of money, any country's money, 24 hours a day, in nano-seconds.

And all of this global and generalized commodity production is based on capitalist wage-labor, not slavery.

On second thought, since really smart people would realize that the labor inputs have no quantitative values themselves, they wouldn’t be able to be transformed, after all.

Every day in every capitalist industry all over the world people are converting labor inputs into quantitative values. It's called wages/hour. The employee inputs his labor-value into the production process and his employer pays him a quantitative value, called a wage.

My version of ‘exploitation is the Ricardian of c+v+p=Cost. This gives an inverse relationship between ‘v and p, assuming you can do the algebra.

Your exercise in algebra reveals more than you know. The inverse relationship between wages and profits means that as wages go up, profits come down and vice-versa. You unwittingly hit on one of the basic contradictions of capitalism: the capitalist must sell at a profit, but the only way, ultimately to insure a profit is to reduce wages. But then the worker can't afford to purchase the capitalist's product and then the whole contraption comes crashing down again.

It's no wonder the capitalist class hires intellectuals to argue that the system has always existed and that nothing should be done about it and that the economic destruction it causes cannot be helped and nobody knows why it happens.

RedMaterialist

4th July 2015, 22:07

Are "Origins of the Private Propriety, the Family and the State" and "Ancient society", books by Engels and Morgan, still considered "right" by modern antropologists?

Are there any other works, by other [marxist or not] antropologists/historians on the same matter?

I am interested in becoming a history teacher, and the origins matter is one of wich legitimizes the left, so I'm interested in learning about it.

Thanks for your attention.

The genius of Morgan was that he showed how "primitive" or "savage" society developed based on kinship patterns. The original primitive (for want of a better word) society was based on group marriage, i.e. everybody was everybody else's sexual partner. For obvious reasons the anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries and even now into the 21st century refused to acknowledge this kinship fact. Add on to it that Engels, a communist, expounded on Morgan, and you have a perfect ideological barrier to accepting anything produced by Morgan. Marxism is the kiss of death to a career in anthropology.

Due to obvious inbreeding problems it was inevitable that a separation of the individuals of the group marriage system would develop: into separate generations, parents were prohibited form "marrying" their children. Thus the incest, the Oedipus taboo. A child was then not allowed to marry not only his immediate parents but any member of the older generation. The fathers and mothers then became the fathers and mothers of all the children.

However this new system allowed any member of the separate generation to marry. Brothers and sisters and all cousins could intermarry (i.e., have sex.) A system, by the way, which still exists in some of the remoter and undeveloped parts of the American south.

The next step in the process to decrease the effects of inbreeding was obvious: outlaw the intermarriage between brothers and sisters and cousins. (Meaning own brothers, sisters and cousins.)

The problem, then, is how do you know who your brother and sister and cousins are? There is only one person who knows this: your birth mother. Thus, the next social structure was based on the line of descent from the mother, the mother-right, or the gentile clan or gens. You were prohibited from marrying anyone in your own gens/clan.

The gens system then developed into the tribal system, you could no longer marry anyone in the gens within the tribe.

The increase in population and exchange between tribes led to tribes becoming organized into nations. But even at this time there were no classes, no slavery, no exploitation, no capitalism.

This is a more or less simplified version of Morgan and Engels.

Islam Muslim Muhammad

4th July 2015, 23:07

This makes sense, as what Marx called Asiatic despotism could preside over social formations that were paying tribute but not yet incorporated into a class society, but could also preside over more developed class formations that were basically just bonapartist variants of feudalism in which the state had yet to be fully integrated into the nobility’s parcellization of power through layered sovereignties extending over vast territories. (Just as Lenin sometimes referred to semi-feudal capitalism, Lenin called this system semi-Asiatic feudalism; it was feudalism with forms of exploitation that resembled the tribute taking that drew local peoples into a wider empire of class exploitation.) These societies were developing, did have a history, and part of an incipient global network of trade and production. What was different about them was the persistence of archaic communal property forms.

Anything and everything is Asiatic!

khad

4th July 2015, 23:35

If you were able to bring a serious materialist methodology to the discussion, you would see that the Mongol invasions are important to analyze through the prism of class structure and development. I know it might seem boring to a person who appears to come to leftism out of an interest in tank formations and oppressive intelligent apparatuses but a new book by Anievas draws from Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development to make a compelling argument that the Mongol empire's nomadic raiding (itself one big centralized Asiatic bureaucratic project) facilitated the geostrategic relationships essential to providing space for the development of capitalism in Western Europe.

Look, I know Asian history might be boring to someone who prays altar the altar of the MELT every night and exorcizes the evil spirits of the Soviet Union before every meal, but I wasn't talking about the Mongols. The fact that you understand so little about the actual histories of the peoples you are talking about in abstraction betrays the very bias that led Marx and Engels to their incomplete and incorrect conclusions.

Spectre of Spartacism

4th July 2015, 23:47

Look, I know Asian history might be boring to someone who prays altar the altar of the MELT every night and exorcizes the evil spirits of the Soviet Union before every meal, but I wasn't talking about the Mongols.

Since your earlier contributions to our learning consisted of of pasting a line graph and copying a portion of a wikipedia article, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that your latest post here is all unsubstantiated characterizations and flaming. My referencing the Mongols was in response to your earlier statement:

Yeah, I'm not sure where "northern nomads come in, genocide a bunch of population centers, and install ethno-supremacist settler rule" fits in with the Marxist theory of class struggle. Whatever the case may be, though, I'm sure that facts will just go in one ear and out the other, because who needs facts when all questions can be answered in the realm of theoretical abstraction?This is a clear reference to Mongols, just as your latest post is a clear avoidance of the substance of my previous post.

will franklin

5th July 2015, 04:50

In the post I was replying to, I was called a 'useful idiot'. My reply was that the writer must be a useless idiot. Do you have a double standard here?

will franklin

5th July 2015, 06:30

Again, because you're confused: Morgan did not base the book in question on his own fieldwork, Rather, on heresay.

Anyone who's studied anthropology can tell you that Lowie's fieldwork was among the Crow and Hidasia Plains Indians. He/she can also inform you that the kinship terminology we use today was created by Lowie, then tweaked by Murdoc for the HRAF. The older, by Morgan, was inaccurate.

His 'culture at a distance' study of Germany was done at the bequest of the american government, during WW2, to get an idea as to how German culture worked. If this is all you know of Lowie, you know nothing about anthropology.

The scientific method uses 'hypotheses to test. A successfully-tested hypotheses then becomes a 'theory'. In science, a speculation that one cannot test (eg uniliner evolution c 1880) remains a speculation. This is basic: to say that science starts with theory indicates that you know nothing of science.

Yes, per citation, Morgan was for the overthrow of property relations as they existed in Euro-civilization during that epoch, So did Boas, btw, whose verbal rants were aimed at how political beliefs would not allow science to cheat, at least at Columbia U. Otherwise, you'd be a 'marxist'.

Everyone in economics works with supply and demand one way or another. Keynes, in the early 1920's saw demand as a set of probabilities, or 'propensities to spend'. This, in short refutes Say.

It seems to be that time again. The appearance of self-appointed bringers of enlightenment, here to convince us of the Holy Trinty of the Eternal Markets, the Eternal State, and the Eternal Family, amen, on the basis of positivist myths, is indeed a regular occurrence on RL. And your posting here is particularly embarrassing. First you claim that Morgan's work was based on hearsay, then you yourself list some instances of his fieldwork. (If the use of reports counts as "hearsay", of course, much of anthropology would have to be discarded - but not Lowie, for example, who based his book on Germany, written at the request of the US government, pretty much on nothing at all.) You imply that Morgan had a negative view of those peoples he, following standard Victorian terminology, assigned to the state of savagery or barbarism, completely ignoring his own conclusions in "Ancient Society":

"Property and office were the foundations upon which aristocracy planted itself.
Whether this principle shall live or die has been one of the great problems with which modern society has been engaged through the intervening periods. As a question between equal rights and unequal rights, between equal laws and unequal laws, between the rights of wealth, of rank and of official position, and the power of justice and intelligence, there can be little doubt of the ultimate result. Although several thousand years have passed away without the overthrow of privileged classes, excepting in the United States, their burdensome character upon society has been demonstrated.

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanagable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations.

A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of its self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes."

But worst of all, despite blustering about your PhD, you show a complete misunderstanding of how science works. What you term "categorization before measurement" is called, in serious work on how science is done (although probably not in positivist fairly-tales) the theory-ladeness of data, and it is an inescapable aspect of scientific work. Without a prior theory, no experimental or observational reports would be possible. (If I don't accept classical electrodynamics, I won't "see" changes in the current if I look at an ampermetre; I will see a dial move, and ascribe it to some other cause.)

As for progress, articles get published all the time that demonstrate the progress in e.g. lithic technology in the Neolithic period, or the increase in productive forces with changes in the social organisation of labour. What is ideologically frowned upon is extending this to the entirety of human history. But it is demonstrable - the increase in the productive forces. Take any metric you want - the production of this or that commodity, maximum population sustainable, whatever. That is what progress means to Marxists. You're trying to read some moral nonsense into it, but that's your personal pathology. Nazi Germany, to a Marxist, entailed a more progressive mode of production than the first hunter-gatherers in Europe. This is not an endorsement of Nazi Germany, but an observation about the productive forces.

Oh, and Keynes of course continued to work with supply and demand models, even if he had to "fix" them a bit to make them seem to approximate the data.

But the real gem of this exchange is this:

Now I challenge you to find one quotation in the entirety of Boas's work that says anything similar. I won't be holding my breath, though. It's obvious at this point you're just making things up so you can go on a great big cry-wank about how evil Marxists are. Well, yes, to people who think capitalism is eternal and can only be ameliorated we are evil. Boo.

will franklin

5th July 2015, 06:50

There is no evidence for group marriage, ever, anywhere. This is precisely why Lowie & cie went out to do fieldwork.

Again Morgan's Nut's n berries eating, group- marriage people is junk science, fit only for bottom-feeding Marxiods

The genius of Morgan was that he showed how "primitive" or "savage" society developed based on kinship patterns. The original primitive (for want of a better word) society was based on group marriage, i.e. everybody was everybody else's sexual partner. For obvious reasons the anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries and even now into the 21st century refused to acknowledge this kinship fact. Add on to it that Engels, a communist, expounded on Morgan, and you have a perfect ideological barrier to accepting anything produced by Morgan. Marxism is the kiss of death to a career in anthropology.

Due to obvious inbreeding problems it was inevitable that a separation of the individuals of the group marriage system would develop: into separate generations, parents were prohibited form "marrying" their children. Thus the incest, the Oedipus taboo. A child was then not allowed to marry not only his immediate parents but any member of the older generation. The fathers and mothers then became the fathers and mothers of all the children.

However this new system allowed any member of the separate generation to marry. Brothers and sisters and all cousins could intermarry (i.e., have sex.) A system, by the way, which still exists in some of the remoter and undeveloped parts of the American south.

The next step in the process to decrease the effects of inbreeding was obvious: outlaw the intermarriage between brothers and sisters and cousins. (Meaning own brothers, sisters and cousins.)

The problem, then, is how do you know who your brother and sister and cousins are? There is only one person who knows this: your birth mother. Thus, the next social structure was based on the line of descent from the mother, the mother-right, or the gentile clan or gens. You were prohibited from marrying anyone in your own gens/clan.

The gens system then developed into the tribal system, you could no longer marry anyone in the gens within the tribe.

The increase in population and exchange between tribes led to tribes becoming organized into nations. But even at this time there were no classes, no slavery, no exploitation, no capitalism.

This is a more or less simplified version of Morgan and Engels.

will franklin

5th July 2015, 07:27

This is hilarious. After the writer learns how to write clear, rant-free Englisn minus the F-bombs, he should go take a remedial high-school course in Methods of science'.

The fact that Engels cites and built his 'theories' on false data makes his theory false. 'False', btw, means 'not true'.

Yet what's nevertheless interesting is how Engels gushed praise on Morgan, and writes Marx accordingly. Strange to tell, half of Engel's book consists of citations from Morgan's own; for you to speak of Engel's 'disregard' is downright ignorance.

Marx himself tried so hard to find real quantities for labor values that might transform in to prices. But he failed. Borkiewitz is used by today's Marxists as somewhat of a straw dog; an austrian- skooler who actually took this transformation thing seriously enough to waste ink and paper.

Then you marxiod peeple could thankfully retort that this guy was a nitpicker who couldn't do the Cauchy Distribution necessary to demonstrate how prices fluctuate against a hidden labor value that is nevertheless causal. But then again, neither could Marx, who showed great difficulty with the simpler Gauss,and probably thought 'Cauchy' was a French mathematician soaked in vinegar and salt.

but I digress. Transfo Problem is a joke because you need to quantify 'labor value' before you can even dream of establishing its causality to prices. Make sure that when you try to establish even probabalistic causality to a known quantity such as prices that you can quantify the causal agent. This as basic to positivistic, bourgeois, philistine science as making sure your data is correct.

What you fail to understand is what constitutes "evolution toward modern-day society". Now frankly, it doesn't fucking matter what Morgan believes, because Engels cited his DATA - he had no regard for Morgan's scheme of unilinear evolution. Frankly, this makes perfect sense, because the point of difference between Engels and Morgan was precisely along hte lines of how they conceived social development - the idea that because Engels may have cited Morgan's direct, empirical findings somehow constitutes an extrapolation of Mogan's IDEAS regarding the evolution of society is fucking nonsensical - because it would warrant the non-existence of historical materialism itself and it would have simply allowed Engels to adopt Morgan's conception of social change. Ultimately, while Morgan provided specific scientific insight vis a vis the social, that went beyond his empirical research - such as the profound insight with regard to kinship relations as well as his ability to demonstrate the connection between the "base" and "superstructure" to a minor extent, his conception of history - devoid of Hegel - was bourgeois to its core, it was inherently metaphysical prattling of "timeless facts" of life. If one actually READS Marx and Engels, one finds that the idea that there is a universal "scheme of development" is completely devoid in their works, it was a creative invention of later bourgeois-romantic "Marxists" in the Soviet Union and elsewhere who conceived this. The reality is that it is rather basic to Hegel's logic that only after something happens, does it become inevitable all along - things do not HAVE to happen, but because they did, they fit a general scheme of development that shapes present day society. And this philistine franklin, confronted with this basic fact, commits the unforgivable error that every haughty, arrogant and intellectually disabled bourgeois ideologue does in translating such complexity to some kind of bizarre platitude that they can easily dismiss.

The reality is that 'evolution towards modern day society' means PRECISELY that - how our general condition, here in now, has come to be. In fact, what is so painfully FUCKING stupid about your assertion is that not even Engels was naive enough to think this - the whole fucking POINT of the Asiatic mode of production was that these societies had no general, spontaneous tendency to follow the same path that Europe did in its historical development, and that only with association into the wider capitalist global totality, via free trade, were these societies able to change in such a way that would invoke historic synchronicity with Europe. It is beyond ironic that you level the accusation of "uni-linear development" when the pre-requisites to capitalist accumulation are DIRECTLY acknowledged to be non-existent in societies without association with capitalism in Europe, when even feudalism is acknowledged to not have taken afoot in such societies. Of course it rests on flimsy foundations to conceive Safavid Persia, India and China as all being historically on par with Ancient Egypt in terms of their social development - as these societies were clearly more advanced, but it warrants a specific understanding of social relations in those societies that does't have to conform to Europe's history, and no one made pretenses otherwise. That is why the term is so ambiguous in the first place - Marx simply was stressing that these societies in no meaningful sense could be conceived as feudal, and that the key to understanding their development laid in considerations that weren't found in Europe.

Except that this could have been known, and was known in the 19th century, perhaps even before then by HEGEL, of whom both Marx and Engels were disciples. "We, today" if this is you, know infinitely less, because you're privileged with the ideological inclination to think that the 19th century has been cast into the dustbin of irrelevancy, that this epoch merely consisted of "figures", spectacles with no independent substance of their own - never mind the 40 years of tireless investigation and theoretical sophistication, all of this is now converted into a stupid aesthetic cliche' of "well back then everyone had metaphysical ideas about the evolution of society". You want to criticize Marx? Then you must do so in a way that meets him eye to eye - you must acknowledge that Marx, for his OWN time period was "wrong", that he COULD have known better but did not. What evidence demonstrates otherwise? And what is fucking idiotic is that Marx EXPLICITLY stated the congruency between his conception of history and Darwin's conception of natural history, which only the philistines conceived as some kind of "unilinear" universal scheme of development. The lesson of Darwin is that yes - a scheme of evolution in natural history is necessary, but ONLY in conceiving the natural world TODAY. This EXACTLY holds true for Marx and Engels. So what teleology is to be found here? The fact of the matter is that it is YOUR error in being unable to fathom this basic fact, that because something happens does not mean it HAD to happen, it does not mean that we must convert it into some kind of metaphysical-ontological platitude so you idealist philistines can comprehend it.

Thank you for revealing the inherently unscientific basis for your attacks on Engels, you worthless fucking philistine, thank you for revealing the inherent ideological, moral dimension behind your opposition to Marxism. This, however, could have been known to anyone with a careful eye, so perhaps I personally ought to thank you less than those viewing this thread. Yes, of course it is viewed as a "triviality" that Tsar's kids were killed to Marxists, that is why the executioner fell into a steep depression, was received with contempt even by ardent Bolsheviks, and remained remorseful about the act. But let's not pretend - it was necessary, and we are absolutely unashamed in condoning it, and only a fool who puts his sentimentality before his dedication to the holistic cause would have hesitated. I mean, tell me, would it have been worth strengthening the morale of the white butchers, who I can promise were responsible for the death, rape, and mutilation of children, conceiving it as a triviailty because they were doing god's work? Let me ask you a quick question, would your beloved system, and the ideology which sustains it for a second allow the life of a few little girls to not only hinder its EXISTENCE, but get in the way of profit in the immediate sense? The logic of us "Marxo-paranoids" is that we ought to make heavy sacrifices for the greater good, but the logic of capitalism is sexually enslaving little girls as an extension of the commodification of sexuality in general. You hypocritical piece of fucking shit, you're going ot sit here and lecture us about your moral qualms with the "ends justifies the means"? Well FUCK YOU, you SADISTIC scum are so morally depraved that you can't even follow through with THIS logic, i.e. there seldom even has to be justification for the bloody butchers of capital, it is a given that she must be fed annually with blood-sacrifice in war and in hell.

But as it is to say, it is absolutely FUCKING nonsensical to assume that because of the erroneous conclusion drawn by ANY scientist that it discredits the entirety of their work. All it would reveal is the specific error in the methodology they used in pertinence to the erroneous conclusion, that is how a critical thinker processes information, not a worthless philistine who makes over-reaching claims to make himself comfortable and call it a day, i.e. "Capitalism has always existed, same thing, same story". Are you LITERALLY a fucking idiot? For fuck's sake, was there never error in Darwin? Isaac Newton also dabbled in mystical nonsense, does this go to discredit him in his entirety? You could argue that the same methodological foundations which led to a pretense to the dietary habits of "savages", but how did he come to this conclsuion? First, you don't offer us what this means. If it concerns hunter-gatherers, it is not a far-reaching assumption to think that this was their diet, and how could it be? It depends on what is meant here by "savages" - any Marxist would know that the tribal, pre-civilized societies were not hunter-gatherers at all, and this was outlined very specifically, and very extensively in Engels' work. In pertinence to the designation of pre-neolithic peoples as savages, this had nothing to do with giving them inherently Hobbsean moral qualities (which, as it happens, Marx and Engels did not - by designating the epoch as one of primitive Communism, not post-apocalyptic free-for-all hell), because the term was deeply ingrained into any conception of pre-civilized societies in the west, most especially during the 19th century, it was not a point of controversy to speak of "savages" as it is today. This shoudl be very basic, if not for someone hell bent on distorting information and trying to discredit Marx and Engels in every which way possible.

But to reiterate, no, it is absolutely IDIOTIC to fucking claim this discredits him as an anthropologist, all it shows is how unscientifically you approach such issues, what a fucking intellectually lazy philistine you are. And for the record, no one gives a fuck about your "credentials", as far as we're concerned, you're full of shit - and if not, you're still objectively wrong. If you're not full of shit regarding your credentials, rather than bestowing upon you some kind of aura of legitimacy, it discredits the educational establishment in our society.

The correlation was drawn from detailed accounts of pre-civilized Greece which was also largely based on kinship systems. As it happens, the phenomena extended far beyond the native Americans, which means that they had more to work with then them - detailed historical accounts which show a correlation.

So, in your inability to actually properly conceive generalized commodity production for what it means, therefore drawing a STUPID fucking abstraction, apparently this confirms that capitalism has always existed? Even if your stupid fucking abstraction worked, it would not mean that capitalism has always existed, it would mean that 'generalized commodity production' does not exist because within the frame of reference that we might call the global economic totality, it would constitute simple commodity production because now England can be converted into "a single factory" (but the point is that IT COULD NOT BE). The problem is that the global capitalist totality DID NOT ARISE until very recently in history, and any FUCKING idiot can know that England's imports from pre-capitalsit societies introduced capitalist relations to thsoe societies, and this was precisely the basis of Marx's support for the introduction of free trade, and the colonization of both India and in China (until the perpetual basis of previous social bonds was done away with - when we can clearly see Marx become more sympathetic toward Indian independence, as well as the independence of colonized peoples across the globe - on the condition that they would transform their project into a revolutionary one, lest they be "taken by the devil", in reference to the Algerians). The global economic totality, the "world economy" did not exist during antiquity, it did not exist during the Middle Ages either, it ONLY was wrought out into existence during the development and rise of capitalist production.

What is most especially fucking idiotic is that even if we take your BULLSHIT with a grain of seriousness - it is very well that England was an industrial capitalist society whose raw materials and resources came from non-capitalist social formations, but how the fuck does this work when THE ENTIRE WORLD EXISTS IN A GLOBAL TOTALITY in the 21st century, where virtually no society can be conceived as pre-capitalist? Please point out to me where our "resources" derive today, that "won't be produced by capitalism per se" (again, a FLIMSY assumption to begin with, because nothing can be "produced by capitalism", rather production is conducted in a specific way, which constitutes capitalist relations - which actually knocks your whole basis of argument to the fucking ground insofar as one cannot be "outside" capitalism if one is part of the totality, as was the case of colonized India and Africa, IT IS STILL PRODUCED BY "CAPITALISM"). But most of all, the most laughably stupid extrapolation we can draw from this is the idea that this sum how sums up Empire, which was written specifically to refer to our postmodern geopolitical epoch and not some timeless fucking fact of history. So no, capitalism has not always existed, and cannot have always existed, simply because capitalist relations themselves extend beyond mere abstractions like "wage labor", "markets" and the presence of factories, it amounts to a totality of specific relations to production, specific processes of production, which has never before been present in any historic epoch. For an empiricist idealist, this is impossible to grasp - the idea that one thing can change into another, you commit the predictable error of thinking that everything that exists, has to be some kind of quantitative extension of something which previously existed. That is not how the evolution of the mind, and reason works, nevermind the evolution of societies themselves.

As it happens, it does not turn out to be a problem at all - because the point of controversy, as is anything that pertains to Marx, rested in a fundamental MISUNDERSTANDING of the relationship between value and prices. In fact the whole basis of Bortkiewicz's critiicsms was the fatal assumptions of physicalism, that value ALWAYS corresponds to the quantifiable physical existence of the commodities, and Simultaneism, the notion that the prices of inputs and outputs are simultaneously determined. But never mind all of that, the Temporal Single System Interpretation did will to dispel this nonsense, but it's rather cute that you bring up arguments that Marx himself long-discredited in the midst of your inability to conceive Marx beyond the baseless criticisms of him. But nevermind any of that. Nevermind whether the transformation problem would have been problematic after all. Never-mind whether we need to re-work the foundations of our conception of value. IT DOES NOT STAND that this now somehow gives exploitation in capitalist society "moral" qualities that can be applied to pre-capitalsit social formations, IT DOES NOT STAND that the basis of Marx's understanding of exploitation was "speculation" ANY MORE THAN ANY OTHER ECONOMIC WORK IS SPECULATION, because in case you didn't fucking know, Marx was very careful about his methodology - nothing in Kapital amounts to mere "speculation", and if you want, I'll be happy to wipe my ass with you in pertinence to the "speculative" nature of the theory of value too, though I suspect this would be saved for a different thread. The fact of the matter is that exploitation still can only be conceived in a scientific manner in pertinence to its existence in capitalism, which STILL gives it a unique fucking character. As we will show bellow, you don't have the faintest idea as to what constitutes exploitation beyond stupid moral platitudes:

Except for the fact that exploitation does not amount to being "underpaid", in fact, every idiot knows that in capitalism workers are paid their labor value - it has nothing to do with being "underpaid" as such, it is infinitely more complex. But nevermind that, the fact of the matter is that slave labor does not constitute the foundation of capitalist society, the atrocious conditions that which workers live in "developing" economies were present in industrial societies in western Europe as well, to conceive it as "slave labor" might be a cute analogy, but to have the audacity, the degree of stupidity to claim that it is exactly the same as slavery in ancient Rome is so fucking stupid I might laugh to death. here's a fucking hint, you philistine piece of shit - THE FACT THAT WE, IN A SELF-IRONIC WAY CALL IT SLAVERY WHEN IT IS SOLD TO US AS SOMETHING ELSE MEANS IT IS NOT SLAVERY. In Ancient Rome, you didn't have dumb fuckers talking about "Same old' thing, it's slavery" cynically, they KNEW it was slavery and it was institutionalized on that basis, not only in law, but in the public sphere of conceiving reality. You're drawing abstractions from present day society, digging deeply to try and find similarities in pre-capitalist social formations, and proclaiming that you've somehow struck gold when you manage to project your abstraction in such a vague, ambiguous way that there is a semblance of similarity. The fact of the matter is that it was not the "Same old story", it barely counts as a decent fictionalized allegory if anything. This is really the trick of ideology and reification- you find a semblance of similarity, divorced from its specific totality and context, and hark on about how "Yup, there it is, same old thing, we're just too stupid to see it!". You conceive the world cyclically, and for that reason you will never understand it. You DARE make pretenses to the "unscientific" nature of us Marxists? I mean, you DARE fucking attack us on this basis when your understanding of history LITERALLY amounts to "armchair" up the ass, 'Ol grandad drawn platitudes about life? I can't fucking believe what I'm talking to.

Good luck you little shit, because I'm not going anywhere. So far, you've failed miserably, but let's see what you have to say yet. Either we're dealing with a bunch of sock-puppets, or there is somehow a general spontaneous inclination for people to join this site thinking they've magically discredited Marxism, but nevermind that. Keep trying to "dsicredit" Marx, I won't give you any room to breath, count on that.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to adhere to some mystical idea of the "circle of life" in pertinence to scientifically conceiving historical development, whereby capitalism now constitutes some kind of timeless historic existence - where the FUCK do you draw the line? Because there was some limited trade between hunter-gatherer groups, did capitalism now exist in pre-history too? The only thread in common is the inability to conceive the reality of CHANGE, which is why all the vulgarists of Darwin metaphysically attempted to apply his ideas vis a vis biology to humans as though they were timeless laws, incapable of knowing that the biological cannot be a substitute for the social anymore than the atomic is a substitute for the biological. The fact of the matter is that only philistines as yourself can prattle of "teleology", but it is erroneous to say that "capitalism is a passing STAGE" anyway, becuase the whole point of Marx's understanding of capitalisms's destruction is that Communism derives from its premises, Communism is therefore a "part" of capitalism, not some far of, distant future that we will inevitably "gravitate" towards. That is why Marx said the first two classes in history are the proletariat and bourgeoisie, in a sense, because from their antagonism can the intricacies of ALL class warfare throughout history be understood, as a result of the precarious nature of capitalist relations, their regular destruction and creation, formal equality before the law where all that is solid melts into air, i.e. where class relations are no longer directly codified in law but dissonance between the formal democracy of the state and our capitalist relations is crated. All of this was outlined in marx's conception of the state very early on in his life, in distinguishing it from PREVIOUS forms. Because capitalism creates the foundations of a socially self-conscious society, which no society was ever capable of being - even in "planned" economies like Egypt, where fixed labor relations existed, this was mandated superstitiously and ritualistically.

If it offends your sensitivities that yes - life is not a circle, that we might very well be living in the end times, kindly go fuck yourself, use your tears as lubrication too. Take a look at the past one hundred years and tell me how this follows a fucking "cycle" seen before in history. How you philistines would love it if human population followed the same pattern historically - that every thousand years, 7 billion live on the Earth only to decline in an eternal boom and bust cycle. Such is the nature of the vulgar eastern spiritualism that encompasses the religious basis of capitalism in the 21st century.

Are your morals somehow etched into the foundations of the cosmos? Go on, cry about "Stalinism" to cowardly excuse your dismissal of Marxism, we have nothing to apologize for. Capitalism can be overturned, this statement is self-evident once one does away with the metaphysical, superstitious ideas which sustain the idea that it cannot be. Left without that, you're left with some stupid and cheap agnosticism. The trick with that though, is that you either believe, or you don't, it is not a passive stance. Both have implications that concern science.

I begin to suspect you're not even a socialist, so it happens that it would be mighty convenient of us to "rid" ourselves of Marxism so we'd become the punching bag of you bourgeois ideologues, you scum, merely the "idealistic" yin of the "cold truths" bourgeois yang. But fuck you anyway: Marxism is here to stay, and this isn't a dispute between two fields of "respectable" gentlemen on the same page. Our goal is to annihilate you, to annihilate not only bourgeois society, but bourgeois thought, superstition and darkness. To you who oppose socialism, if we offend you, we plainly have nothing to say to you. Such is the nature of a class war. There can be no "compromise".

It does not matter if this is a "convenient" reality, for Marx did not have to justify his Communism with the reality that social relations change. Hegel, who was not a Communist, already understood this, as did the culmination of those dealing with history were able to see: Social relations DO objectively change, and to say otherwise means to dabble in abstractions with no regard for the substance of the changes themselves. In other words, you might be able to pathetically try and say Rome was capitalist, but you will never have the ability to scientifically assess how Roman society changed into feudal society, and how this changed into capitalist society - the basis of CHANGE will always be beyond you. The reality is that Marx's Communism allowed him to think OUTSIDE the bourgeois metaphysics in pertinence to the social in the same vein that the Humanism of the Renaissance allowed thinkers to understand reality outside the doctrine of the church. Social relations are not eternal, and even YOU acknowledge this, you merely base your point of reference in where the breaking point is. Social relations in hunter-gatherer societies are not identical with social relations in Ancient Egypt, not in any meaningful sense that would allow us to meaningfully approach those societies, so why didn't Marx just stick with the platitude from Rousseau, that it was between "pre-civilization" and civilization that was the point of change?

The idea that social relations change is unfounded even by its linguistic constitution. If you have the SAME THING in two different totalities, and contexts, it no longer is the same thing, because it possesses a different relation to the world. You can talk about how "society changes" but that categories intristic to societies do not change, but HOW THEN CAN WE CONCEIVE THE PROCESS OF CHANGE? How then does society "change"? Are you suggesting that man cyclically invents computers, only to lose the knowledge of them, and so on? This is nothing short of METAPHYSICAL ONTOLOGY, it has NO basis in science, it is merely a "scheme" of conceiving the universe in a way that allows you to avoid critically evaluating it for what it is. You cannot explain this process in a matter of depth that correlates with the depth of empirical difference between societies, you instead designate this through ideology, making things unknowable.

They are, because qualifications for capitalism are given, and those qualifications are followed through by distinguishing them from previously existing societies. The basis of these qualifications, in addition, is highlighting relations to production which previously did not exist. How the FUCK is manoralism, serfdom a form of capitasilm, for example? In trying to find the least common denominator, you LOSE SIGHT of the actual, independent BASIS of such societies, how they tick and so on - by digging for marginal militarists with our society. You don't need "proof" either, because it is assumed to be a given as it is designated ideologically. You might say that "Domination" or "classes" have always existed, that "laborers and the propertied" always existed (ignoring peasants, of course), but these are abstractions divorced from the essence of the according societies.

And you seem to have no fucking idea as to what constitutes a counter-imposed hypothesis. The idea that social relations change was always an ideological category, it was never subject to critical evaluation. Following your logic, the idea that the cosmos can be understood scientifically without astrology is also a counter-imposed hypothesis that must be proven with "facts". But it is a practical act, which contains its own proof, likewise so does the ability to critically understand societies by merit of their own doings. I mean, you can try to CALL, abuse the word "capitalism" to make it apply to previously existing societies, but what's left is the absence of a critical understanding of those societies, just a bunch of stupid fucking abstractions projected upon them which are alien to their substance and basis. The temporal nature of capitalism, is ALREADY proven by facts, because those differences in regards to the production process OBJECTIVELY EXIST, how one approaches them is not enshrined into their objective existence of course, but they exist OBJECTIVELY -so the question comes as to whether we approach them critically, or dismiss them with ideological platitudes. I do not have to justify doing the former any more than Kepler had to justify doing away with astrology, because IT IS A PRACTICAL ACT.

No, EVIDENCE is EVIDENCE, it can be false or true, but it basis of validity is NOT drawn from the conclusions drawn by the person who yielded the data. Are you literally that stupid? This is basic logic, that false conclusions are derived from data does not mean that the data is false, that evidence is false. For FUCK's sake.

Yes, they were specific, how could they not be? Do you even understand words? Something is either specific or it is broad - did Marx make broad genralizations regarding the social? No, he critically provided a basis by which it can be evaluated and understood, yes the "specific factors" are specific to capitalism, because despite your desperate attempts to draw "some" similarities with previous societies, these similiariteis exist in an entirely different context in relation to an entirely different totality. It's as stupid as trying to say shoe production is timeless, because people always made shoes - HOW did they make shoes, what KIND of shoes, WHY, etc. and so on. These are all practical utilization of language and words - so WHAT DO YOU MEAN when you claim capitalism is timeless, and why? Did wage-labor form the basis of Roman production and the economy? No, slave labor did. Did wage labor form the foundation of agricultural production (therefore all production) in feudalism? No, again, serfdom did. Did wage labor exist in Roman society, and Feudal society? Yes, but was it the foundational basis of production? Did it constitute a UNIVERSAL basis of production in regard to labor? NO, IT DID NOT. Let's go on further. Did currency exist in Rome? Yes. Did UNIVERSAL currency exist in Rome? No, this is unique to CAPITALISM. Did profit exist in ancient societies? Yes. Does profit on the basis of M-C-M exist, rather than the opposite? NO, because a universal measurement of commodities DID NOT EXIST before capitalism. Your stupid fucking ABSTRACTIONS only work if we IGNORE the specifialities of what they entail. That's the trick.

But go on with your attempts to "discredit" Marx. I will be here, as always.

RedMaterialist

5th July 2015, 08:57

In the post I was replying to, I was called a 'useful idiot'. My reply was that the writer must be a useless idiot. Do you have a double standard here?

I apologize, my bad. will franklin has only marginal utility production of intelligence.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th July 2015, 11:19

Again, because you're confused: Morgan did not base the book in question on his own fieldwork, Rather, on heresay.

It's not that I'm confused, it's that either you haven't read the book in question, or you're willfully misrepresenting it, much as you're doing with Boas's own position. Which is unfortunate to you as anyone can open the book - I believe there are several versions online - and verify that Morgan discusses e.g. the Iroquois, a group he did field work on.

Anyone who's studied anthropology can tell you that Lowie's fieldwork was among the Crow and Hidasia Plains Indians. He/she can also inform you that the kinship terminology we use today was created by Lowie, then tweaked by Murdoc for the HRAF. The older, by Morgan, was inaccurate.

His 'culture at a distance' study of Germany was done at the bequest of the american government, during WW2, to get an idea as to how German culture worked. If this is all you know of Lowie, you know nothing about anthropology.

I never said his, as you term it, "'culture at a distance' study of Germany" was his only work. I'm simply pointing out how ridiculous it is for you to post these long emotional rants about the True Scientific Method (TM) (actually positivist fairytales) and how eeevil the Soviet Union was, then cite someone who completely made up one of his works, in service to US imperialism.

The scientific method uses 'hypotheses to test. A successfully-tested hypotheses then becomes a 'theory'. In science, a speculation that one cannot test (eg uniliner evolution c 1880) remains a speculation. This is basic: to say that science starts with theory indicates that you know nothing of science.

Jesusing Christ. Far from being someone who can lecture others on the scientific method, you have more than a century of catching up to do when it comes to theories of how science is done. That you come here and in apparent seriousness repeat these banal oversimplifications beggars belief.

(If you want an example of a hypothesis that isn't testable according to any reasonable criterion, try the ergodic hypothesis. Now if you were familiar with Quine - no doubt a "Marxist paranoiac" according to you as he didn't repeat positivist bromides - we might discuss whether theories are tested at all, or systems of theories. But it's pointless.)

Yes, per citation, Morgan was for the overthrow of property relations as they existed in Euro-civilization during that epoch, So did Boas, btw, whose verbal rants were aimed at how political beliefs would not allow science to cheat, at least at Columbia U. Otherwise, you'd be a 'marxist'.

This should be fun. Cite one example of Boas arguing for "the overthrow of property relations as they existed in Euro-civilization during that epoch" (by which I mean capitalism, as Negrian "empire" and "oligarchies" are of no interest to us, in fact a financial oligarchy tied to cartels is infinitely more progressive than fucking small capital of the sort Negri and Hardt champion). Come to think of it, cite one example of Boas calling Engels "evil", as per your claim.

You know what people who willingly make false claims are called, right?

Everyone in economics works with supply and demand one way or another. Keynes, in the early 1920's saw demand as a set of probabilities, or 'propensities to spend'. This, in short refutes Say.

This is nonsense. Marxists don't work with the law of supply and demand, not even the law of supply and demand amended so it doesn't immediately come into conflict with the historical trends of prices, but the law of value. Of course since the only thing about the law of value you seem to know comes from Boehm-Bawerk...

QueerVanguard

6th July 2015, 01:53

will franklin

6th July 2015, 04:55

Of course Morgan used his fieldwork on The Iroquois as an example of the particular ‘stage of evolution’ that he gave them. He also used his fieldwork on Plains Indian kinship systems. Why would he not?

The issue was that far more ethnographic material was needed in order to coherently write such a large-scale theory; none existed. Rather, the stages of evolution were buttressed by rumorand speculation. Hence the ‘nuts ‘n berries eating ‘savages’.

Within the field, debate continues today as to whether Boas was a committed ‘cultural historicist’-- or rather saw this theoretical as a default based upon lack of real data necessary to do a general theory of humanity.

Debate, is centered on various statements within the “Franz Boas Papers’, which are readily available online. This, of course, has been, since 1942, an obvious must-read for anyone interested in the history of American Anthropology. There, you’ll find statements of his advocating socialism. These were so common that the generic statement of his socialist beliefs can be googled up.

In other words, only a marxo-paranoid would be so dumb as to call someone a liar about facts than are available online. Which reminds me of the joke told by the Argentinean military: “The Marxists came on board of their own free will because we told them that we we’re flying to Moscow”.

Re Lowie: ‘culture at a distance’ is hardly my term. This is taught to undergrads on the 3-400 history of anthropology level. Ditto that Lowie was the first to clearly apply the method known as ‘cultural relativism’.

Also taught in school is both the basic distinction between ‘hypotheses’ and theory’ and the ‘scientific method’. That you think that these are ‘positivist’ afflictions is as interesting to me as your denial of the evil character of the USSR and the labeling of American intervention in WW2 as ‘imperialist.

In other words, frequently the best way of dealing with nutcase ideologues is to simply state your case, state their ‘case’ as a basis of comparison, and then back off. Mine is a simple rendition of Anthropology as taught. Otherwise, one is free to remain a Marxo-paranoid; all that can be done is to demonstrate the differences.

In Physics, you say ‘Ergodic Hypothoses precisely because it remains unproven due to a lack of means for testing. Otherwise, you would say ‘theory’. Rather, computational Physics uses it as a tool that obtains predictable results.

I know of no ‘Quine’ who’s a scientist with published results. Rather, there’s a ‘Willard Quine’, the great philosopher who passed away 15 years ago. Perhaps you understand his ‘denial’ of hypotheses-forming as part of either his ‘Fallacies of Empiricism’, or more specifically his concepts of ‘Relativistic ontology’ or ‘confirmation holism’. Perhaps you care to explain….(?).

Hardly a marxo-materialist, he famously wrote,”But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of conceptions enter into our mind only as cultural posits.” Also, “To speak of Philosophy of science is to be redundant.” He voted Republican, btw. That, you can google up, too.

I suppose ‘marxist economics’ means anything marxists want it to mean at the time that they say it. Doubtless, this means long debates with the likes of B-B and the austro-ninnies who aren’t much for numbers, either. In any case, yes, all bourgeois-empiricist Economics utilizes some form of supply demand function, replete with quantities.

It’s sort of a world-view thing, such as calling the shooting of children at Yekaterinburg “murder” instead of ‘objective-social justice rendered to members of the oppressor class who, even as children, stand objectively guilty, in the concrete dialectical sense’.

It's not that I'm confused, it's that either you haven't read the book in question, or you're willfully misrepresenting it, much as you're doing with Boas's own position. Which is unfortunate to you as anyone can open the book - I believe there are several versions online - and verify that Morgan discusses e.g. the Iroquois, a group he did field work on.

I never said his, as you term it, "'culture at a distance' study of Germany" was his only work. I'm simply pointing out how ridiculous it is for you to post these long emotional rants about the True Scientific Method (TM) (actually positivist fairytales) and how eeevil the Soviet Union was, then cite someone who completely made up one of his works, in service to US imperialism.

Jesusing Christ. Far from being someone who can lecture others on the scientific method, you have more than a century of catching up to do when it comes to theories of how science is done. That you come here and in apparent seriousness repeat these banal oversimplifications beggars belief.

(If you want an example of a hypothesis that isn't testable according to any reasonable criterion, try the ergodic hypothesis. Now if you were familiar with Quine - no doubt a "Marxist paranoiac" according to you as he didn't repeat positivist bromides - we might discuss whether theories are tested at all, or systems of theories. But it's pointless.)

This should be fun. Cite one example of Boas arguing for "the overthrow of property relations as they existed in Euro-civilization during that epoch" (by which I mean capitalism, as Negrian "empire" and "oligarchies" are of no interest to us, in fact a financial oligarchy tied to cartels is infinitely more progressive than fucking small capital of the sort Negri and Hardt champion). Come to think of it, cite one example of Boas calling Engels "evil", as per your claim.

You know what people who willingly make false claims are called, right?

This is nonsense. Marxists don't work with the law of supply and demand, not even the law of supply and demand amended so it doesn't immediately come into conflict with the historical trends of prices, but the law of value. Of course since the only thing about the law of value you seem to know comes from Boehm-Bawerk...

will franklin

6th July 2015, 05:02

Marx wrote that Proudhon was "a Jew of nigger blood".

Call me crazy, but I can't get really excited about the "work" of a man who had this to say about Black people

"Unimportant in numbers, feeble in intellect, and inferior in rank to every other portion of the human family, they yet centre in themselves, in their unknown past and mysterious present, one of the greatest problems in the science of the families of mankind. They seem to challenge and to traverse all the evidences of the unity of the origin of the human family by their excessive deviation from such a standard of the species as would probably be adopted on the assumption of unity of origin. In the light of our present knowledge the negro is the chief stumbling block in the way of establishing the unity of the origin of the human family, upon the basis of scientific proofs"
MORGAN

His work is littered with all of the muh Aryan supremacy shit that all anthropology had back then. It's a disgrace Engels took this guys shit seriously, I'm sure Marx would have laughed at it for the pseudo-science it is.

QueerVanguard

6th July 2015, 05:13

Marx wrote that Proudhon was "a Jew of nigger blood".

Where, when? If he did, he was probably being satirical. Proudhon was the racist who wanted to exterminate Jews and supported the Confederates during the Civil War.

Rafiq

6th July 2015, 07:18

Of course Morgan used his fieldwork on The Iroquois as an example of the particular ‘stage of evolution’ that he gave them. He also used his fieldwork on Plains Indian kinship systems. Why would he not?

Because again, a point of similarity was conceived in evaluating pre-civilized Greek kinship bands, among others I've already fucking pointed out. You commit the basic error in assuming that Morgan, and later Engels, made pretenses to a "universal" stage of human evolution SOLELY from the kinship studies derived from the Native Americans. But this is hardly the case - the extrapolations were drawn from both the kinship studies, and an evaluation of present-day accounts of societies who were in similar stages of social development. Even so, the point of Engels was not to draw grand conclusions about "human evolution" but to wrought out the very basic implications that the kinship systems among the native Americans had for their respective societies, and how societies with similar kinship systems had the same implications. And for the record, I find it doubtful that even Morgan claimed that the primary diet of all savages was "nuts and berries" as this makes little sense as a form of "speculation" even without data. Are you going to try and tell us that Morgan had no notion of geographic diversity, i.e. that the primary diet of savages in the arctic, or desert dwelling nomadic peoples ate nuts and berries? No, of course not. One begins to recognize that the entire basis of argument you've constructed has been built PURELY on a straw man. You have done nothing more than continually misrepresent Morgan.

That you think that these are ‘positivist’ afflictions is as interesting to me as your denial of the evil character of the USSR and the labeling of American intervention in WW2 as ‘imperialist.

It's absolutely fucking shocking that someone who makes pretenses to "science" uses words like "evil" to describe societies. Really, what the fuck am I reading? The "evil character" of the USSR? Lo and behold, the same mechanisms which allow you to have your backward, broken epistemology, sustain notions inherently outside of the domain of scientific inquiry like "evil". As far as a critical analysis of this word goes on a scientific level, its fundamentally ideological implications, the positivist will tell us that nothing can be said - that it is simply an "unknown" - they might concede its lack of scienticity, but what makes them a positivist, or an empiricist, is precisely their assertion that it cannot be known at all. Hence the scienticity of Marxism: Even if Engels was 100% empirically wrong, we are still in a position to convert what is assumed ideologically by bourgeois ideologues into real knowledge that is up for critical evaluation. So keen are these philistines who prattle of "science" to buttress what is irrevocably unscientific about their conception of the world, as using catch phrases like "All of this is taught in school". In other words, "authoritative" knowledge for them has literal connotations, bound up precisely with real authority itself.

Why could I not say that what you're taught in the schools of the Soviet Union is a basis for "legitimate" knowledge? Why could I not say: "Also taught in schools is the reality that in bourgeois societies, scientific methodology is subordinate to the prerogatives instilled by ruling ideology" vis a vis Soviet schools? The typical response you will hurl here is one of laughter out of pure arrogance: Which conveys CONFIDENCE in legitimacy, which is sustained by nothing more than raw power in approximation to the reproduction of human life. There is nothing about schools in the west which makes them "less biased" or "more true" than schools in the Soviet Union that is beyond practicality (i.e. in approximation to their respective societies). You couldn't even make much pretenses to inferior practicality, because there was absolutely nothing inferior about Soviet science - and while philistines love to prattle of lysenkoism, it's still nowhere near as abominable as scientific racism, evolutionary psychology, or the innumerable pseudoscientific currents produced in capitalist society like astrology, etc.

all that can be done is to demonstrate the differences.

At least you're honest in recognizing that such differences aren't grounded in mere theoretical disputes, but real, practical social differences. Your'e a bourgeois ideologue, we're Communists. We, quite simply have nothing to say to you in this regard. We don't seek to convert you, we don't seek to win you over anymore than we do the bourgeoisie themselves. Take for example the basic example of a slave rebellion. Is this a product of a misunderstanding? What does the master, and the slave - what do they have to say to each other? Nothing!

But you can most certainly bet that we will expose you for what you are. We will expose you when you make pretenses to the divine, to nature, or finally - to 'science' as shields to hide behind. And it's really that simple.

Rather, computational Physics uses it as a tool that obtains predictable results.

That is because it has a practical purpose, with the point being that scientific truth is not grounded merely in its 'testability' (for there is ambiguity here), because truth does not exist outside of the domain of human practice. Truth is nothing more than a conceived relationship between man and the world that exists independently of him, it is PRACTICAL. Truth, in this sense, is an inherently human category, and to say otherwise is to assume that the universe around us is embedded, innately, with essential "human" characteristics independently of a human relationship to it.

I suppose ‘marxist economics’ means anything marxists want it to mean at the time that they say it.

Wow, you demonstrate such stunning familiarity with Marxist economics! Are you fucking kidding me? Thsi is how illegitimate ideas are designated ideologically - they are merely assumed to be a random association of "words" that are formed and the whims of the individual, rather than that of the gods. But we Marxists are atheists - in practice. We do not have gods, we do not need pretenses to some kind of higher legitimate authority in order to conceive the world around us, it does not stand that "Marxist economics" is an arbitrary term.

It’s sort of a world-view thing, such as calling the shooting of children at Yekaterinburg “murder” instead of ‘objective-social justice rendered to members of the oppressor class who, even as children, stand objectively guilty, in the concrete dialectical sense’.

Who practically conceives the shootings this way? Again, you dishonest piece of fucking shit, I already pointed out that the main perpetrator remained remorseful for the rest of his life, and was received with hostility even by fellow Bolsheviks. Because something is necessary does not mean it is any less of a tragedy. Again, I ask again:

I mean, tell me, would it have been worth strengthening the morale of the white butchers, who I can promise were responsible for the death, rape, and mutilation of children, conceiving it as a triviailty because they were doing god's work? Let me ask you a quick question, would your beloved system, and the ideology which sustains it for a second allow the life of a few little girls to not only hinder its EXISTENCE, but get in the way of profit in the immediate sense? The logic of us "Marxo-paranoids" is that we ought to make heavy sacrifices for the greater good, but the logic of capitalism is sexually enslaving little girls as an extension of the commodification of sexuality in general. You hypocritical piece of fucking shit, you're going ot sit here and lecture us about your moral qualms with the "ends justifies the means"? Well FUCK YOU, you SADISTIC scum are so morally depraved that you can't even follow through with THIS logic, i.e. there seldom even has to be justification for the bloody butchers of capital, it is a given that she must be fed annually with blood-sacrifice in war and in hell.

Indeed though, you are right to ground it in purely an ideological dispute, one of legitimacy. Of course a bourgeois ideologue is going to be fucking horrified by the act, just like all the hypocritical pieces of shit are horrified by the reign of terror (when in reality, the deaths at the hand of the guillotine were hardly significant historically, within the context of the absolutist French monarchy) solely because this time it was gentlemen who received the bad end of the stick. Bourgeois ideologues are horrified when figures of power that posses an aura of legitimacy are killed, because vested in them is all meaning, all that is holy and good. Vested in them is the only sense of security, meaning and life - for without them lies the infinite abyss of freedom, and all the anxiety it inspires. Do not for a fucking second try to pass off the horror of the death of the Tsar's kids, which was in the context of the civil war itself anything but significant, as anything more than the trauma of regicide in your feeble little fucking mind.

Rafiq

6th July 2015, 07:20

Where, when? If he did, he was probably being satirical. Proudhon was the racist who wanted to exterminate Jews and supported the Confederates during the Civil War.

This moron is probably referring to Marx's comments about Lassalle. He fails to not only get the quote wrong, but completely fuck up in at least getting the context right. The reality is that using the word "Jewish nigger" hardly contains connotations of the genetic, innate inferiority of blacks or anything of significance about Jews (who, incidentally, Marx "ethnically" belonged).

will franklin

6th July 2015, 08:18

Racist citations by both Marx and Engels are splattered all over the net.

Where, when? If he did, he was probably being satirical. Proudhon was the racist who wanted to exterminate Jews and supported the Confederates during the Civil War.

will franklin

6th July 2015, 08:22

The reality is that this moron is so numbed by his own violent and vulgar language that he deludes himself into a 'contextualization' of the obviously racist.

This moron is probably referring to Marx's comments about Lassalle. He fails to not only get the quote wrong, but completely fuck up in at least getting the context right. The reality is that using the word "Jewish nigger" hardly contains connotations of the genetic, innate inferiority of blacks or anything of significance about Jews (who, incidentally, Marx "ethnically" belonged).

will franklin

6th July 2015, 08:48

Since there is only speculation and legend as to the kinship terminology and organization of 'pre-civilized' Greeks, you cannot cross correlate this non- data with that of the observed and recorded Plains Indians.

That the first humans were nuts 'n berries foragers is plainly stated in his book. Ditto that they practiced communal marriage. Not only is this speculative nonsense, but also neither ethnography nor paleontology show this. Quite the contrary.

More to the point, the Boasian Revolution that overturned 19th century evolutionary schemes (again, which he pejoratively called 'unilineal') emphasized that present day 'primitives' were in their own way as evolutionary as Western industrial societies. Studying those deemed less 'advanced' in the present world gives no insight into prehistory.

Re shield I'm hiding behind: Socialist progress needs to purge itself of any suggestion or remnant of marxo-paranoiacs such as you. So prattle on, with your obscenities: Lumpen of the World, Unite!

Because again, a point of similarity was conceived in evaluating pre-civilized Greek kinship bands, among others I've already fucking pointed out. You commit the basic error in assuming that Morgan, and later Engels, made pretenses to a "universal" stage of human evolution SOLELY from the kinship studies derived from the Native Americans. But this is hardly the case - the extrapolations were drawn from both the kinship studies, and an evaluation of present-day accounts of societies who were in similar stages of social development. Even so, the point of Engels was not to draw grand conclusions about "human evolution" but to wrought out the very basic implications that the kinship systems among the native Americans had for their respective societies, and how societies with similar kinship systems had the same implications. And for the record, I find it doubtful that even Morgan claimed that the primary diet of all savages was "nuts and berries" as this makes little sense as a form of "speculation" even without data. Are you going to try and tell us that Morgan had no notion of geographic diversity, i.e. that the primary diet of savages in the arctic, or desert dwelling nomadic peoples ate nuts and berries? No, of course not. One begins to recognize that the entire basis of argument you've constructed has been built PURELY on a straw man. You have done nothing more than continually misrepresent Morgan.

It's absolutely fucking shocking that someone who makes pretenses to "science" uses words like "evil" to describe societies. Really, what the fuck am I reading? The "evil character" of the USSR? Lo and behold, the same mechanisms which allow you to have your backward, broken epistemology, sustain notions inherently outside of the domain of scientific inquiry like "evil". As far as a critical analysis of this word goes on a scientific level, its fundamentally ideological implications, the positivist will tell us that nothing can be said - that it is simply an "unknown" - they might concede its lack of scienticity, but what makes them a positivist, or an empiricist, is precisely their assertion that it cannot be known at all. Hence the scienticity of Marxism: Even if Engels was 100% empirically wrong, we are still in a position to convert what is assumed ideologically by bourgeois ideologues into real knowledge that is up for critical evaluation. So keen are these philistines who prattle of "science" to buttress what is irrevocably unscientific about their conception of the world, as using catch phrases like "All of this is taught in school". In other words, "authoritative" knowledge for them has literal connotations, bound up precisely with real authority itself.

Why could I not say that what you're taught in the schools of the Soviet Union is a basis for "legitimate" knowledge? Why could I not say: "Also taught in schools is the reality that in bourgeois societies, scientific methodology is subordinate to the prerogatives instilled by ruling ideology" vis a vis Soviet schools? The typical response you will hurl here is one of laughter out of pure arrogance: Which conveys CONFIDENCE in legitimacy, which is sustained by nothing more than raw power in approximation to the reproduction of human life. There is nothing about schools in the west which makes them "less biased" or "more true" than schools in the Soviet Union that is beyond practicality (i.e. in approximation to their respective societies). You couldn't even make much pretenses to inferior practicality, because there was absolutely nothing inferior about Soviet science - and while philistines love to prattle of lysenkoism, it's still nowhere near as abominable as scientific racism, evolutionary psychology, or the innumerable pseudoscientific currents produced in capitalist society like astrology, etc.

At least you're honest in recognizing that such differences aren't grounded in mere theoretical disputes, but real, practical social differences. Your'e a bourgeois ideologue, we're Communists. We, quite simply have nothing to say to you in this regard. We don't seek to convert you, we don't seek to win you over anymore than we do the bourgeoisie themselves. Take for example the basic example of a slave rebellion. Is this a product of a misunderstanding? What does the master, and the slave - what do they have to say to each other? Nothing!

But you can most certainly bet that we will expose you for what you are. We will expose you when you make pretenses to the divine, to nature, or finally - to 'science' as shields to hide behind. And it's really that simple.

That is because it has a practical purpose, with the point being that scientific truth is not grounded merely in its 'testability' (for there is ambiguity here), because truth does not exist outside of the domain of human practice. Truth is nothing more than a conceived relationship between man and the world that exists independently of him, it is PRACTICAL. Truth, in this sense, is an inherently human category, and to say otherwise is to assume that the universe around us is embedded, innately, with essential "human" characteristics independently of a human relationship to it.

Wow, you demonstrate such stunning familiarity with Marxist economics! Are you fucking kidding me? Thsi is how illegitimate ideas are designated ideologically - they are merely assumed to be a random association of "words" that are formed and the whims of the individual, rather than that of the gods. But we Marxists are atheists - in practice. We do not have gods, we do not need pretenses to some kind of higher legitimate authority in order to conceive the world around us, it does not stand that "Marxist economics" is an arbitrary term.

Who practically conceives the shootings this way? Again, you dishonest piece of fucking shit, I already pointed out that the main perpetrator remained remorseful for the rest of his life, and was received with hostility even by fellow Bolsheviks. Because something is necessary does not mean it is any less of a tragedy. Again, I ask again:

I mean, tell me, would it have been worth strengthening the morale of the white butchers, who I can promise were responsible for the death, rape, and mutilation of children, conceiving it as a triviailty because they were doing god's work? Let me ask you a quick question, would your beloved system, and the ideology which sustains it for a second allow the life of a few little girls to not only hinder its EXISTENCE, but get in the way of profit in the immediate sense? The logic of us "Marxo-paranoids" is that we ought to make heavy sacrifices for the greater good, but the logic of capitalism is sexually enslaving little girls as an extension of the commodification of sexuality in general. You hypocritical piece of fucking shit, you're going ot sit here and lecture us about your moral qualms with the "ends justifies the means"? Well FUCK YOU, you SADISTIC scum are so morally depraved that you can't even follow through with THIS logic, i.e. there seldom even has to be justification for the bloody butchers of capital, it is a given that she must be fed annually with blood-sacrifice in war and in hell.

Indeed though, you are right to ground it in purely an ideological dispute, one of legitimacy. Of course a bourgeois ideologue is going to be fucking horrified by the act, just like all the hypocritical pieces of shit are horrified by the reign of terror (when in reality, the deaths at the hand of the guillotine were hardly significant historically, within the context of the absolutist French monarchy) solely because this time it was gentlemen who received the bad end of the stick. Bourgeois ideologues are horrified when figures of power that posses an aura of legitimacy are killed, because vested in them is all meaning, all that is holy and good. Vested in them is the only sense of security, meaning and life - for without them lies the infinite abyss of freedom, and all the anxiety it inspires. Do not for a fucking second try to pass off the horror of the death of the Tsar's kids, which was in the context of the civil war itself anything but significant, as anything more than the trauma of regicide in your feeble little fucking mind.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

6th July 2015, 12:09

Call me crazy, but I can't get really excited about the "work" of a man who had this to say about Black people

"Unimportant in numbers, feeble in intellect, and inferior in rank to every other portion of the human family, they yet centre in themselves, in their unknown past and mysterious present, one of the greatest problems in the science of the families of mankind. They seem to challenge and to traverse all the evidences of the unity of the origin of the human family by their excessive deviation from such a standard of the species as would probably be adopted on the assumption of unity of origin. In the light of our present knowledge the negro is the chief stumbling block in the way of establishing the unity of the origin of the human family, upon the basis of scientific proofs"
MORGAN

His work is littered with all of the muh Aryan supremacy shit that all anthropology had back then. It's a disgrace Engels took this guys shit seriously, I'm sure Marx would have laughed at it for the pseudo-science it is.

Morgan's view of black Americans and his actual politics were pretty bad. In fact he advocated an end to slavery - through gradual reform of course - in order to rid the US of its black population. But his anthropological work doesn't focus on black Americans, or on Africans. It focuses on American Indians, for which Morgan, like many white racists of the period (including several senior Confederate figures), had a sort of paternalistic appreciation. Far from it that his work is unproblematic, or that Engels would have been right if he had simply copied it uncritically (he hadn't, of course, since Morgan focused on the evolution of kinship terms whereas Engels focused on the sexual relations that later Marxists would explicitly recognise as a form of social reproduction).

Of course Morgan used his fieldwork on The Iroquois as an example of the particular ‘stage of evolution’ that he gave them. He also used his fieldwork on Plains Indian kinship systems. Why would he not?

The issue was that far more ethnographic material was needed in order to coherently write such a large-scale theory; none existed. Rather, the stages of evolution were buttressed by rumorand speculation. Hence the ‘nuts ‘n berries eating ‘savages’.

"Rumorand speculation" here consisting of historical sources that were accepted in serious science of the time (which wouldn't be critically reevaluated until much later). I don't know, I half want you to keep digging that hole. It's entertaining.

Debate, is centered on various statements within the “Franz Boas Papers’, which are readily available online. This, of course, has been, since 1942, an obvious must-read for anyone interested in the history of American Anthropology. There, you’ll find statements of his advocating socialism. These were so common that the generic statement of his socialist beliefs can be googled up.

In other words, only a marxo-paranoid would be so dumb as to call someone a liar about facts than are available online. Which reminds me of the joke told by the Argentinean military: “The Marxists came on board of their own free will because we told them that we we’re flying to Moscow”.

If "the generic statement of his socialist beliefs" can be "googled up", then you can provide it quite easily, including the source. The same goes for the contention that Boas called Engels "evil", which is another one of your fantasies. And yes, we call people who willingly make false claims liars. And when liars are caught they squirm, and it's quite entertaining to watch.

Also taught in school is both the basic distinction between ‘hypotheses’ and theory’ and the ‘scientific method’. That you think that these are ‘positivist’ afflictions is as interesting to me as your denial of the evil character of the USSR and the labeling of American intervention in WW2 as ‘imperialist.

So here is another thing for you to find interesting: I don't label any social formation "evil". In fact I think "evil" is a nonsense term more suited for sermons than analysis of society. In fact given your violent moralistic language and your tendency to "find" present social forms everywhere in history as eternal and immutable, I would really like to know your view on, say, abortion, homosexuality, the market etc., but I don't think you will fess up. You don't have the guts for that.

And yes, a lot of things are taught in school. Many of those things turn out to be oversimplifications, or outright wrong, when you study the field in question more closely. When I was in school, we were though the Umayyads invaded Gaul in order to spread their religion, encountering Christian resistance at every turn before being driven out by Chuckie the Hammer at Tours. When you actually take the time to study this period of history, of course, you realise how opposed the Gallo-Roman aristocracy of the south was to Martel's rule, that they invited the Umayyads in many instances (particularly the Patrician of Provence) and collaborated with them almost always, and that the Umayyads themselves didn't consider Tours to be a major defeat.

The notion that there is a strict distinction between hypotheses and theories is part of the so-called hypothetico-deductive model of how science works, which despite its survival in popular accounts (usually married with some form of quasi-Popperian falsificationism) hasn't really been taken seriously for quite some time. In fact the general trend of the last century was to move away from the idea that it is individual theories, or hypotheses, or whatever you please (actual scientific naming practices are all over the place, as scientists don't feel themselves obliged by the claims of the positivists), that are tested.

And that the involvement of the US, the "giant of world imperialism", in WWII was imperialist is a basic communist position. Oddly enough the only ones who would dispute this are the Stalinists, who were in a popular front with various liberal imperialists at that point.

In Physics, you say ‘Ergodic Hypothoses precisely because it remains unproven due to a lack of means for testing. Otherwise, you would say ‘theory’. Rather, computational Physics uses it as a tool that obtains predictable results.

Yet a few posts ago you claimed that:

"In science, a speculation that one cannot test (eg uniliner evolution c 1880) remains a speculation."

And as per the previous paragraph, actual naming practices in science do not follow your positivist nonsense. "String theory", after all, was a common expression well before it was clear if it could be tested in the usual sense. "Parton theory" as well.

I know of no ‘Quine’ who’s a scientist with published results. Rather, there’s a ‘Willard Quine’, the great philosopher who passed away 15 years ago. Perhaps you understand his ‘denial’ of hypotheses-forming as part of either his ‘Fallacies of Empiricism’, or more specifically his concepts of ‘Relativistic ontology’ or ‘confirmation holism’. Perhaps you care to explain….(?).

I was obviously talking about what has come to be called confirmation holism. Serious work about how science is done - I mean, you can include people like Gardner here but then we're not speaking the same language anymore - is today split between what is called the philosophy of science (including Quine, incidentally a published mathematician and logician) and the sociology of science. You won't find the old hypothetico-deductive method taught in schools in either field, I'm afraid.

Hardly a marxo-materialist, he famously wrote,”But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of conceptions enter into our mind only as cultural posits.” Also, “To speak of Philosophy of science is to be redundant.” He voted Republican, btw. That, you can google up, too.

Yes, that was the joke: Quine was a conservative, but according to your own criteria he was a "marxo-paranoiac" (here's a bit of unsolicited advice: whenever you find yourself inventing new terms, just stop and take a good hard look at what you're doing). Although Quine did consider himself a materialist - just not the sort of God's fool of a materialist who thinks human knowledge is passively received from the external world (and in that regard the conservative Quine agrees, not just with the conservative Hegel but with the communist Marx).

I suppose ‘marxist economics’ means anything marxists want it to mean at the time that they say it. Doubtless, this means long debates with the likes of B-B and the austro-ninnies who aren’t much for numbers, either. In any case, yes, all bourgeois-empiricist Economics utilizes some form of supply demand function, replete with quantities.

Whereas Marxist economists don't use numbers at all, as I'm sure you've found out by an extensive review of the literature on the subject. No, wait, I was lying, I think you don't know what you're talking about, as is usual. No, the problem is not the use of numbers, using numbers is all well and in fact the only way to proceed. The point is that supply-demand functions are bunk.

It’s sort of a world-view thing, such as calling the shooting of children at Yekaterinburg “murder” instead of ‘objective-social justice rendered to members of the oppressor class who, even as children, stand objectively guilty, in the concrete dialectical sense’.

You're projecting your creepy morality onto everything, darling. And of course no one here is going to gush tears of remorse at your example, so I fail to see the point of bringing it up constantly.

Marx wrote that Proudhon was "a Jew of nigger blood".

He called, in private correspondence whose context has been lost to time, Lassalle a "Jewish nigger", incidentally while being Jewish himself. The fact that you can't even get the name right just underlines how hopelessly out of your depth you are.

Rafiq

6th July 2015, 16:59

will franklin

7th July 2015, 04:26

Using Quine to ‘refute’ empiricism is as dumb as a dialectician. His critique was aimed at the classical epistemology of Carnap, et al, as offering insufficient support for empiricism as such:
:
“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . “

In this respect, his ‘confirmation holism’ and ‘relative ontology’ indicate, simply, that data can be interpreted in more than one way; data used to support one theory is not exclusive to that particular theory. A good example would be Malinowski’s (observed) understanding of Morgan’s (unobserved) data on ‘Hawaiian’ kinship indicates a trade route for the exchange of wives among island groups—not a survival of ‘communal marriage.’

As an empiricist, he obviously had nothing to say of null-set, no data situations such as Morgan’s making up stories of communal marriage and nuts n berry picking. In reality, your “critical evaluation of historical sources that were accepted by serious science at that time” was nothing less than an outright rejection of worthless junk for what it was.

Moreover, an orthodox understanding of Boas’ Papers (cv) indicate his admiration for Darwin, and the ostensible hope to put Anthropology on an evolutionary footing of some sport. Yet without real data, this wasn’t possible; he simply had to start from scratch.

Otherwise, the ‘Ergodic Hypotheses’ really isn’t; Physicists cut it epistemological slack because it defines parameters of measurement within a thermodynamic system. More correctly, it’s a ‘speculation’. Ditto with String ‘Theory’, which isn’t, because it hasn’t been tested.

Therefore, the blurring of lines between speculation, hypotheses, and theory is a function of mass media and popular culture that gave us, for example, ‘God’ particles and a symbol for ‘atom’ that depicts electrons in elliptical orbits around a nucleon.

Yet the understanding of this socially-induced blurring process is part and parcel to Quine’s project, as well. That’s because we have a public of scientific illiterates—basically ideologues—who confuse a critique within science with a self-serving scenario of methodological anarchy. Part of this stratagem, I suppose, is to pull out 19th century terms such as ‘positivist’.

To this end, readers of Philo of Sci must be careful as to how and to whom concepts are presented. For example, in explaining Nancy Cartwright, her attack on ‘grand theory’ and definition of experimentation as ‘simulacra’ might be construed to suggest that Physics is total bullshit.

Conceptual mis-representation is also prevalent in history. High-skool accounts of Martel’s defeat of the ‘Islamic horde’ at Tours was propagated by the Katholick church and ‘official’ French history. What it took was real scholarship to reveal the complexities of multiple alliances between Romans, Goths, Kelts, and Moors who did, indeed, think rather unkindly towards the Franks. This is taught in ‘school’, too, but obviously not yours.

Morgan's view of black Americans and his actual politics were pretty bad. In fact he advocated an end to slavery - through gradual reform of course - in order to rid the US of its black population. But his anthropological work doesn't focus on black Americans, or on Africans. It focuses on American Indians, for which Morgan, like many white racists of the period (including several senior Confederate figures), had a sort of paternalistic appreciation. Far from it that his work is unproblematic, or that Engels would have been right if he had simply copied it uncritically (he hadn't, of course, since Morgan focused on the evolution of kinship terms whereas Engels focused on the sexual relations that later Marxists would explicitly recognise as a form of social reproduction).

"Rumorand speculation" here consisting of historical sources that were accepted in serious science of the time (which wouldn't be critically reevaluated until much later). I don't know, I half want you to keep digging that hole. It's entertaining.

If "the generic statement of his socialist beliefs" can be "googled up", then you can provide it quite easily, including the source. The same goes for the contention that Boas called Engels "evil", which is another one of your fantasies. And yes, we call people who willingly make false claims liars. And when liars are caught they squirm, and it's quite entertaining to watch.

So here is another thing for you to find interesting: I don't label any social formation "evil". In fact I think "evil" is a nonsense term more suited for sermons than analysis of society. In fact given your violent moralistic language and your tendency to "find" present social forms everywhere in history as eternal and immutable, I would really like to know your view on, say, abortion, homosexuality, the market etc., but I don't think you will fess up. You don't have the guts for that.

And yes, a lot of things are taught in school. Many of those things turn out to be oversimplifications, or outright wrong, when you study the field in question more closely. When I was in school, we were though the Umayyads invaded Gaul in order to spread their religion, encountering Christian resistance at every turn before being driven out by Chuckie the Hammer at Tours. When you actually take the time to study this period of history, of course, you realise how opposed the Gallo-Roman aristocracy of the south was to Martel's rule, that they invited the Umayyads in many instances (particularly the Patrician of Provence) and collaborated with them almost always, and that the Umayyads themselves didn't consider Tours to be a major defeat.

The notion that there is a strict distinction between hypotheses and theories is part of the so-called hypothetico-deductive model of how science works, which despite its survival in popular accounts (usually married with some form of quasi-Popperian falsificationism) hasn't really been taken seriously for quite some time. In fact the general trend of the last century was to move away from the idea that it is individual theories, or hypotheses, or whatever you please (actual scientific naming practices are all over the place, as scientists don't feel themselves obliged by the claims of the positivists), that are tested.

And that the involvement of the US, the "giant of world imperialism", in WWII was imperialist is a basic communist position. Oddly enough the only ones who would dispute this are the Stalinists, who were in a popular front with various liberal imperialists at that point.

Yet a few posts ago you claimed that:

"In science, a speculation that one cannot test (eg uniliner evolution c 1880) remains a speculation."

And as per the previous paragraph, actual naming practices in science do not follow your positivist nonsense. "String theory", after all, was a common expression well before it was clear if it could be tested in the usual sense. "Parton theory" as well.

I was obviously talking about what has come to be called confirmation holism. Serious work about how science is done - I mean, you can include people like Gardner here but then we're not speaking the same language anymore - is today split between what is called the philosophy of science (including Quine, incidentally a published mathematician and logician) and the sociology of science. You won't find the old hypothetico-deductive method taught in schools in either field, I'm afraid.

Yes, that was the joke: Quine was a conservative, but according to your own criteria he was a "marxo-paranoiac" (here's a bit of unsolicited advice: whenever you find yourself inventing new terms, just stop and take a good hard look at what you're doing). Although Quine did consider himself a materialist - just not the sort of God's fool of a materialist who thinks human knowledge is passively received from the external world (and in that regard the conservative Quine agrees, not just with the conservative Hegel but with the communist Marx).

Whereas Marxist economists don't use numbers at all, as I'm sure you've found out by an extensive review of the literature on the subject. No, wait, I was lying, I think you don't know what you're talking about, as is usual. No, the problem is not the use of numbers, using numbers is all well and in fact the only way to proceed. The point is that supply-demand functions are bunk.

You're projecting your creepy morality onto everything, darling. And of course no one here is going to gush tears of remorse at your example, so I fail to see the point of bringing it up constantly.

He called, in private correspondence whose context has been lost to time, Lassalle a "Jewish nigger", incidentally while being Jewish himself. The fact that you can't even get the name right just underlines how hopelessly out of your depth you are.

will franklin

7th July 2015, 05:39

Since you seem to have a genuine interest in the lineage issue,permit me a few points, please:

First, Anthropology uses Murdock's (revised) HRAF to do a first-glance correlation of data. For example, there's a high tendency for cultures based upon local farming to be matrilineal: both inheritance and name are traced through the mother. Classically, you see the 'avunculate', in which mother's brother (our system's 'uncle') plays the father-figure.

Yet when you cross-reference this trait against 'war-like', patrilineality appears, for obvious reasons.

Many cultures also change their lineality based upon place, situation, season,and social class. In this respect, the studies of Emmanuel Marx (yes, a relative of Karl) with the Bedouin and Leach with the Malay Kachin are classic.

My own, with the Tuareg of the central Sahara-Az'wan involved demonstrating the caste nature of lineality--as only the warrior-guys in indigo were patrilineal/archy. Conveniently enough, all Saharan Am'zer (Berber) societies use a closed small-clan system of familial nomenclature in the desert, and an extended-familial nomenclature when migrating to the coast in search of work. There, in cities, everyone seems 'related', strange to tell.

Now i'm pointing this out to emphasize that, in terms of Anthropology, Marxist-influenced research strategies that define kinship systems as fundamentally adaptive infrastructures to changing material conditions have met with great success.

In other words, a realistic Marxism would seem far more about human plasticity of institutions and beliefs, rather than grand-theory stages. this, in any case, is wholly consistent with a young Marx whose own PhD work concerned a comparison of Classical Greek materialisms, ostensibly advocating a hands-on epistemology that emphasis thing-ness to human labor and creative power.

In any case, what we know of Mycenian 'Greeks' is of their warlike culture of the Iliad and Odyssey, etc. Here, we can accept reports from the classical era that social formation was based around what we'd now call an officer's klub of extended cousins. The eldest was called 'archon', because that's what it meant. He, a survivor, supposedly had the most battle experience.

So can we cross-reference this trait to, say, the warlike Iroquois, who were constantly fighting not only the Huron but also with each other? Well yes, of course; but what's important is that this represents a human adaptation--not an evolutionary stage.

This, we can assert by the obverse: the archaeology indicates that the excavation of pre-Mycenian, neolithic villages that appear untouched by warfare seem to have been somewhat inclined towards matrilineality. Simply put, we see both the same tendency everywhere of female figurines replacing in house weapons and the lack of 'male-only' dwellings, or barracks.

This, in turn, is positively cross-referenced against a now-huge template of both ethnography and archaeology from America. Then of course, we have astounding, 20,000 year old sequences in places such as an-Natuf, in present-day Lebanon. Warlike strata vs peaceful, masculine vs feminine. 'Evolution' seems to mean nothing more than winning wars and taking slaves...

Again, it derived from extensive studies regarding societies in similar historic epochs, and today we know that the conclusion drawn by Engels about kinship relations in such tribal societies was true: Beyond the plains indians. Again, you keep making hte error in assuming that SOLELY from studying the plains Indians was the conclusion drawn. You make it as though no extensive studies on kinship relations in other studies were done beyond "speculation", but this is hardly the case. You keep making pretenses to changes in "times", but regarding the study of antiquity, the methodology used to interpret it wasn't somehow so inferior as to warrant us to ignore it in the 19th century:

If this is mere "speculation", it sure is rather creative speculation. Is it so bizarre to assume that societies whose relations to survival are similar would, in turn, have similar kinship relations? It is not. Likewise, hunter-gatherer societies have been observed to be similar in this regard across the board, and hte point of difference almost always lies in: Level of influence by outsiders (inuits), historic changes (Complex HG societies), etc. - all characteristics that are conceivable as a point of distinguishing such societies "culturally", gravely opposed to the unscientific notion of culture simply developing at random with "not enough data" to draw conclusions as to where it derives.

When there is speculation, in the book, inferences and probabilities are presented as precisely those, i.e. "but it is nowhere near stated that the office was hereditary in certain families. Until the end of barbarism the probability is always against strict hereditary, which is quite incompatible with conditions in which rich and poor had completely equal rights within the gens". The reason this cannot be assumed to be "speculation" is the reality that it stands to reason that societies that emerged to civilization developed in a similar manner, with "cultural variance" being nowhere near sufficient enough to dictate reproductive practices for societies virtually in the same epoch.

Except that such a conclusion could have been drawn in the 19th century with the same so-called poverty of data: This statement is purely a platitude. Primitive societies which still exist clearly were not on the road to civilization, because it is this they managed to avoid doing (I.e. most egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have to strictly regulate it). But is there an objective criteria of development and advancement? Yes, there is - and this is not disputable. Some productive practices are more advanced and complex than others, but even if this were not the case, the point of reference is OUR society, the same society which has sustained the field of anthropology, etc. in the first place, meaning that a society is only less developed insofar as the point of development has its basis in modern day capitalism, which has, evidently, inherited world history and complete global hegemony.

Clearly prehistorical societies were less advanced, because most of them ceased to exist.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

7th July 2015, 11:40

Using Quine to ‘refute’ empiricism is as dumb as a dialectician. His critique was aimed at the classical epistemology of Carnap, et al, as offering insufficient support for empiricism as such:
:
“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . “

Quine certainly self-identified as an empiricist. Whether that self-identification made sense is another thing entirely (his student and PLP member Putnam self-identified as a realist, which most people would agree was not the case). But, as is usual, you're completely missing the point. I'm not "using Quine to refute empiricism", I've mentioned Quine as an example of the serious work in philosophy of science you are completely ignoring. Now you imply that you are familiar with his work, but the next sentence:

In this respect, his ‘confirmation holism’ and ‘relative ontology’ indicate, simply, that data can be interpreted in more than one way; data used to support one theory is not exclusive to that particular theory.

demonstrates that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, again. Since none of the works by Quine are online, here is what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

The predicament Duhem here identifies is no rainy day puzzle for philosophers of science, but a methodological challenge that constantly arises in the course of scientific practice itself. It is simply not true that for practical purposes and in concrete contexts a single revision of our beliefs in response to disconfirming evidence is always obviously correct, or the most promising, or the only or even most sensible avenue to pursue. To cite a classic example, when Newton's celestial mechanics failed to correctly predict the orbit of Uranus, scientists at the time did not simply abandon the theory but protected it from refutation by instead challenging the background assumption that the solar system contained only seven planets. This strategy bore fruit, notwithstanding the falsity of Newton's theory: by calculating the location of a hypothetical eighth planet influencing the orbit of Uranus, the astronomers Adams and Leverrier were eventually led to discover Neptune in 1846. But the very same strategy failed when used to try to explain the advance of the perihelion in Mercury's orbit by postulating the existence of “Vulcan”, an additional planet located between Mercury and the sun, and this phenomenon would resist satisfactory explanation until the arrival of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So it seems that Duhem was right to suggest not only that hypotheses must be tested as a group or a collection, but also that it is by no means a foregone conclusion which member of such a collection should be abandoned or revised in response to a failed empirical test or false implication. Indeed, this very example illustrates why Duhem's own rather hopeful appeal to the ‘good sense’ of scientists themselves in deciding when a given hypothesis ought to be abandoned promises very little if any relief from the general predicament of holist underdetermination.
As noted above, Duhem thought that the sort of underdetermination he had described presented a challenge only for theoretical physics, but subsequent thinking in the philosophy of science has tended to the opinion that the predicament Duhem described applies to theoretical testing in all fields of scientific inquiry. We cannot, for example, test an hypothesis about the phenotypic effects of a particular gene without presupposing a host of further beliefs about what genes are, how they work, how we can identify them, what other genes are doing, and so on. And in the middle of the 20th Century, W. V. O. Quine would incorporate confirmational holism and its associated concerns about underdetermination into an extraordinarily influential account of knowledge in general. As part of his famous (1951) critique of the widely accepted distinction between truths that are analytic (true by definition, or as a matter of logic or language alone) and those that are synthetic (true in virtue of some contingent fact about the way the world is), Quine argued instead that all of the beliefs we hold at any given time are linked in an interconnected web, which encounters our sensory experience only at its periphery:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. (1951, 42–3) One consequence of this general picture of human knowledge is that any and all of our beliefs are tested against experience only as a corporate body—or as Quine sometimes puts it, “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, p. 42).[4] A mismatch between what the web as a whole leads us to expect and the sensory experiences we actually receive will occasion some revision in our beliefs, but which revision we should make to bring the web as a whole back into conformity with our experiences is radically underdetermined by those experiences themselves. If we find our belief that there are brick houses on Elm Street to be in conflict with our immediate sense experience, we might revise our beliefs about the houses on Elm Street, but we might equally well modify instead our beliefs about the appearance of brick, or about our present location, or innumerable other beliefs constituting the interconnected web—in a pinch we might even decide that our present sensory experiences are simply hallucinations! Quine's point was not that any of these are particularly likely responses to recalcitrant experiences (indeed, an important part of his account is the explanation of why they are not), but instead that they would serve equally well to bring the web of belief as a whole in line with our experience. And if the belief that there are brick houses on Elm Street were sufficiently important to us, Quine insisted, it would be possible for us to preserve it “come what may” (in the way of empirical evidence), by making sufficiently radical adjustments elsewhere in the web of belief. It is in principle open to us, Quine argued, to revise even beliefs about logic, mathematics, or the meanings of our terms in response to recalcitrant experience; it might seem a tempting solution to certain persistent difficulties in quantum mechanics, for example, to reject classical logic's law of the excluded middle (allowing physical particles to both have and not have some determinate classical physical property like position or momentum at a given time). The only test of a belief, Quine argued, is whether it fits into a web of connected beliefs that accords well with our experience on the whole. And because this leaves any and all beliefs in that web at least potentially subject to revision on the basis of our ongoing sense experience or empirical evidence, he insisted, there simply are no beliefs that are analytic in the originally supposed sense of immune to revision in light of experience or true no matter what the world is like.
Quine recognized, of course, that many of the logically possible ways of revising our beliefs in response to recalcitrant experiences that remain open to us strike us as ad hoc, perfectly ridiculous, or worse. He argues (1955) that our actual revisions of the web of belief seek to maximize the theoretical “virtues” of simplicity, familiarity, scope, and fecundity, along with conformity to experience, and elsewhere suggests that we typically seek to resolve conflicts between the web of our beliefs and our sensory experiences in accordance with a principle of “conservatism”, that is, by making the smallest possible number of changes to the least central beliefs we can that will suffice to reconcile the web with experience. That is, Quine recognized that when we encounter recalcitrant experience we are not usually at a loss to decide which of our beliefs to revise in response to it, but he claimed that this is simply because we are strongly disposed as a matter of fundamental psychology to prefer whatever revision requires the most minimal mutilation of the existing web of beliefs and/or maximizes virtues that he explicitly characterizes as pragmatic. Indeed, it would seem that on Quine's view the very notion of a belief being more central or peripheral or in lesser or greater “proximity” to sense experience should be cashed out simply as a measure of our willingness to revise it in response to recalcitrant experience. That is, it would seem that what it means for one belief to be located “closer” to the sensory periphery of the web than another is simply that we are more likely to revise the first than the second if doing so would enable us to bring the web as a whole into conformity with otherwise recalcitrant sense experience. Thus, Quine saw the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic beliefs as simply registering the endpoints of a psychological continuum ordering our beliefs according to the ease and likelihood with which we are prepared to revise them in order to reconcile the web as a whole with our sense experience.

Otherwise, the ‘Ergodic Hypotheses’ really isn’t; Physicists cut it epistemological slack because it defines parameters of measurement within a thermodynamic system. More correctly, it’s a ‘speculation’. Ditto with String ‘Theory’, which isn’t, because it hasn’t been tested.

And this is the point where your entire "argument" unravels. You're forced to acknowledge that actual scientists - not "a public of scientific illiterates" - don't follow your prescriptions, so you chastise them. Well, thank you, great master, for telling us how to do our jobs, because we were basically guessing until now.

Science is demonstrably useful. Your positivist ideology is not. The only thing philosophy of science can do is describe how science is done - this is something almost anyone working in the field for the last century has understood. When you come with these prescriptive statements that conflict with how science is actually done, why should we follow them? It's beyond puerile.

Yet the understanding of this socially-induced blurring process is part and parcel to Quine’s project, as well. That’s because we have a public of scientific illiterates—basically ideologues—who confuse a critique within science with a self-serving scenario of methodological anarchy. Part of this stratagem, I suppose, is to pull out 19th century terms such as ‘positivist’.

And here we have another instance of you seeing things that no one else sees. Perhaps you should consult a physician. Because no one on this thread has advocated anything remotely similar to "methodological anarchy". What we refuse to do is take positivist crap like "before my hero, who I will misrepresent at every turn, people relied on theories, but then the hero came and discovered data and observation, and saw the world for how it really was and that's why his theories are the bestest every and the people before him were evil ideologues" seriously. And yes, it is positivist. Not the best example of the ideology, and about a century too late, but such is life.

And of course, you still haven't given us any evidence for your claims that Boas was a socialist, or that he called Engels evil. No surprise there, because you can't give any evidence. You're a complete fantasist.

For that matter you haven't told us anything about your own politics, particularly when it comes to issues like the family, abortion, homosexuality etc.

Rafiq

7th July 2015, 17:52

So can we cross-reference this trait to, say, the warlike Iroquois, who were constantly fighting not only the Huron but also with each other? Well yes, of course; but what's important is that this represents a human adaptation--not an evolutionary stage.

What you fail to understand is that your criticism of Engels merely amounts to a banality, which any idiot was capable of observing. In fact, if we conceive the basic scheme of "evolution" leading up to modern day society, slavery and then feudalism, it is rather easy to recognize that both of these historic epochs were a result of "human adaption", but this does not make them any less rife with implicit social antagonisms that would lead to historic change. In conceiving different systems as merely "human adaptions" to changing ecological backgrounds, what is missing is the reality of how man constitutes his own environment through labor, and thereby 'adapts' to it. So, so to speak, the Iroquouis did not passively 'adapt' to some background, but underwent social changes that led them where they were. The problem with primitive societies that remained in the 19th century (Say, besides the Iroquois, wherein the introduction of agriculture to North America was far later than in the rest of the world), is that they possessed essential characteristics which made them resilient to social change, the neolithic, and so on. But the grand majority of primitive (Hunter-gatherer societies) were shaped, and were in contact with various other historic societies throughout the iron age and beyond. The native Americans here, whom we assume did not go through this, are of unique importance.

What is important here is that it is probable to assume that yes, the Iroquois could very well have conjoined into a civilization, it is not ridiculous to assume that they were at a stage of development that was not infinitely stable. And frankly, the argument derives from a straw man itself - evolution is only conceived insofar as it shaped society as it exists now, which amounts to recognize the DIRECT social changes which led to 21st century global capitalism. A universal scheme of development of course makes little sense, becasue again, in many modern day primitive societies there are no implicit predispositions to neolithic practices, in fact, these are societies which several colonial, and civilized societies tried to subordinate through missionaries and agricultural practice,s and all miserably failed - hence why they still exist.

None the less, different historic EPOCHS are conceivable insofar as they proceeded modern day society. These are meaningful because thy outline the stages of world history, which leaves no room for "adaptations".

This, in turn, is positively cross-referenced against a now-huge template of both ethnography and archaeology from America. Then of course, we have astounding, 20,000 year old sequences in places such as an-Natuf, in present-day Lebanon. Warlike strata vs peaceful, masculine vs feminine. 'Evolution' seems to mean nothing more than winning wars and taking slaves...

And you mistaken the symptomatic for the casual. Societies do not, by random, become "masculine" or "feminine" which then determines their social character, rather, their sexual character derives from social changes. There is no reason to believe, and there stands absolutely no evidence of war existing in pre-neolithic society, we have yet to find any cave paintings, any forensic evidence to suggest this beyond a few bashed skulls which, suffice to say, do not constitute evidence for war. Of course, ironically, it was Engels who believed that war was common in primitive societies, that primitive Communism was only of "the tribe", but we know now that it is infinitely more likely that other bands served as, rather than competitors, outlets for those who leave their respective bands to join another when angry, trade and so on.

will franklin

8th July 2015, 03:43

In my last post I offered a minimalist explanation for Quine’s Confirmation Holism and Relative Ontology, and how it might be applied. You responded with a gigantic quote from Stanford, thereby giving no evidence that you have any idea as to what either Stanford or Quine was talking about.

In other words, you’re free to disagree with my understanding of Quine, stated in your own terms. Otherwise, you’re passing for nothing more than a talking horse with nothing to say.

Nothing that you’ve written gives any indication that you know a shred or either anthropology or philosophy: it’s obvious that you’re one of those who uses red-crayon Marxism as sop for not having to read—your own magic bullet, so to speak, that’s shot in the opposite direction of randoidism. So go to school.

Anthropologists have long noted how other societies assess the same bunch of facts to give different outcomes. This ostensibly intersects---in terms of Philosophy of Law--with Quine’s Two Principles. Likewise, tweaking a fact here or there can hugely alter an outcome, as seems as a postulated theoretical statement.

For example:

“Iffin da glub doin fits den youse gotta equits” can be seen as either a profound factual rationale for innocence or as a triviality that’s seen as ‘profound’ only by black jury members who hate white women.

Also:

Stuffing a bunch of young girls in a closet and shooting them can either be seen as an expression ‘their morality and ours’ or simple murder. I strongly prefer the later, and derive joy in thinking as to how the writer of the former met his own end at the point of a pickax, at the bequest of another Bolshevik- murderer.

My own politics indicate that absolutely no socialist progress can be made until doctrinaire marxiodism is excoriated.

In the social sciences, Marx generates useful research strategies that might be tested as hypotheses. These normally concern seeing how beliefs and institutions (superstructure) are related to an economic infrastructure.

In philosophy, I can do no better than to cite Deleuze as to why we’re all Marxists: he was the first to ask the question ‘What is capitalism’ in a way that is philosophically meaningful as the authentic terms of our existence. ‘A bit over your head, however….

Quine certainly self-identified as an empiricist. Whether that self-identification made sense is another thing entirely (his student and PLP member Putnam self-identified as a realist, which most people would agree was not the case). But, as is usual, you're completely missing the point. I'm not "using Quine to refute empiricism", I've mentioned Quine as an example of the serious work in philosophy of science you are completely ignoring. Now you imply that you are familiar with his work, but the next sentence:

demonstrates that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, again. Since none of the works by Quine are online, here is what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

The predicament Duhem here identifies is no rainy day puzzle for philosophers of science, but a methodological challenge that constantly arises in the course of scientific practice itself. It is simply not true that for practical purposes and in concrete contexts a single revision of our beliefs in response to disconfirming evidence is always obviously correct, or the most promising, or the only or even most sensible avenue to pursue. To cite a classic example, when Newton's celestial mechanics failed to correctly predict the orbit of Uranus, scientists at the time did not simply abandon the theory but protected it from refutation by instead challenging the background assumption that the solar system contained only seven planets. This strategy bore fruit, notwithstanding the falsity of Newton's theory: by calculating the location of a hypothetical eighth planet influencing the orbit of Uranus, the astronomers Adams and Leverrier were eventually led to discover Neptune in 1846. But the very same strategy failed when used to try to explain the advance of the perihelion in Mercury's orbit by postulating the existence of “Vulcan”, an additional planet located between Mercury and the sun, and this phenomenon would resist satisfactory explanation until the arrival of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So it seems that Duhem was right to suggest not only that hypotheses must be tested as a group or a collection, but also that it is by no means a foregone conclusion which member of such a collection should be abandoned or revised in response to a failed empirical test or false implication. Indeed, this very example illustrates why Duhem's own rather hopeful appeal to the ‘good sense’ of scientists themselves in deciding when a given hypothesis ought to be abandoned promises very little if any relief from the general predicament of holist underdetermination.
As noted above, Duhem thought that the sort of underdetermination he had described presented a challenge only for theoretical physics, but subsequent thinking in the philosophy of science has tended to the opinion that the predicament Duhem described applies to theoretical testing in all fields of scientific inquiry. We cannot, for example, test an hypothesis about the phenotypic effects of a particular gene without presupposing a host of further beliefs about what genes are, how they work, how we can identify them, what other genes are doing, and so on. And in the middle of the 20th Century, W. V. O. Quine would incorporate confirmational holism and its associated concerns about underdetermination into an extraordinarily influential account of knowledge in general. As part of his famous (1951) critique of the widely accepted distinction between truths that are analytic (true by definition, or as a matter of logic or language alone) and those that are synthetic (true in virtue of some contingent fact about the way the world is), Quine argued instead that all of the beliefs we hold at any given time are linked in an interconnected web, which encounters our sensory experience only at its periphery:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. (1951, 42–3) One consequence of this general picture of human knowledge is that any and all of our beliefs are tested against experience only as a corporate body—or as Quine sometimes puts it, “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, p. 42).[4] A mismatch between what the web as a whole leads us to expect and the sensory experiences we actually receive will occasion some revision in our beliefs, but which revision we should make to bring the web as a whole back into conformity with our experiences is radically underdetermined by those experiences themselves. If we find our belief that there are brick houses on Elm Street to be in conflict with our immediate sense experience, we might revise our beliefs about the houses on Elm Street, but we might equally well modify instead our beliefs about the appearance of brick, or about our present location, or innumerable other beliefs constituting the interconnected web—in a pinch we might even decide that our present sensory experiences are simply hallucinations! Quine's point was not that any of these are particularly likely responses to recalcitrant experiences (indeed, an important part of his account is the explanation of why they are not), but instead that they would serve equally well to bring the web of belief as a whole in line with our experience. And if the belief that there are brick houses on Elm Street were sufficiently important to us, Quine insisted, it would be possible for us to preserve it “come what may” (in the way of empirical evidence), by making sufficiently radical adjustments elsewhere in the web of belief. It is in principle open to us, Quine argued, to revise even beliefs about logic, mathematics, or the meanings of our terms in response to recalcitrant experience; it might seem a tempting solution to certain persistent difficulties in quantum mechanics, for example, to reject classical logic's law of the excluded middle (allowing physical particles to both have and not have some determinate classical physical property like position or momentum at a given time). The only test of a belief, Quine argued, is whether it fits into a web of connected beliefs that accords well with our experience on the whole. And because this leaves any and all beliefs in that web at least potentially subject to revision on the basis of our ongoing sense experience or empirical evidence, he insisted, there simply are no beliefs that are analytic in the originally supposed sense of immune to revision in light of experience or true no matter what the world is like.
Quine recognized, of course, that many of the logically possible ways of revising our beliefs in response to recalcitrant experiences that remain open to us strike us as ad hoc, perfectly ridiculous, or worse. He argues (1955) that our actual revisions of the web of belief seek to maximize the theoretical “virtues” of simplicity, familiarity, scope, and fecundity, along with conformity to experience, and elsewhere suggests that we typically seek to resolve conflicts between the web of our beliefs and our sensory experiences in accordance with a principle of “conservatism”, that is, by making the smallest possible number of changes to the least central beliefs we can that will suffice to reconcile the web with experience. That is, Quine recognized that when we encounter recalcitrant experience we are not usually at a loss to decide which of our beliefs to revise in response to it, but he claimed that this is simply because we are strongly disposed as a matter of fundamental psychology to prefer whatever revision requires the most minimal mutilation of the existing web of beliefs and/or maximizes virtues that he explicitly characterizes as pragmatic. Indeed, it would seem that on Quine's view the very notion of a belief being more central or peripheral or in lesser or greater “proximity” to sense experience should be cashed out simply as a measure of our willingness to revise it in response to recalcitrant experience. That is, it would seem that what it means for one belief to be located “closer” to the sensory periphery of the web than another is simply that we are more likely to revise the first than the second if doing so would enable us to bring the web as a whole into conformity with otherwise recalcitrant sense experience. Thus, Quine saw the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic beliefs as simply registering the endpoints of a psychological continuum ordering our beliefs according to the ease and likelihood with which we are prepared to revise them in order to reconcile the web as a whole with our sense experience.

And this is the point where your entire "argument" unravels. You're forced to acknowledge that actual scientists - not "a public of scientific illiterates" - don't follow your prescriptions, so you chastise them. Well, thank you, great master, for telling us how to do our jobs, because we were basically guessing until now.

Science is demonstrably useful. Your positivist ideology is not. The only thing philosophy of science can do is describe how science is done - this is something almost anyone working in the field for the last century has understood. When you come with these prescriptive statements that conflict with how science is actually done, why should we follow them? It's beyond puerile.

And here we have another instance of you seeing things that no one else sees. Perhaps you should consult a physician. Because no one on this thread has advocated anything remotely similar to "methodological anarchy". What we refuse to do is take positivist crap like "before my hero, who I will misrepresent at every turn, people relied on theories, but then the hero came and discovered data and observation, and saw the world for how it really was and that's why his theories are the bestest every and the people before him were evil ideologues" seriously. And yes, it is positivist. Not the best example of the ideology, and about a century too late, but such is life.

And of course, you still haven't given us any evidence for your claims that Boas was a socialist, or that he called Engels evil. No surprise there, because you can't give any evidence. You're a complete fantasist.

For that matter you haven't told us anything about your own politics, particularly when it comes to issues like the family, abortion, homosexuality etc.

will franklin

8th July 2015, 04:39

Of course, you are fundamentally correct that human societies are made in a creative fashion. Boas would not disagree. Again, the importance of Marx is that he left us with an emphasis on human agency as an epistemological template to define the metaphysics of materialism.

Yet what I disagree with is his teleology of ‘evolution’ which was taken from Aristotle (cause #4) and regenerated by Hegel. In other words, although, yes, knowledge and technology accumulate within a given society that leads to change, what we see and observe as anthropologists is that all societies, regardless of their assessed ‘level’, have equally undergone change.

In other words, as Lowie and Boas (el al) wrote, no inter-cultural scheme or ‘stages’, however broadly defined or general, can serve as an adequate descriptor of how societies change. That this constitutes a radical rupture with 19th century social thought cannot be over-emphasized. All of their schemes—not just Morgan!—stand as equally invalid and useless for two reasons:
• lack of real, acceptable data puts the whole project back to null-hypotheses level
• following Darwin, all teleologies are in error.

What’s of interest is how military and population stress necessitated choice and adaptive institutions within Iroquois society. First, they were excellent farmers, but constantly under attack from the Hurons to the north, who were envious of their land (After all, if you lived in present day south Ottawa, you’d be jealous of upper -New York state farmland, too!).

Then the issue of population expansion caused problems within Iroquois tribes. Hence, the constant meetings for the ‘Ho-dee-o-so-nee’ to iron out land issues.

Then we had the French/English/American colonist issue, the latter considered by far the greater problem. Therefore, having sided against the Americans, they lost everything. So only now, their society having been totally destroyed, can they be considered ‘evolved’ into the ‘civilized’ level!

What sticky, to say the least, is that Marx and Engels, following Hegel, envisioned an inner logic of sorts which would make these constant episodes of genocide and ethnocide follow the dictates of progress. This, they erroneously coded into a metaphysic of dialectical materialism.

Yet the real ‘materialism’ came within the harnessing of productive forces within each particular society. Theirs, however, came down to nothing more than the conversion of cultural technology to articles and subsequent organization for warfare. The winners obtained the privilege of saying that they were the ‘evolved’, much as Billuh Payne could declare that Atlanta ‘progressed’ by obtaining rights to destroying the city’s architecture for the sake of holding the Olympics.

The evolution proposed by Engels, then, is nothing more than red fascism with an ethnological face. Thankfully, there was Boas, himself a committed socialist, to show us that ‘Origins’, following Morgan, amounts to nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.

What you fail to understand is that your criticism of Engels merely amounts to a banality, which any idiot was capable of observing. In fact, if we conceive the basic scheme of "evolution" leading up to modern day society, slavery and then feudalism, it is rather easy to recognize that both of these historic epochs were a result of "human adaption", but this does not make them any less rife with implicit social antagonisms that would lead to historic change. In conceiving different systems as merely "human adaptions" to changing ecological backgrounds, what is missing is the reality of how man constitutes his own environment through labor, and thereby 'adapts' to it. So, so to speak, the Iroquouis did not passively 'adapt' to some background, but underwent social changes that led them where they were. The problem with primitive societies that remained in the 19th century (Say, besides the Iroquois, wherein the introduction of agriculture to North America was far later than in the rest of the world), is that they possessed essential characteristics which made them resilient to social change, the neolithic, and so on. But the grand majority of primitive (Hunter-gatherer societies) were shaped, and were in contact with various other historic societies throughout the iron age and beyond. The native Americans here, whom we assume did not go through this, are of unique importance.

What is important here is that it is probable to assume that yes, the Iroquois could very well have conjoined into a civilization, it is not ridiculous to assume that they were at a stage of development that was not infinitely stable. And frankly, the argument derives from a straw man itself - evolution is only conceived insofar as it shaped society as it exists now, which amounts to recognize the DIRECT social changes which led to 21st century global capitalism. A universal scheme of development of course makes little sense, becasue again, in many modern day primitive societies there are no implicit predispositions to neolithic practices, in fact, these are societies which several colonial, and civilized societies tried to subordinate through missionaries and agricultural practice,s and all miserably failed - hence why they still exist.

None the less, different historic EPOCHS are conceivable insofar as they proceeded modern day society. These are meaningful because thy outline the stages of world history, which leaves no room for "adaptations".

And you mistaken the symptomatic for the casual. Societies do not, by random, become "masculine" or "feminine" which then determines their social character, rather, their sexual character derives from social changes. There is no reason to believe, and there stands absolutely no evidence of war existing in pre-neolithic society, we have yet to find any cave paintings, any forensic evidence to suggest this beyond a few bashed skulls which, suffice to say, do not constitute evidence for war. Of course, ironically, it was Engels who believed that war was common in primitive societies, that primitive Communism was only of "the tribe", but we know now that it is infinitely more likely that other bands served as, rather than competitors, outlets for those who leave their respective bands to join another when angry, trade and so on.

Rafiq

8th July 2015, 06:42

What sticky, to say the least, is that Marx and Engels, following Hegel, envisioned an inner logic of sorts which would make these constant episodes of genocide and ethnocide follow the dictates of progress. This, they erroneously coded into a metaphysic of dialectical materialism.

No, you keep dodging the fundemental point, which is simply that Hegel, and Marx and ENgels afterwards, concerned WORLD HISTORY, which simply concerned understanding the processes of change that HAD to be inevitable with the reference point of the EXISTENCE of present-day society. That does not mean that at the time, they were inevitable, but that insofar as they led to existing, present-day society (INSOFAR AS PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY EXISTS) they had to be inevitable. This is why Hegel dealt with an entirely different form of logic, and the idea that there's some kind of linear evolution in history is alien to the Hegelian tradition.

This is why erroneous conclusions like:

all societies, regardless of their assessed ‘level’, have equally undergone change.

Are meant to support the notion that each society is equally advanced. But this is far from the case, because while every society had to undergo change to even exist in the 19th century, unless it was completely isolated from any external human contact, which is rare, this does not meant that the intricacies of change, or change in what Hegel would call spirit would be equal. Again, the point is not that the Iroquois were on the road to a North American Mycenaean, because the implicit predisposition to change which would be necessary have to be thoroughly evaluated by the society's own merits. As we know, developments in a society can occur which can precisely hinder development, as was the case in various civilizations in Asia, or various primitive societies that must regularly maintain a strict egalitarian conduct. Engels claimed that Marx was simply demonstrating the processes of change in the social field that Darwin did in the biological field. Likewise, contra to what the metaphysical idealists like to claim, animals do not intentionally "adapt" or "evolve", rather, their unique constitution is simply testament to their survival. The same goes for the survival of various social formations - if they were not as they were, they would have changed, or would change eventually.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th July 2015, 11:14

LuÃs Henrique

8th July 2015, 14:37

LuÃs Henrique

8th July 2015, 16:20

The scientific method uses 'hypotheses to test. A successfully-tested hypotheses then becomes a 'theory'.

Uh, no.

Theories generate hypotheses (if it is true that matter attracts matter directly proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them - theory - then all objects, when left to fall in vacuum, will fall at the same speed - hypothesis).

Hypotheses are directly testable, theories are not. If a hypothesis is confirmed, it doesn't turn into theory; it merely fails to falsify a previous theory. If a hypothesis is infirmed, then that is an argument against the theory that generated it (but the first thing to do is not to throw the theory away; it is to make sure that the experiment was properly conducted - and properly designed, too). Only after that, it may be possible to conclude that the previous theory is wrong; in such case it will be necessary to build a new theory, that can account for the infirmation of the hypothesis. But in no way a hypothesis "turns into a theory".

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

8th July 2015, 16:31

Marxists don't work with the law of supply and demand, not even the law of supply and demand amended so it doesn't immediately come into conflict with the historical trends of prices, but the law of value. Of course since the only thing about the law of value you seem to know comes from Boehm-Bawerk...

Well, it depends. If a Marxist wants to make money at the stock market, no doubt s/he will have to work with the "law" of supply and demand. If however a Marxist wants to understand how prices are formed, s/he will resort to the Labour Theory of Value. If a Marxist is interested in it, s/he can even explain how the LTV creates "supply" (easily) and "demand" (with some more expense of gray matter).

But what makes a Marxist a Marxist, is that s/he understands the difference between understanding the way prices are formed, and taking advantage of oscilating prices for short term profit.

A marginalist, on the other hand, will try to explain the formation of prices through the same principles that are useful when trying to obtain profits in speculative markets.

Luís Henrique

will franklin

9th July 2015, 02:14

Yes, by denouncing the work of Morgan as useless, Boas was going for the dead center of his 'web of belief': a general theory of human evolution can be constructed without the requisite ethnographic research of all societies; unverified heresay accounts are acceptable.

However, what you cannot say, per Quine, is that Morgan represented only a peripheral element, and that the center element--that of stages of evolution--still hold. That's because all of the 19th century 'evolutionists' were employing the same (non) methodology. Destroying one example of these schemes destroys the credibility of the entire group, therefore, the entire project.

Revolutionary thought is that which demolishes the entire web; this is what Boas did, and was.

Once again you're talking about things only you see, oh dear. I already talked about "my" understanding of Quine, specifically that confirmation holism means that the unit being tested is not a single theory, but what Quine called the "web of belief", the entire system of theories the scientist assumes. I cited the SEP because I wanted to preempt the usual dull "well prove it", said by people who haven't read the source material, and incidentally to show how one should cite sources. Something you still haven't done. So, yeah: how about you either cite Boas saying he is a socialist, and that Engels is evil for that matter, or just admit you're a dirty little liar.

And this sentence strongly hints that, contrary to my initial charitable assumption, you're not some kid with an inflated sense of self-worth on a positivist crusade, but a troll. Either way, go bother Stormfront or Iron March, they'd be more up your alley.

And even if you are sincere, what are you doing here, exactly? No one cares about your market "socialism" and your attempts to get a rise out of people are failing spectacularly. Yes, we're evil, whatever. We don't care. We stand for an end to markets, for an end to the family, and an end to the state. If that requires killing girls in Yekaterinburg, so be it.

will franklin

9th July 2015, 02:35

I, personally believe that 'value' lies at the heart of philosophy because the concept endows life with meaning. And deriving meaning from events is what philosophy is all about.

OTH, Economics deals with quantities as a measure of demonstrable proof. To this extent, a 'marxist economics' that's a non-quantifiable discourse on labor-value is, in actuality, 'philosophy'.

For example, the standard Ricardian tells us how wages contribute to prices. Yet if you were to say that wages 'represent' (unquantified) value, your argument would be philosophical to the extent that you could not offer quantifiable proof of the value/wage relationship.

The intersection of supply and demand universally determines 'market value', which is precisely why it's used by all Economists. The real issue, then, for a real Marxist economist, is to demonstrate why goods and services should not be placed upon the market, but rather allocated according to need.

In passing, it would seem obvious that even if one were to reject markets as the arbitrator of prices (as i do), knowing both the market value, and the subsequent cost- benefit of such a rejection would still entail the analysis of supply/demand.

Well, it depends. If a Marxist wants to make money at the stock market, no doubt s/he will have to work with the "law" of supply and demand. If however a Marxist wants to understand how prices are formed, s/he will resort to the Labour Theory of Value. If a Marxist is interested in it, s/he can even explain how the LTV creates "supply" (easily) and "demand" (with some more expense of gray matter).

But what makes a Marxist a Marxist, is that s/he understands the difference between understanding the way prices are formed, and taking advantage of oscilating prices for short term profit.

A marginalist, on the other hand, will try to explain the formation of prices through the same principles that are useful when trying to obtain profits in speculative markets.

Luís Henrique

will franklin

9th July 2015, 03:17

Uh, well...You can say that established theories generate new questions that must be posed as hypotheses. Moreover, in terms of the practice of science, it's quite rare that a researcher will devise an experiment only to falsify a theory. More than likely, he/she will have their own ideas.. For example...

Planck and his 'quanta' with respect to The ultraviolet Catastrophe, Dirac's (mathematical) discovery of anti-particles by relativizing the electron, Lamb shifts with regads to The Pauli Principle, etc....

Re The Newtonian: he could not explain the orbit of Mercury. So Einstein padoodled around with Rieman, Ricci, et al to derive what we now call "General Relativity".

Now the problem he encountered was that although it was demonstratively true that his 'GR' equation(s) explained Mercury, it was written to include the gravitational effect on light, as well.

In this regard, GR stood as 'hypothetical' until the famous eclipse observation several years later. To this extent, to say that the observation 'proved' the theory is to use what I consider to be redundant language.

That hypotheses are directly testable is true by definition. That we rig up simulacra assuming ceteris paribus is what doing experiments is all about.
Yet because of our ceteris paribus assumptions, I agree with both you and Nancy Cartwright that experiments say nothing as such about the limits of the proposed theory.

For example, take the 'rubber sheet' example of general relativity that eventually establishes black holes at the Schwartzchild Radius: does this apply for particles of light, as well?

In my own field of anthropology, examples are to diverse to cite them all: Mead's Samoans were friendly and sharing (communal?): thirty years later they were observed to have all the dignity of a bunch of drunks at a white-trash North Georgia Confederate bar.

By contrast, Chagnon's classic monograph saw the Yanomomo as 'fierce'. Now, they're tourist-friendly and photo-op hungry; spear-making his a forgotten technology that's accessable only by reading ethnographic accounts as to how they were one made.

Yet to return to Boas: his point was simply that regardless of the epistemic relationship between hypotheses and theory, observation is a necessary pre-requisite.

Uh, no.

Theories generate hypotheses (if it is true that matter attracts matter directly proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them - theory - then all objects, when left to fall in vacuum, will fall at the same speed - hypothesis).

Hypotheses are directly testable, theories are not. If a hypothesis is confirmed, it doesn't turn into theory; it merely fails to falsify a previous theory. If a hypothesis is infirmed, then that is an argument against the theory that generated it (but the first thing to do is not to throw the theory away; it is to make sure that the experiment was properly conducted - and properly designed, too). Only after that, it may be possible to conclude that the previous theory is wrong; in such case it will be necessary to build a new theory, that can account for the infirmation of the hypothesis. But in no way a hypothesis "turns into a theory".

Luís Henrique

will franklin

9th July 2015, 03:26

will franklin

9th July 2015, 04:18

I believe that you're correct in bringing Hegel directly into this discussion. To him I simply want to counterpose the works of Boas' student, Lowie:

His seminal work, Primitive Society was entitled with a strong sense of irony; so-called 'primitives' weren't. In terms of local adaption, they were as evolved--or more so--than anyone else.

Now you'd be correct in stating the Quinean-Web based proposition that local adaptation does not necessarily refute 'general evolution', and that the basic premise still stands.

However, what does disappear is any Darwinian justification for General Evolution, in so far as all cultural adaptivity is demonstrated to be local. This thematic point of Lowie comes from Boas who, in turn, wrote (as a good socialist!) that only a Darwinian, naturally selective version of evolution was acceptable for any natural science.

Now as you recall, the Hegelian motor of evolution was a geist: learning experiences of a progressively less-oppressive life were passed on. Marx, in turn, linked the dialectic to increasingly productive forces.

Therefore, to say that a general evolution would involve the diffusion of better tools that increased productive capacity, etc, you'd get no argument. For example, Custer lost because he assumed that the injuns he faced were still using bow and arrow...actually, even the points of injun arrows had converted from flint to steel some 100 years prior....

In short, lots of what anthros do now is to study the effects of new and better instruments on cultural elements such as kinship, etc. But again, the Darwinian adaptivity is specific to any particular culture, and not always successful. Part of the anthroplogical discourse is to show failure--for example, The Easter islanders.

So the whole essence of Hegelian/Marxian resided within its stages which are supposed to resemble, in form, the evolution of hominids. It's this--not the general, common-sense notion of accumulation via diffusion--that's nonsense. But without this formal scheme, there's no 'Marxism' as such. Rather, again the same old shared, common sense notions that 'explain' why New Guinea tribes that practice cannibalism carry aps and have email addresses.

And of course, said evolutionary scheme had to have had a beginning form, lost in the conjectural mists of history. Otherwise, the scheme doesn't work! So that takes us back to communal marriage and nut's n berry picking, yes?

Lowie, OTH, ended his masterpiece by famously writing that "Culture is a thing of shreds and patches"--an ostensible update to "Stat rosa pristina nomina...." Having information as to how a particular culture functions is all you'll really know. The rest is intellectual dross.

No, you keep dodging the fundemental point, which is simply that Hegel, and Marx and ENgels afterwards, concerned WORLD HISTORY, which simply concerned understanding the processes of change that HAD to be inevitable with the reference point of the EXISTENCE of present-day society. That does not mean that at the time, they were inevitable, but that insofar as they led to existing, present-day society (INSOFAR AS PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY EXISTS) they had to be inevitable. This is why Hegel dealt with an entirely different form of logic, and the idea that there's some kind of linear evolution in history is alien to the Hegelian tradition.

This is why erroneous conclusions like:

Are meant to support the notion that each society is equally advanced. But this is far from the case, because while every society had to undergo change to even exist in the 19th century, unless it was completely isolated from any external human contact, which is rare, this does not meant that the intricacies of change, or change in what Hegel would call spirit would be equal. Again, the point is not that the Iroquois were on the road to a North American Mycenaean, because the implicit predisposition to change which would be necessary have to be thoroughly evaluated by the society's own merits. As we know, developments in a society can occur which can precisely hinder development, as was the case in various civilizations in Asia, or various primitive societies that must regularly maintain a strict egalitarian conduct. Engels claimed that Marx was simply demonstrating the processes of change in the social field that Darwin did in the biological field. Likewise, contra to what the metaphysical idealists like to claim, animals do not intentionally "adapt" or "evolve", rather, their unique constitution is simply testament to their survival. The same goes for the survival of various social formations - if they were not as they were, they would have changed, or would change eventually.

Rafiq

9th July 2015, 16:46

At the heart of the problem (the Quinean web, so to speak) is the false assumption that there really was a stage called 'primitive communism'.

The observation of so-called 'primitive societies does not support such a claim in the sense as they would serve as a model as to how societies back then (time undetermined) were structured.

What you fail to understand is that all primitive Communism entails is the absence of private property. As far as anyone can tell, this is observable to have existed universally not simply by examining modern day primitive societies, but evaluating the oral traditions, archaeological renditions of earlier societies, and so on. The observation of primitive societies most certainly do not serve a viable model for how societies "back then" were structured, but the difference is that one can isolate and evaluate how the direct influence of civilized societies has impacted them, etc. - for example, the Inuits still abide by the 19th century British sexual morality that was imported to them. Likewise:

In my own field of anthropology, examples are to diverse to cite them all: Mead's Samoans were friendly and sharing (communal?): thirty years later they were observed to have all the dignity of a bunch of drunks at a white-trash North Georgia Confederate bar.

Mead's observations remain valid, because as it happens, drastic changes in the lives of the Samoans had occurred in the contemporary period between her observations and that of her critics, so much so that they were visited by missionaries, many adopted Christianity, and so on.

His seminal work, Primitive Society was entitled with a strong sense of irony; so-called 'primitives' weren't. In terms of local adaption, they were as evolved--or more so--than anyone else.

Again, as I've stated, this is meaningless. This is akin to saying that mice are "just as evolved" as gray wolves - of course they're just as evolved, that doesn't mean mice are as complex as gray wolves are. What is meaningfully ironic about this? To repeat myself - AGAIN:

Except that such a conclusion could have been drawn in the 19th century with the same so-called poverty of data: This statement is purely a platitude. Primitive societies which still exist clearly were not on the road to civilization, because it is this they managed to avoid doing (I.e. most egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have to strictly regulate it). But is there an objective criteria of development and advancement? Yes, there is - and this is not disputable. Some productive practices are more advanced and complex than others, but even if this were not the case, the point of reference is OUR society, the same society which has sustained the field of anthropology, etc. in the first place, meaning that a society is only less developed insofar as the point of development has its basis in modern day capitalism, which has, evidently, inherited world history and complete global hegemony.

Clearly prehistorical societies were less advanced, because most of them ceased to exist.

Are meant to support the notion that each society is equally advanced. But this is far from the case, because while every society had to undergo change to even exist in the 19th century, unless it was completely isolated from any external human contact, which is rare, this does not meant that the intricacies of change, or change in what Hegel would call spirit would be equal. Again, the point is not that the Iroquois were on the road to a North American Mycenaean, because the implicit predisposition to change which would be necessary have to be thoroughly evaluated by the society's own merits. As we know, developments in a society can occur which can precisely hinder development, as was the case in various civilizations in Asia, or various primitive societies that must regularly maintain a strict egalitarian conduct. Engels claimed that Marx was simply demonstrating the processes of change in the social field that Darwin did in the biological field. Likewise, contra to what the metaphysical idealists like to claim, animals do not intentionally "adapt" or "evolve", rather, their unique constitution is simply testament to their survival. The same goes for the survival of various social formations - if they were not as they were, they would have changed, or would change eventually.

The fact that they're "just as evolved" is only testament to their enduring existence, it does not mean such societies are advanced, and furthermore, what you fail to understand is that if the point of reference is present-day society, we can assume that the in the process of history, of what we would call world history, the people's who compose our present day capitalist totality, or in the case of the 19th century, western Europe, had also undergone an epoch that was similar to the "primitive" societies in question. The difference is that these primitive societies most likely developed some kind of anomalous mechanism of historic hindrance, in the same vein that some complex HG developed a hindrance to the neolithic, but the existence of this anomalous characteristic by no means makes them just as "advanced", it merely makes them just as alive as societies. This is why conceiving such societies in terms of whether their development simply "lagged behind" a few thousand years is rarely meaningful, and sometimes outright wrong. So in this case, the scheme of development that allows us to conceive such societies as primitive remains legitimate, because again, those factors which contributed to the endurance of those societies are merely anomalous characteristics, not substitution for some kind of 'advanced' social formation.

This thematic point of Lowie comes from Boas who, in turn, wrote (as a good socialist!) that only a Darwinian, naturally selective version of evolution was acceptable for any natural science.

Which is meaningless in pertinence to such social questions. This is why fields as sociobiology, biological anthropology, ETC. are worthless abominations. The social field constitutes one that is entirely irreducible to that of the biological, so while Darwin's ontology, if you want to call it that, remains valid (that, for example, organisms do not intentionally "adapt", rather, adaptations are merely testament to their existence and survival, and that the same goes for societies), it is vulgar to substitute an extrapolation of zoology for a critical understanding of history. And we could imagine this is why vulgarists like Lowie were, in fact, practitioners of a vile kind of racism.

Now as you recall, the Hegelian motor of evolution was a geist: learning experiences of a progressively less-oppressive life were passed on. Marx, in turn, linked the dialectic to increasingly productive forces.

That is a rather stupid platitude, one that not only proceeded Hegel, but was ALIEN to Hegel. The point of Hegel was precisely the opposite - that men and women do not, and can not learn ANYTHING from history, and that all changes, or all enduring characteristics of a society are due to their immediate affirmative necessities, "place" in the present application. This is the point of totality, that "each age and each nation finds itself in such peculiar circumstances, in such a unique situation, that it can and must make decisions in reference to itself alone." To speak of a "hegelian motor of evolution" is also a bad misreading of Hegel, for Hegel - world history again pertained solely to the developments of 19th century Europe and before, so as it happens, an objectively existing motor of history existed that constituted the progression between the past and present-day society. Geist then does not refer to "learning experiences", it refers to the culmination of the collective social existence of a society, it refers to that element in a historic peoples that endures, that makes them most certainly definitive. Geist refers to the culmination of a definitive national existence, which is why Marxists should eb tempted to say that the highest expression of geist for a nation is internationalism, i.e. that for example, Internationalism simply does not refer to "freedom" from the concrete nation, but the transcendence of the spirit of a nation, inherited by the working class, and the "culmination" of all of its aesthetic difference, values, and so on, into its own negation. I.e. we might say that you go from Charlemagne to the Paris Commune.

In short, lots of what anthros do now is to study the effects of new and better instruments on cultural elements such as kinship, etc. But again, the Darwinian adaptivity is specific to any particular culture, and not always successful. Part of the anthroplogical discourse is to show failure--for example, The Easter islanders.

"Again", this does not concern world history as such, but those who were left behind from it. Meaning, not to say these people are "less human" (my god, it's stupid that I must even clarify this), but if you want, these societies are anomalous mutations, "freaks" of social history, and it does not concern a passive ADAPTIVITY as such (being that humans are not like the tortoise) but the active menas by which humans constitute their own environment, by merit of their social relations to each other and therefore production. Social relations form out of the necessity for survival, yes, but this is what Hegel recognizes as the absence of spirit. In this sense, Hegel himself was eons ahead of scum like Lowie, in that he recognized that the absence of spirit in primitive people's had nothing to do with their biological constitution, and in reference to those who had tried to say Africans were "less evolved' or whatever by merit of their appearance, Hegel claimed that all humans, European or otherwise are "not that different" PHYSICALLY than the ape. Hegel's point was that civilization, and history, are absolutely irreducible to humans physiologically, and that these matters concerned SPIRIT, they did not derive from the innate biological properties of any peoples, but from the summation of the intricacies of their social relations.

So the whole essence of Hegelian/Marxian resided within its stages which are supposed to resemble, in form, the evolution of hominids. It's this--not the general, common-sense notion of accumulation via diffusion--that's nonsense. But without this formal scheme, there's no 'Marxism' as such. Rather, again the same old shared, common sense notions that 'explain' why New Guinea tribes that practice cannibalism carry aps and have email addresses.

No, again, this is the irk of scientific racists, quite on the contrary the difference is that "stages" don't resemble anything, they are sufficient unto themselves as a fundamentally different SOCIAL dimension, which dictates the biological (i.e. as the biological might dictate the material, even if bound by it). "Accumulation" via diffusion is alien to the notion of history being conceived in terms of EPOCHS, wherein radical changes occur that rupture the foundations of society, that lead to revolution and so on. THIS is the change in spirit, not some kind of passive accumulation of previous knowledge, but quite on the contrary, through violent antagonisms that exist only for themselves which DICTATE how all previous history is even conceived. This is why, as you claimed, the introduction of technology to New Guinea tribes didn't have to historically change them that significantly, because historic change involves antagonisms WITHIN the social process, within social relations, not simply passive "captivity" to changing environments.

And of course, said evolutionary scheme had to have had a beginning form, lost in the conjectural mists of history. Otherwise, the scheme doesn't work! So that takes us back to communal marriage and nut's n berry picking, yes?

No, it doesn't. And frankly, you keep talking a bunch of bullshit, misrepresenting Morgan's works. You would not have us believe that Morgan thought that primitive peoples who dwelled in areas that did not grow nuts and berries, actually ate these. That Morgan might have got the diet of primitive peoples wrong originally doesn't change the truth of the fact that primitive peoples did not have agriculture of any kind, that if htey weren't picking nuts and berries, you bet your fucking ass htey were picking something else. Who cares about the specifialities of "nuts and berries"? How is this SIGNIFICANT? The underlying point is that they had to make due with their surroundings, how is this even a point of controversy? Regarding communal marriage - again, communal marriage, group marriage, WAS the de-facto form of marriage in primitive societies. The predispositions to monogamy, and the irk, simply did not exist. Of course many primitive people today are monogamous, but this is because of their endured contact with other peoples throughout history, or again, is testament to their anomalous, ahistoical character as social formations. To claim that all social formations are somehow too different to extrapolate a wider understanding of how primitive humans lived is ridiculous insofar as it ignores how the differences between these societies are always trivialities, much like the differences between Japanese capitalism and American capitalism. These are still the same mode(s) of production!

will franklin

9th July 2015, 20:17

All societies have always defined 'private property' as usufruct-entitlement, which is universal. For example, it's written into the French constitution that the ultimate guardian of the nation's economy is the state itself. Standards for french 'ownership is that which is to the benefit of the collective.

Likewise, most amerikans are not aware that, today, charters for corporations to do bizness in any and all particular states is granted on a yearly basis.

Many societies grant both personal usufruct and define basic property limits within an extended family, or clan. looking outside the clan--yet within what the observer would still see as a 'culture' of linked clans, there are frequent inter-clan wars over entitlements. In other words, there is 'communism' only within what's defined as a 'family, whether extended or nuclear.

Therefore,actually doing on-site observation,as Lowie, et al did, indicates no basis for communism; we see some things as collective, other aspects, not. So here the marxoids are doubly wrong:
* Assuming that one can derive pre-history from present-day behavior is prima-facie absurd
** The data itself doesn't even support the 'theory'.

What we also find is that hunting existed prior to the full emergence of h sapiens. This, in and of itself destroys any speculation based upon foraging.

So what we have is an empirical disaster, bourgeois-positivistically speaking: No communal property, no communal marriage, no foraging. So what do you propose? To take all of the anthropologists to Yekaterinburg, stuff them into a closet and shoot them, too?

Otherwise, your evolutionary comparison of different animals (wolves. mice) to the development within one particular (h sapiens) begs the obvious question: biological adaptivity of all three indicate that present speciation follows natural selection.

Biologically speaking, to say that wolves are more 'evolved' than mice is nonsense. To comare putative levels of human development to mice/wolves distinctions is daffy, even for a marxoid.

Last, Hegel was ambiguous, to say the least, on the question of volition. the master/slave dialectic somehow gets buried in the subconscious, leaving us consciously aware of only the 'cunning of history' that appears on the surface to be nothing but a slaughterhouse. Only the Hegelians can reveal to us the deeper truth. This is not interesting.

What you fail to understand is that all primitive Communism entails is the absence of private property. As far as anyone can tell, this is observable to have existed universally not simply by examining modern day primitive societies, but evaluating the oral traditions, archaeological renditions of earlier societies, and so on. The observation of primitive societies most certainly do not serve a viable model for how societies "back then" were structured, but the difference is that one can isolate and evaluate how the direct influence of civilized societies has impacted them, etc. - for example, the Inuits still abide by the 19th century British sexual morality that was imported to them. Likewise:

Mead's observations remain valid, because as it happens, drastic changes in the lives of the Samoans had occurred in the contemporary period between her observations and that of her critics, so much so that they were visited by missionaries, many adopted Christianity, and so on.

Again, as I've stated, this is meaningless. This is akin to saying that mice are "just as evolved" as gray wolves - of course they're just as evolved, that doesn't mean mice are as complex as gray wolves are. What is meaningfully ironic about this? To repeat myself - AGAIN:

Except that such a conclusion could have been drawn in the 19th century with the same so-called poverty of data: This statement is purely a platitude. Primitive societies which still exist clearly were not on the road to civilization, because it is this they managed to avoid doing (I.e. most egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have to strictly regulate it). But is there an objective criteria of development and advancement? Yes, there is - and this is not disputable. Some productive practices are more advanced and complex than others, but even if this were not the case, the point of reference is OUR society, the same society which has sustained the field of anthropology, etc. in the first place, meaning that a society is only less developed insofar as the point of development has its basis in modern day capitalism, which has, evidently, inherited world history and complete global hegemony.

Clearly prehistorical societies were less advanced, because most of them ceased to exist.

Are meant to support the notion that each society is equally advanced. But this is far from the case, because while every society had to undergo change to even exist in the 19th century, unless it was completely isolated from any external human contact, which is rare, this does not meant that the intricacies of change, or change in what Hegel would call spirit would be equal. Again, the point is not that the Iroquois were on the road to a North American Mycenaean, because the implicit predisposition to change which would be necessary have to be thoroughly evaluated by the society's own merits. As we know, developments in a society can occur which can precisely hinder development, as was the case in various civilizations in Asia, or various primitive societies that must regularly maintain a strict egalitarian conduct. Engels claimed that Marx was simply demonstrating the processes of change in the social field that Darwin did in the biological field. Likewise, contra to what the metaphysical idealists like to claim, animals do not intentionally "adapt" or "evolve", rather, their unique constitution is simply testament to their survival. The same goes for the survival of various social formations - if they were not as they were, they would have changed, or would change eventually.

The fact that they're "just as evolved" is only testament to their enduring existence, it does not mean such societies are advanced, and furthermore, what you fail to understand is that if the point of reference is present-day society, we can assume that the in the process of history, of what we would call world history, the people's who compose our present day capitalist totality, or in the case of the 19th century, western Europe, had also undergone an epoch that was similar to the "primitive" societies in question. The difference is that these primitive societies most likely developed some kind of anomalous mechanism of historic hindrance, in the same vein that some complex HG developed a hindrance to the neolithic, but the existence of this anomalous characteristic by no means makes them just as "advanced", it merely makes them just as alive as societies. This is why conceiving such societies in terms of whether their development simply "lagged behind" a few thousand years is rarely meaningful, and sometimes outright wrong. So in this case, the scheme of development that allows us to conceive such societies as primitive remains legitimate, because again, those factors which contributed to the endurance of those societies are merely anomalous characteristics, not substitution for some kind of 'advanced' social formation.

Which is meaningless in pertinence to such social questions. This is why fields as sociobiology, biological anthropology, ETC. are worthless abominations. The social field constitutes one that is entirely irreducible to that of the biological, so while Darwin's ontology, if you want to call it that, remains valid (that, for example, organisms do not intentionally "adapt", rather, adaptations are merely testament to their existence and survival, and that the same goes for societies), it is vulgar to substitute an extrapolation of zoology for a critical understanding of history. And we could imagine this is why vulgarists like Lowie were, in fact, practitioners of a vile kind of racism.

That is a rather stupid platitude, one that not only proceeded Hegel, but was ALIEN to Hegel. The point of Hegel was precisely the opposite - that men and women do not, and can not learn ANYTHING from history, and that all changes, or all enduring characteristics of a society are due to their immediate affirmative necessities, "place" in the present application. This is the point of totality, that "each age and each nation finds itself in such peculiar circumstances, in such a unique situation, that it can and must make decisions in reference to itself alone." To speak of a "hegelian motor of evolution" is also a bad misreading of Hegel, for Hegel - world history again pertained solely to the developments of 19th century Europe and before, so as it happens, an objectively existing motor of history existed that constituted the progression between the past and present-day society. Geist then does not refer to "learning experiences", it refers to the culmination of the collective social existence of a society, it refers to that element in a historic peoples that endures, that makes them most certainly definitive. Geist refers to the culmination of a definitive national existence, which is why Marxists should eb tempted to say that the highest expression of geist for a nation is internationalism, i.e. that for example, Internationalism simply does not refer to "freedom" from the concrete nation, but the transcendence of the spirit of a nation, inherited by the working class, and the "culmination" of all of its aesthetic difference, values, and so on, into its own negation. I.e. we might say that you go from Charlemagne to the Paris Commune.

"Again", this does not concern world history as such, but those who were left behind from it. Meaning, not to say these people are "less human" (my god, it's stupid that I must even clarify this), but if you want, these societies are anomalous mutations, "freaks" of social history, and it does not concern a passive ADAPTIVITY as such (being that humans are not like the tortoise) but the active menas by which humans constitute their own environment, by merit of their social relations to each other and therefore production. Social relations form out of the necessity for survival, yes, but this is what Hegel recognizes as the absence of spirit. In this sense, Hegel himself was eons ahead of scum like Lowie, in that he recognized that the absence of spirit in primitive people's had nothing to do with their biological constitution, and in reference to those who had tried to say Africans were "less evolved' or whatever by merit of their appearance, Hegel claimed that all humans, European or otherwise are "not that different" PHYSICALLY than the ape. Hegel's point was that civilization, and history, are absolutely irreducible to humans physiologically, and that these matters concerned SPIRIT, they did not derive from the innate biological properties of any peoples, but from the summation of the intricacies of their social relations.

No, again, this is the irk of scientific racists, quite on the contrary the difference is that "stages" don't resemble anything, they are sufficient unto themselves as a fundamentally different SOCIAL dimension, which dictates the biological (i.e. as the biological might dictate the material, even if bound by it). "Accumulation" via diffusion is alien to the notion of history being conceived in terms of EPOCHS, wherein radical changes occur that rupture the foundations of society, that lead to revolution and so on. THIS is the change in spirit, not some kind of passive accumulation of previous knowledge, but quite on the contrary, through violent antagonisms that exist only for themselves which DICTATE how all previous history is even conceived. This is why, as you claimed, the introduction of technology to New Guinea tribes didn't have to historically change them that significantly, because historic change involves antagonisms WITHIN the social process, within social relations, not simply passive "captivity" to changing environments.

No, it doesn't. And frankly, you keep talking a bunch of bullshit, misrepresenting Morgan's works. You would not have us believe that Morgan thought that primitive peoples who dwelled in areas that did not grow nuts and berries, actually ate these. That Morgan might have got the diet of primitive peoples wrong originally doesn't change the truth of the fact that primitive peoples did not have agriculture of any kind, that if htey weren't picking nuts and berries, you bet your fucking ass htey were picking something else. Who cares about the specifialities of "nuts and berries"? How is this SIGNIFICANT? The underlying point is that they had to make due with their surroundings, how is this even a point of controversy? Regarding communal marriage - again, communal marriage, group marriage, WAS the de-facto form of marriage in primitive societies. The predispositions to monogamy, and the irk, simply did not exist. Of course many primitive people today are monogamous, but this is because of their endured contact with other peoples throughout history, or again, is testament to their anomalous, ahistoical character as social formations. To claim that all social formations are somehow too different to extrapolate a wider understanding of how primitive humans lived is ridiculous insofar as it ignores how the differences between these societies are always trivialities, much like the differences between Japanese capitalism and American capitalism. These are still the same mode(s) of production!

RedMaterialist

9th July 2015, 22:03

All societies have always defined 'private property' as usufruct-entitlement, which is universal.

What does this sentence even mean? What is "usufuct-entitlement?"

There is no anthropological, archeological, economic, kinship-based evidence of any kind that private property has existed for all societies, everywhere and at all times.

If you mean that private property is the right to use something then you are simply wrong. Private property includes the right of use (usufruct), it also includes the right of alienation, either by selling or disposing of the property through inheritance. Private property, until recently, also included the right to use, possess, alienate and otherwise do whatever you wanted to another human being.

Private property now includes the right to take possession and ownership of the production of another person.

What you're saying is that private property, i.e., capitalism, has existed in all societies in history.

Is it any wonder that nobody takes anthropology, neo-classical economics or political science seriously anymore?

RedMaterialist

9th July 2015, 22:50

One of Boas' famous studies showed that the cranial size of immigrant children was smaller than those of the children who had been born more than 10 yrs after their mother's arrival in the US. In other words, immigrant mothers who had lived in the US longer tended to produce children with bigger heads.

So, how to explain this? Since Boas was not a Marxist there could be no economic explanation. The explanation is now obvious to all but the most deluded anthropologists: better nutrition leads to bigger people.

You can see it every day if you walk into a Wal-Mart. You see immigrant parents who are typically five inches or so shorter than the average American. Their children, however, all are average size. Wake up anthropology and get Marx!

Also, Boas once had a group of Inuit brought from Greenland to his New York museum. All of them died except for one. Boas then cut up the bodies and used the bones for his display. The remaining survivor asked Boas to give him his father's bones back. Boas ignored him and the survivor went back to Greenland.

Boas was obviously a racist and cultural imperialist, and his work is obviously to be rejected in its entirety.

will franklin

10th July 2015, 05:01

will franklin

10th July 2015, 05:21

Boas' measurements were based on the then-accepted assumption that larger heads indicated a greater capacity for intelligence. A part of the anthropology that your denounce--paleontology-- was responsible for the refutation of this idea.

The evolutionary schemes that he objected to were another part of the late 19th century zeitgeist. Nothing is more racist that to declare that 'evolution' orients societies in our direction

A Marxist research strategy would consist of devising a testable hypotheses that more favorable economic factors caused larger heads. This would include comparative studies of nutrition and disease. For example, NYC was a death- pit for immigrants; even the population genetics of southern slavery are far more favorable.

In this respect, Boas's measurements may only indicate that the survivors were more healthy, larger-boned than ether the newer arrivals or those who succumbed.

OTH, marxoids just know the answer going in, and no testable hypotheses is necessary.

One of Boas' famous studies showed that the cranial size of immigrant children was smaller than those of the children who had been born more than 10 yrs after their mother's arrival in the US. In other words, immigrant mothers who had lived in the US longer tended to produce children with bigger heads.

So, how to explain this? Since Boas was not a Marxist there could be no economic explanation. The explanation is now obvious to all but the most deluded anthropologists: better nutrition leads to bigger people.

You can see it every day if you walk into a Wal-Mart. You see immigrant parents who are typically five inches or so shorter than the average American. Their children, however, all are average size. Wake up anthropology and get Marx!

Also, Boas once had a group of Inuit brought from Greenland to his New York museum. All of them died except for one. Boas then cut up the bodies and used the bones for his display. The remaining survivor asked Boas to give him his father's bones back. Boas ignored him and the survivor went back to Greenland.

Boas was obviously a racist and cultural imperialist, and his work is obviously to be rejected in its entirety.

RedMaterialist

10th July 2015, 05:54

For example, NYC was a death- pit for immigrants; even the population genetics of southern slavery are far more favorable.

NYC a death pit? The immigrant population in the US reached almost 100 million by the 20th century. The southern slave owners had a very real economic incentive in keeping their slaves healthy: cotton.

Cheap land and a fantastically expanding economy in the US led to high wages. Workers use more money to buy more food. It wasn't some metaphysical "anthropological," American exceptionalism.

Morgan was certainly a racist (so were a lot of people in the 19th century, including Lincoln), but that doesn't invalidate his findings on kinship terminology.

How do anthropologists explain the fact that every society known to have ever existed has developed the words, "mother", "father" to refer to female and male older members of a clan, tribe, band, or similar group; and the words 'sister", "brother", and "cousin" to refer to younger female and male members?

According to you it is just a lucky coincidence that all cultures have such terms, there could not have been any evolutionary development of the terminology.

But even stranger, all cultures have very strict rules with very rigid enforcement, about who in these groups can inter-marry. The oldest taboo, is of course, the mother-son rule. Break that one and you have to kill your father, jab needles into your eyes, and your mother had to hang herself. Why is it that ALL cultures have this rule (except, of course, for the group marriage cultures which, by definition never could have existed)? Could it be that there is some kind of economic benefit in developing a human group with lesser inbreeding? And maybe it took hundreds of thousands of years to develop?

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 07:04

All societies have always defined 'private property' as usufruct-entitlement, which is universal. For example, it's written into the French constitution that the ultimate guardian of the nation's economy is the state itself. Standards for french 'ownership is that which is to the benefit of the collective.

The collective summation of the capitalist totality as a whole, yes. It doesn't come as a surprise that property is legally conceived in terms of how it benefits the sum-total of relations of privet property in general. How the fuck do you expect this to be mediated? It stands to reason that "the state exists as an instrument of the ruling classes" would not be inscribed into the French constitution anymore than it would be in codified law in say, the Aztec empire. That is because relations of private property are contingent upon societies that do not possess social-consciousness, i.e. ideology must exist to sustain the existence of class. And no, private property did not exist before the events that led to the Neolithic revolution, even personal possessions were seldom defined and regulated to have existed. Either way, private property was never conceived in terms of personal possession anyway, instead, it took an inherently ritualistic, and often times spiritual role - clearly divorced from the prerogatives of man's physiological needs, contra to the bourgeois notion of the "egoist" rational man who sees property as an extension of "maximizing his fitness" and so on.

Many societies grant both personal usufruct and define basic property limits within an extended family, or clan. looking outside the clan--yet within what the observer would still see as a 'culture' of linked clans, there are frequent inter-clan wars over entitlements. In other words, there is 'communism' only within what's defined as a 'family, whether extended or nuclear.

"Many societies", but none of theses societies being primitive ones, of course - that is, societies without agriculture. Considering Hunter-gatherer bands consisted of more than individual families, considering inter-marriage between different bands existed, it makes absolutely no sense that wars were commonplace, most especially considering the fact that human survival, throughout its 190,000 odd years of existence, was already very precarious as a result of natural catastrophes and the driving of big game into extinction virtually everywhere humans migrated to en masse. If 'warfare' was commonplace in primitive societies, then we would at least have some archaeological evidence to confirm this, in the form of cave paintings and weapons of war, and most especially, the existence of mass-graves. These didn't exist until shortly before the Neolithic revolution, which suggests that they most likely were a result of the development of complex hunter-gatherer societies. In any case, no, there was nothing even remotely similar to private property as it has existed for the past 10,000 or so years.

** The data itself doesn't even support the 'theory'.

That is only if one approaches the data like a fucking child, i.e. one can extrapolate, based on existing data, the degree of insight it gives us about pre-historic societies because of the ability for us to cross-reference them with the various legends, myths, oral accounts of not only those societies, but accounts of pre-history in various civilizations. It might even be probable that the story of Adam's fall from paradise might have been an extension of this, but we might never know.

What we also find is that hunting existed prior to the full emergence of h sapiens. This, in and of itself destroys any speculation based upon foraging.

What's your point? Chimpanzees (bonobos and common chimps) both engage in "hunting", but in any case, yes it's true that hominids that proceeded homo sapiens engaged in hunting. What's your point, however? The emergence of bipedal apes, by "freeing the hands" were able to more amply transform nature to their will, in approximation to their growing social complexity (as shown by physiological changes in the brain), no one even knows what you're talking about.

No communal property, no communal marriage, no foraging. So what do you propose? To take all of the anthropologists to Yekaterinburg, stuff them into a closet and shoot them, too?

Except communal property, group marriage and foraging were all integral characteristics of pre-historic human society. It is probable that the monogamous practices of primitive peoples in South America, Africa, etc. were introduced externally, or whose introduction coincided with the necessity to adjust to the social changes that which such enduring primitive society forged an oasis. Does your argument somehow amount to the fact that because species before homo sapiens sapiens engaged in hunting practices, that there was "no foraging"? What the fuck are you even talking about? In any case, yes, we'd do well to take all the scumfuck biological anthropologists, stuff them in a closet, and shoot them.

Otherwise, your evolutionary comparison of different animals (wolves. mice) to the development within one particular (h sapiens) begs the obvious question: biological adaptivity of all three indicate that present speciation follows natural selection.

Biologically speaking, to say that wolves are more 'evolved' than mice is nonsense. To comare putative levels of human development to mice/wolves distinctions is daffy, even for a marxoid.

Can you actually shut the fuck up if you're so confused? What instills you with such confidence to respond this way, when you don't even know what I'm talking about? My comparison with different animals had NO PRETENSE TO HUMANS BIOLOGICALLY WHATSOEVER. if you actually READ my fucking post: they are sufficient unto themselves as a fundamentally different SOCIAL dimension, which dictates the biological (i.e. as the biological might dictate the material, even if bound by it). It's absolutely of no surprise you're repeating the same psueod-darwinist myths in your conception of the human species. Namely, humans are capable of history, animals are not, humans change their surroundings with labor, animals cannot. Conceiving humans in terms of passive "adaptations" that are testament to their biological survival, in the same vein as that of a species, is beyond fucking stupid and likewise entirely paradoxical ideologically and linguistically (to designate man as an animal pre-supposes a frame of reference which designates ITSELF as something "not animal", and this famously encapsulates the enigma of the pseudo-darwinists: Can man be fully conscious that he is solely motivated by "primeval" instincts? Would consciousness of this "ruin" it, so to speak? More importantly, if man is conscious of all the "purely genetic" foundations of his consciousness, is his consciousness altered?) but more importantly, it ideologically designates the domain of the social uncritically, which makes it unscientific. Homo sapeins sapiens has existed for 200,000 years, while history has existed for some 10,000. As eusocial animals, human "adaptation" can only be physiological predispositions to plasticity and subordination to the social, to the whims of the collective summation of their existence. Unlike animals, whose behavior is almost purely autonomous, with autonomous organisms needing to rely on 'innate instincts' for survival the less social they are, humans did not have to "adapt" for certain behaviors in order to exist, because as far as the environments of humans, which weren't nearly complex enough ALONE to warrant such complex behavioral traits - passive environments shared by a plethora of other species, conceiving human "adaptations" in terms of passive adjustments to enviroments is beyond fucking stupid.

Finally, you totally miss the fucking point of my analogy, which was: This is akin to saying that mice are "just as evolved" as gray wolves - of course they're just as evolved, that doesn't mean mice are as complex as gray wolves are.

Can you even FUCKING read? Human development can be compared in terms of complexity in the sphere of language, science, divisions of labor, ideology, ETC. - it's something every bumfuck idiot knows, even those cultural relativists. My point is that, evne though some primitive society might have endured, they specifically had to develop certain characteristics that are testament to their endurance, if not for this - then anomalous characteristics which prevented them from transitioning to the systematized cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals. What makes the Americas interesting is the fact that the neolithic revolution occured thousands of years after it did on the other side of the Road, which might not seem like much - but if we put into perspective the fact that the Aztec empire came into existence in the 15th century, it shows that indeed many societies WERE "not fully developed", i.e. were rife with antagonisms that could have made them predisposed to changing drastically. This could have been true for a confederation of tribes in North America as anywhere.

But aside from that, it is a stepping stone to scientific racism. Question: Do you think that different races have "selected" for different behaviors, etc.? Do you think that race exists?

Last, Hegel was ambiguous, to say the least, on the question of volition. the master/slave dialectic somehow gets buried in the subconscious, leaving us consciously aware of only the 'cunning of history' that appears on the surface to be nothing but a slaughterhouse. Only the Hegelians can reveal to us the deeper truth. This is not interesting.

I mean, you clearly don't have a fucking idea about what you're talking about. If morgan can be dismissed because he erroneously claimed that nuts and berries was the initial diet of primitive societies, than will here can be dismissed if he's touting complete bullshit knowing full well the extent of his ignorance. Are you actually schizophrenic? Like holy shit, first we go from the "master/slave dialectic" in the subconscious to the "cunning of history" being nothing but a slaughterhouse? Not only do you blatantly abuse words, you also blatantly abuse cheap quotes extrapolated from Hegel. What you fail to understand is that anyone can be a "Hegelian", i.e. someone who reads Hegel seriously. You're trying to paint a picture that there's some kind of hereditary caste called "the Hegelians" who can only reveal a deeper truth, but that's just as meaningful as claiming the same of those who ascribe to Darwin's evolution. If you're so ignorant that you can't conceive Darwin, it sais nothing that "only Darwinians can reveal to us the deeper truth". It just means that, plainly, you're ignorant.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 07:20

I've already said that capitalism is universal insofar as you use the definition given by Marx himself: the commoditization of labor. People everywhere and at all times have had the ability to calculate the use-value of another person's work against both alternative factors of production and replacement costs.

Again, this is nothing but an unscientific ABSTRACTION meant to find a least common denominator in all of human history. The point was NOT that what distinguished labor relations in capitalism was "the ability to calculate the use value of another person's work against both alternative factors of production and replacement costs", for that would indeed define labor so broadly as to apply to just about any social labor. But again, we see the fundamentally Ideological character of this extrapolation merely by the terminology, i.e. as though the "cunning, calculating" capitalist has always existed. But someone living in feudalism most certainly would not conceive labor in terms of "rationally judging it against both alternative factors of production and replacement costs", but in obligations and in duty. The same goes for slave societies: We therefore can see that the means by which the ideologues of each historic epoch conceive the existence of labor-relations in previous epochs, is COMPLETELY constrained ideologically by their present-day prejudices. I mean, you come to us "marxoids" and criticize our 'stageism' for extrapolating universal characteristics based on empirically evaluated primitive societies, but you go ahead and claim that CAPITALISM IS UNIVERSAL AND HAS ALWAYS EXISTED? What distinguishes capitalism, that is, generalized commodity production, universal currency, essential production constituted on relations of wage-labor (not secondary "manifestations" of wage labor but the productive foundations of life themselves being wage-labor relations), and so on. The capitalist totality has not existed anywhere in any society, in any "form" before its emergence in western Europe. You might "try" and argue that the property laws during the so-called Islamic golden age resembled capitalist relations, but even this rests upon very flimsy foundations.

So where, here, is 'private property' if you aren't permitted to pay your workers what you want? Even the randoids are more formally correct than the marxiods in saying that taxation is nothing more than wealth transfer that mitigates against true private property.

Why do taxes exist? Why do such regulations exist? Not because some external entity called "the state" acts for its own sake in forming a universal dissonance with individual proprietors, but because such measures are necessary in defending the foundations of "true private property", the power of labor and the necessity of property regulating labor is contingent upon its mediation through an entity whose loyalty is beyond any individual capitalist, which is why Marx noted that the English bourgeoisie were "intelligent" insofar as they recognized the necessity of not allowing the loyalty of the state to fall upon themselves as a class individually, because this would do nothing but cripple the state itself and subordinate it to the infighting between individual competing capitalists. Hence, formal democracy, universal civic rights, and so on, were built upon the necessity of creating a trans-propertied entity which could directly mediate the myopic nature of the individual capitalist by, in essence, "thinking in the long term" for him. As the bourgeoisie will cross-economically conspire with each other as brothers in contempt, so too will the proletariat coordinate large scale organization and activity (which includes demands for higher wages). The libertarian fantasy is assuming that individual proprietors exist autonomously, divorced from a wider productive totality. Tell me, without the existence of the state, where the fuck would this "true private property" be? How could private property be sustained? This is why Marx, from Hegel, correctly recognized the unique nature of the bourgeois state in that nothing even remotely similar to it has ever previously existed.

RedMaterialist

10th July 2015, 07:53

I've already said that capitalism is universal insofar as you use the definition given by Marx himself: the commoditization of labor.

Specifically, where and how did capitalism exist in 50,000 BCE?

will franklin

11th July 2015, 01:13

[Except communal property, group marriage and foraging were all integral characteristics of pre-historic human society]

Marxoids are such because they believe this nonsense, without a shred of proof.

Lowie's research on 'primitives'--even assuming falsely that the study of these societies somehow offer us an indication of how prehistoric humans lived-- gives no indication of communal marriage, communal property, or foraging as primary food subsistence.

The collective summation of the capitalist totality as a whole, yes. It doesn't come as a surprise that property is legally conceived in terms of how it benefits the sum-total of relations of privet property in general. How the fuck do you expect this to be mediated? It stands to reason that "the state exists as an instrument of the ruling classes" would not be inscribed into the French constitution anymore than it would be in codified law in say, the Aztec empire. That is because relations of private property are contingent upon societies that do not possess social-consciousness, i.e. ideology must exist to sustain the existence of class. And no, private property did not exist before the events that led to the Neolithic revolution, even personal possessions were seldom defined and regulated to have existed. Either way, private property was never conceived in terms of personal possession anyway, instead, it took an inherently ritualistic, and often times spiritual role - clearly divorced from the prerogatives of man's physiological needs, contra to the bourgeois notion of the "egoist" rational man who sees property as an extension of "maximizing his fitness" and so on.

"Many societies", but none of theses societies being primitive ones, of course - that is, societies without agriculture. Considering Hunter-gatherer bands consisted of more than individual families, considering inter-marriage between different bands existed, it makes absolutely no sense that wars were commonplace, most especially considering the fact that human survival, throughout its 190,000 odd years of existence, was already very precarious as a result of natural catastrophes and the driving of big game into extinction virtually everywhere humans migrated to en masse. If 'warfare' was commonplace in primitive societies, then we would at least have some archaeological evidence to confirm this, in the form of cave paintings and weapons of war, and most especially, the existence of mass-graves. These didn't exist until shortly before the Neolithic revolution, which suggests that they most likely were a result of the development of complex hunter-gatherer societies. In any case, no, there was nothing even remotely similar to private property as it has existed for the past 10,000 or so years.

That is only if one approaches the data like a fucking child, i.e. one can extrapolate, based on existing data, the degree of insight it gives us about pre-historic societies because of the ability for us to cross-reference them with the various legends, myths, oral accounts of not only those societies, but accounts of pre-history in various civilizations. It might even be probable that the story of Adam's fall from paradise might have been an extension of this, but we might never know.

What's your point? Chimpanzees (bonobos and common chimps) both engage in "hunting", but in any case, yes it's true that hominids that proceeded homo sapiens engaged in hunting. What's your point, however? The emergence of bipedal apes, by "freeing the hands" were able to more amply transform nature to their will, in approximation to their growing social complexity (as shown by physiological changes in the brain), no one even knows what you're talking about.

Except communal property, group marriage and foraging were all integral characteristics of pre-historic human society. It is probable that the monogamous practices of primitive peoples in South America, Africa, etc. were introduced externally, or whose introduction coincided with the necessity to adjust to the social changes that which such enduring primitive society forged an oasis. Does your argument somehow amount to the fact that because species before homo sapiens sapiens engaged in hunting practices, that there was "no foraging"? What the fuck are you even talking about? In any case, yes, we'd do well to take all the scumfuck biological anthropologists, stuff them in a closet, and shoot them.

Can you actually shut the fuck up if you're so confused? What instills you with such confidence to respond this way, when you don't even know what I'm talking about? My comparison with different animals had NO PRETENSE TO HUMANS BIOLOGICALLY WHATSOEVER. if you actually READ my fucking post: they are sufficient unto themselves as a fundamentally different SOCIAL dimension, which dictates the biological (i.e. as the biological might dictate the material, even if bound by it). It's absolutely of no surprise you're repeating the same psueod-darwinist myths in your conception of the human species. Namely, humans are capable of history, animals are not, humans change their surroundings with labor, animals cannot. Conceiving humans in terms of passive "adaptations" that are testament to their biological survival, in the same vein as that of a species, is beyond fucking stupid and likewise entirely paradoxical ideologically and linguistically (to designate man as an animal pre-supposes a frame of reference which designates ITSELF as something "not animal", and this famously encapsulates the enigma of the pseudo-darwinists: Can man be fully conscious that he is solely motivated by "primeval" instincts? Would consciousness of this "ruin" it, so to speak? More importantly, if man is conscious of all the "purely genetic" foundations of his consciousness, is his consciousness altered?) but more importantly, it ideologically designates the domain of the social uncritically, which makes it unscientific. Homo sapeins sapiens has existed for 200,000 years, while history has existed for some 10,000. As eusocial animals, human "adaptation" can only be physiological predispositions to plasticity and subordination to the social, to the whims of the collective summation of their existence. Unlike animals, whose behavior is almost purely autonomous, with autonomous organisms needing to rely on 'innate instincts' for survival the less social they are, humans did not have to "adapt" for certain behaviors in order to exist, because as far as the environments of humans, which weren't nearly complex enough ALONE to warrant such complex behavioral traits - passive environments shared by a plethora of other species, conceiving human "adaptations" in terms of passive adjustments to enviroments is beyond fucking stupid.

Finally, you totally miss the fucking point of my analogy, which was: This is akin to saying that mice are "just as evolved" as gray wolves - of course they're just as evolved, that doesn't mean mice are as complex as gray wolves are.

Can you even FUCKING read? Human development can be compared in terms of complexity in the sphere of language, science, divisions of labor, ideology, ETC. - it's something every bumfuck idiot knows, even those cultural relativists. My point is that, evne though some primitive society might have endured, they specifically had to develop certain characteristics that are testament to their endurance, if not for this - then anomalous characteristics which prevented them from transitioning to the systematized cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals. What makes the Americas interesting is the fact that the neolithic revolution occured thousands of years after it did on the other side of the Road, which might not seem like much - but if we put into perspective the fact that the Aztec empire came into existence in the 15th century, it shows that indeed many societies WERE "not fully developed", i.e. were rife with antagonisms that could have made them predisposed to changing drastically. This could have been true for a confederation of tribes in North America as anywhere.

But aside from that, it is a stepping stone to scientific racism. Question: Do you think that different races have "selected" for different behaviors, etc.? Do you think that race exists?

I mean, you clearly don't have a fucking idea about what you're talking about. If morgan can be dismissed because he erroneously claimed that nuts and berries was the initial diet of primitive societies, than will here can be dismissed if he's touting complete bullshit knowing full well the extent of his ignorance. Are you actually schizophrenic? Like holy shit, first we go from the "master/slave dialectic" in the subconscious to the "cunning of history" being nothing but a slaughterhouse? Not only do you blatantly abuse words, you also blatantly abuse cheap quotes extrapolated from Hegel. What you fail to understand is that anyone can be a "Hegelian", i.e. someone who reads Hegel seriously. You're trying to paint a picture that there's some kind of hereditary caste called "the Hegelians" who can only reveal a deeper truth, but that's just as meaningful as claiming the same of those who ascribe to Darwin's evolution. If you're so ignorant that you can't conceive Darwin, it sais nothing that "only Darwinians can reveal to us the deeper truth". It just means that, plainly, you're ignorant.

will franklin

11th July 2015, 01:21

RedMaterialist

11th July 2015, 01:45

RedMaterialist

11th July 2015, 03:21

If we do a ethnographic survey of all human societies and find that capitalism exists everywhere, we can say that, per Aristotle--that it's 'natural' (fusis). Given the same brain hard-wiring for all members of h.sapiens (with the possible exception of the rando/marxoid), we can infer that prehistoric h sapiens exploited, too.

You have no evidence that capitalism existed in 50K BCE. Yet there is plenty of evidence of hunting and gathering and sharing in common, which you ignore. You're job is obviously to justify and apologize for capitalist exploitation. As another apologist said, "There Is No Alternative;" i.e., capitalism is eternal, forever, a fact of nature, like the sun. Even better than the sun, because capitalism has no beginning and no end.

BTW, Aristotle said that production of commodities for sale was unnatural.

will franklin

11th July 2015, 05:00

Morgan never saw Hawaii firsthand; Westermark has been discredited.

No proof of foraging? What do you think pre-historic humans did for food, go to the local supermarket? Here's a study saying that humans cooked roadkill: http://www.newhistorian.com/fire-made-scavenging-safer-for-early-humans/4258/

There is plenty of evidence of group marriage in Hawaii: the Punaluan type of marriage, a group of brothers sharing wives in common, and a group of sisters sharing husbands in common. (Westermark and Morgan.) Also other groups in Melanasia (Westermark) and in some parts of India (Lyia Polgreen), and in America and Australia (Northcote Thomas.) All of these group marriages from different cultures on different continents have this in common: brothers share wives, and sisters share husbands. But there is absolutely no intermarriage of brothers and sisters.

No communal property? The members of a tribe all used the same hunting ground; all of the harvest was shared by all members of the tribe. The gift economy was common to most cultures.

Lowie is supposed to have written a book called The Origin of the State. That should be interesting reading.

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 07:28

Lowie's research on 'primitives'--even assuming falsely that the study of these societies somehow offer us an indication of how prehistoric humans lived-- gives no indication of communal marriage, communal property, or foraging as primary food subsistence.

That is because of the absence of a rigorous, scientific conception of the social dimension of these "primitives". It most likely ignores factors like the existence of agriculture, level of influence with surrounding societies, and so on. Communal marriage (there might be ambiguity here in terms of ceremonial significance, i.e. if there was no "communal marriage" then there certainly was socially accepted extra-marital sex), the ABSENCE of property (Yes, philistine, what a wonder, isn't it? It wasn't "communal property", the very discourse of property did not enter into these societies at all, shocking, right?), and foraging as primary food subsistence (which would have to depend on surroundings, it obviously was not in the arctic), were all held in common as the basis of primitive society, without 'cultural' variance.

Given the same brain hard-wiring for all members of h.sapiens

Exploitation is just as reducible to "hard-wired" processes in the brain as using a fucking keyboard, it's so stupid how these philistines think. Are you literally this fucking stupid? Here's a hint, you worthless piece of shit, if the basis of social relations was in "hard wired' mechanisms in the brain, there would be no history at all. Or, at the very least, all historical changes would be passive human adaptations to geological changes. This is the result of degenerate academics who, upon revelation that there is no god, conceive sociology in terms of zoology. But we've already been over this.

I mean, this dolt comes to us prattling of "evidence" and is trying to make the case that capitalism existed, somehow, in hunter-gatherer social formations. What the actual fuck? How the FUCK does this even work as an ABSTRACTION, as one of those stupid pretenses to allegory you bourgeois philistines try to make? It doesn't even fucking work! What's next, sex = capitalism because using someone's genitals constituted exploitation? I'm trying very desperately to see how you're actually going on, seriously trying to say that capitalism is "natural". At any rate, I'm surprised you haven't been banned yet, considering your previous comments about black juries and the irk - as well as your open admittance to not being a revolutionary.

will franklin

12th July 2015, 05:47

Saying that it's a constant, ongoing struggle to keep humans from exploiting each other for the sake of their own power is hardly apologetic.

Marx offers a false promise of a communal future that's based upon a falsification of history as 'primitive communism'.

BTW, what Aristotle wrote was that huckstering (kapelike) was un-natural within a community. Goods and services within should circulate under conditions of need and custom. This justifiable taking of one's share is called 'metadosis'. OTH, market transactions must be confined to one particular place within the city---the 'agora'.

What classical history reveals, however, is that Athenians liked to huckster. Consequently, goods were gradually taken out of the communal pot of redistribution, to be sold. Likewise, those without title to land found life much better as an exploited worker in the pottery and bronzework factories rather than given his/her 'metadosis' back on the farm.

will franklin

12th July 2015, 06:27

That NYC was a deathtrap is not inconsistent with either higher-than-European- wages or an expanded population. Any real Marxist historian or anthropologist can tell you red-crayon people that.

So great was the demand for labor that those who died in NYC were more than replaced in number.

Higher wages weren't just a trade-off against the distinct possibility of dying. They were also an inducement to come over, which is why many returned after several years.

Slaves in the south got better medical care because they were irreplaceable.

'Clan' means a lineage, either matri- or patri, but never both, or bilineal. In other words, for formal-social reasons, either father plus his brothers = 'uncle', or mother plus her sisters = 'aunt'.

Likewise, brother=male 'cousin's on father's side, or sister = 'female `cousins' on mother's side.

Classically, most clans are matrilineal.

This is the classic Lowie which refutes a generalized form of clan-ness of 19th century armchair speculation. Moreover, Tuareg society (my research) demonstrated exactly what both Leach and E. Marx predicted: warrior castes are conveniently parilinreal,while farmers and tradesman are matri--although of the same ethnos. Then, if you go into a coastal city to find work, you use both.

Malinowski tweaked Lowie a bit in discovering the Melanesian avunculate,, in which lineage and authority is transmitted thru the mother's brother--who isn't collated with 'father', who is referred to as 'mother's husband'.

Even more tweaking is indicated by informal terms of kinship, which universally recognize 'father and mother as a lived-in nuclear unit apart from any clan distinction.

NYC a death pit? The immigrant population in the US reached almost 100 million by the 20th century. The southern slave owners had a very real economic incentive in keeping their slaves healthy: cotton.

Cheap land and a fantastically expanding economy in the US led to high wages. Workers use more money to buy more food. It wasn't some metaphysical "anthropological," American exceptionalism.

Morgan was certainly a racist (so were a lot of people in the 19th century, including Lincoln), but that doesn't invalidate his findings on kinship terminology.

How do anthropologists explain the fact that every society known to have ever existed has developed the words, "mother", "father" to refer to female and male older members of a clan, tribe, band, or similar group; and the words 'sister", "brother", and "cousin" to refer to younger female and male members?

According to you it is just a lucky coincidence that all cultures have such terms, there could not have been any evolutionary development of the terminology.

But even stranger, all cultures have very strict rules with very rigid enforcement, about who in these groups can inter-marry. The oldest taboo, is of course, the mother-son rule. Break that one and you have to kill your father, jab needles into your eyes, and your mother had to hang herself. Why is it that ALL cultures have this rule (except, of course, for the group marriage cultures which, by definition never could have existed)? Could it be that there is some kind of economic benefit in developing a human group with lesser inbreeding? And maybe it took hundreds of thousands of years to develop?

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 06:40

Can we ban this one now? What, is he just going to come everyday, solely in this one thread, to regurgitate the same bullshit? He clearly isn't for revolution, he doesn't even appear to be a fucking leftist.

Marx offers a false promise of a communal future that's based upon a falsification of history as 'primitive communism'.

No, it is because Marx recognizes that the basis of "markets", if we are supposed to contrast it with the "communal", an already false - idealist - dichotomy, is in private property, and that the proletariat has absolutely no means by which it can transform itself into some new propertied class. The negation of the proletariat is Communism, the end of classes, and the negation of the bourgeoisie is the proletariat - the propertied-less, the exploited. Keep touting that "primitive Communism" as it was conceived was a "falsification of history" when to deny it amounts to pure delusion.

Consequently, goods were gradually taken out of the communal pot of redistribution, to be sold. Likewise, those without title to land found life much better as an exploited worker in the pottery and bronzework factories rather than given his/her 'metadosis' back on the farm.

There was never a "communal pot of redistribution", because Aristotle wasn't the founder of Athenian society. What you are insinuating is that because of the disparity between classical ethics and "the reality" that this somehow constitutes a basis for the ethics to reflect practice, but this ignores the fact that the stoics of Rome (as well as all enlightenment thinkers), too, had egalitarian fantasies all the while being ruling class functionaries. The point is that these "ethics" express ideological truths that could only be expressed through fantasy. Will here wants to tell all of us that Athens was somehow an example of a failed "Communist experiment" (gag). He goes on to repeat stupid fucking arguments about "workers in factories" that have already been decimated, namely, that these were hardly exploited workers in the sense of how exploitation was conceived, because the basis of production was in slave labor, not generalized wage labor.

Saying that it's a constant, ongoing struggle to keep humans from exploiting each other for the sake of their own power is hardly apologetic.

No, it's much worse actually, it is attempting to trivialize a the imminence of a struggle that derives from our present condition as being an eternal problem of mankind, which makes our struggle just as futile as the 200,000 years of human history wherein apparently we're supposed to believe capitalism existed.

will franklin

12th July 2015, 06:41

With or without f-bombs, 'conceptions' aren't 'scientific'. Rather, the're ideas that have not found a way to become a testable hypotheses.

Real Marxists know this, and accept the rules:devise a testable research strategy that's based upon the general concept that a material, economic infrastructure predicts a particular infrastructural feature. A Marxist is what he/she is because of hypothesizing the direction of the causal arrow in any particular case.

An excellent example of this is M Harris' 'the cultural ecology of India's cattle. Hinduism exists to reinforce the caveat against eating your source of field traction and fuel for short-term gain.

OTH, red crayon peeple don't need the scientific method to do 'science', or to make scientific-sounding statements. measurement and observation is for the 'bourgeois-positivist, remember?

That is because of the absence of a rigorous, scientific conception of the social dimension of these "primitives". It most likely ignores factors like the existence of agriculture, level of influence with surrounding societies, and so on. Communal marriage (there might be ambiguity here in terms of ceremonial significance, i.e. if there was no "communal marriage" then there certainly was socially accepted extra-marital sex), the ABSENCE of property (Yes, philistine, what a wonder, isn't it? It wasn't "communal property", the very discourse of property did not enter into these societies at all, shocking, right?), and foraging as primary food subsistence (which would have to depend on surroundings, it obviously was not in the arctic), were all held in common as the basis of primitive society, without 'cultural' variance.

Exploitation is just as reducible to "hard-wired" processes in the brain as using a fucking keyboard, it's so stupid how these philistines think. Are you literally this fucking stupid? Here's a hint, you worthless piece of shit, if the basis of social relations was in "hard wired' mechanisms in the brain, there would be no history at all. Or, at the very least, all historical changes would be passive human adaptations to geological changes. This is the result of degenerate academics who, upon revelation that there is no god, conceive sociology in terms of zoology. But we've already been over this.

I mean, this dolt comes to us prattling of "evidence" and is trying to make the case that capitalism existed, somehow, in hunter-gatherer social formations. What the actual fuck? How the FUCK does this even work as an ABSTRACTION, as one of those stupid pretenses to allegory you bourgeois philistines try to make? It doesn't even fucking work! What's next, sex = capitalism because using someone's genitals constituted exploitation? I'm trying very desperately to see how you're actually going on, seriously trying to say that capitalism is "natural". At any rate, I'm surprised you haven't been banned yet, considering your previous comments about black juries and the irk - as well as your open admittance to not being a revolutionary.

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 06:51

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

12th July 2015, 12:05

If we look at what Marx effectively wrote about pre-capitalist societies (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, here (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/precapitalist/)), I think we will see a very different scheme from the classic stalinist stages (primitive communism - slavery - feudalism - capitalism - socialism - communism).

It seems that Marx identified three different paths for the break up of primitive communism: the Classic (ie, Greco-Roman), the "Germanic", and the "Asiatic", the difference among them relying in the different "proportions" of the break up of communitary solidarity among individuals within each village, or among villages within a bigger society.

Those differences, moreover, seem to be tied to the particular organisation of each analysed society, not to some transhistoric "forces" that might conduct the "progress" of mankind.

It is my impression that while Marx's particular conclusions about those different paths for the breakup of primitive communism (including of course the issue of if there are actually three of those paths, or more, or fewer) may or may not be correct, the general method of analysis is the most fruitful, leading to the possibility of conclusions that have to do with what we are in fact analysing (and not to preconceived ideas we might have about how things "should" be).

I would say that this scheme that contains what you term "classic" stages is the work of Kautsky and, to a lesser extent, Plekhanov, rather than Stalin. And in fact, no one on this thread has argued for a similar scheme. All of us recognise that there was a period between the end of the primitive classless society and the point where slave-owning became the dominant economic form; all of us recognise that there were several modes of production between the slave-owning society and feudalism.

However, if we dispense with the notion of productive forces (which are surely not trans-historic - a steam engine would have been part of the productive forces in 19th century England, but not in Roman Egypt for example), and the notion that certain forms of social organisation are progressive compared to others, we are left unable to explain quite a few historical facts - the near universal dissolution of the primitive classless society for one thing (what little hunter-gatherer groups still exist being mostly the descendants of pastoral groups, and all occupying precisely the stage between the end of what Marx termed "primitive communism" and the first state societies).

Uh, no.

Theories generate hypotheses (if it is true that matter attracts matter directly proportionally to the product of their masses and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them - theory - then all objects, when left to fall in vacuum, will fall at the same speed - hypothesis).

Hypotheses are directly testable, theories are not. If a hypothesis is confirmed, it doesn't turn into theory; it merely fails to falsify a previous theory. If a hypothesis is infirmed, then that is an argument against the theory that generated it (but the first thing to do is not to throw the theory away; it is to make sure that the experiment was properly conducted - and properly designed, too). Only after that, it may be possible to conclude that the previous theory is wrong; in such case it will be necessary to build a new theory, that can account for the infirmation of the hypothesis. But in no way a hypothesis "turns into a theory".

Yes, that's the standard falsificationist account of how science is done.

And immediately, you run into several problems. First of all, you say that "the first thing to do is... to make sure that the experiment was properly conducted - and properly designed, too". But that is not all. The experiment can be meticulously designed and meticulously conducted and be completely irrelevant because it is based on an incorrect theory. The many experiments designed to "resolve" the debate on the nature of light are a good example.

And second, scientists of course don't merely say that a theory has failed to be falsified. They say that certain theories have been confirmed. So you need a strong reason to go against this use - for the first falsificationists it was the so-called problem of induction. But the problem of induction is not a problem for Marxists - for us the chief thing is the usefulness of induction (properly understood) in human practice.

Well, it depends. If a Marxist wants to make money at the stock market, no doubt s/he will have to work with the "law" of supply and demand. If however a Marxist wants to understand how prices are formed, s/he will resort to the Labour Theory of Value. If a Marxist is interested in it, s/he can even explain how the LTV creates "supply" (easily) and "demand" (with some more expense of gray matter).

But what makes a Marxist a Marxist, is that s/he understands the difference between understanding the way prices are formed, and taking advantage of oscilating prices for short term profit.

A marginalist, on the other hand, will try to explain the formation of prices through the same principles that are useful when trying to obtain profits in speculative markets.

Yes, but that's the thing, even when it comes to fluctuations of price, the supply-demand model fares poorly unless it's loaded down with several unappealing ad hoc hypotheses.

I notice troll franklin (well, I suppose he's a troll because of his racist outbursts; he could just as easily be a populist rightist who thinks he's a socialist because he wants higher taxes) still hasn't provided any citation for his claims, oh dear.

Islam Muslim Muhammad

12th July 2015, 14:11

No, because the qualifications for "testability" vis a vis the social being reducible to numbers is an impossibility.

This is why Marx is as true in 1880 as he is in 2015, his method remains the same, and it remains as omnipotent.

This is why people are grasping at straws if they think any new "empirical" evidence can "disprove" Marxism, because Marxism concerns a scientific understanding of processes

Brother Rafiq, you remind me very much of the imam at my mosque. Do you have a Sufi background, by any chance? Your sermons have a very similar substance.

RedMaterialist

12th July 2015, 16:34

Even more tweaking is indicated by informal terms of kinship, which universally recognize 'father and mother as a lived-in nuclear unit apart from any clan distinction.

You simply ignore the overwhelming evidence that the earliest known kinship terminology used "mother and father" to refer to all older members of the group, and used "brothers and sisters" to refer to second generation members. The idea that pre-historic groups used the nuclear "mother-father" unit is ridiculous.

The idea of "group marriage" is, amazingly, still anathema to the bourgeois mind.

You say you study the Tuareg. Who were the Tuareg capitalists?

will franklin

13th July 2015, 01:21

The evidence you're citing is overwhelmingly that which was falsified by Lowie, Malinowski & Cie. The standard kinship terminology in use can be researched with the HRAF, which was stared by Murdock some 60 years ago.

I studied the Tuareg, past tense, as in field work. Upper caste Tuareg warriors take a % of crops and metal crafts as 'protection. They likewise 'protect' the salt flats over which they claim ownership, and permit bedouin to work there, for a fee. The caravans and boats down the Niger are likewise 'protected'.

Here, being a real Marxist means cutting through the verbal behavior (emic) to discover what's really happening (etic).

To loop back into the loopiness of 19th century speculation, lots of official kinship terminology bears no resemblance to what's really happening--father and mother 'really' being considered 'uncle and aunt', etc....

You simply ignore the overwhelming evidence that the earliest known kinship terminology used "mother and father" to refer to all older members of the group, and used "brothers and sisters" to refer to second generation members. The idea that pre-historic groups used the nuclear "mother-father" unit is ridiculous.

The idea of "group marriage" is, amazingly, still anathema to the bourgeois mind.

You say you study the Tuareg. Who were the Tuareg capitalists?

will franklin

13th July 2015, 01:45

Human behavior is qualified all of the time. That's because social scientists try to see human behavior as natural as possible; the language of nature is math.

For example:

* Due to austerity measures imposed by Germany, the ratio of Greek debt to its GDP has risen from 130 to 170%
** Inequality is rising basued upon measurable wealth within deciles.
*** Teenage pregnancies were greatest by % during the 1950's. People were marrying right out of high-school, which is measurable, as well.
**** If the world's population consisted of the population density of Manhattan, it would occupy an area the size of colorado
*****The # of great apes on the planet can fit inside of the Rose Bowl.
****** The entire population of all groups calling themselves 'communist' can easily fit into the total closet space of every house in Yekaterinburg. That's aprox 1500 houses times room for four adults in each closet.
*******It's been scientifically proven by red-fascists that, in a pinch, entire families can be shoved into a closet. but as Marx would have said, we're concerned about average occupancy.

No, because the qualifications for "testability" vis a vis the social being reducible to numbers is an impossibility. Hence, your positivist epistemology will never properly reconcile itself with any field that concerns the social, or even humans directly. Marxism does not make a pretense to some new empirical claim that we have faith scientists will somehow discover in the future, instead, it merely OPENS UP the basis for a scientific evaluation of social processes, free from bourgeois ideological obfuscation as did humanism from religious doctrine, or Greek mathematics from mysticism. This is why Marx is as true in 1880 as he is in 2015, his method remains the same, and it remains as omnipotent. The conception of the social dimension, just as the conception of the astronomical being divorced from the theological, IS scientific, it is a FIELD that is opened up to scientific inquiry. This is why people are grasping at straws if they think any new "empirical" evidence can "disprove" Marxism, because Marxism concerns a scientific understanding of processes, not a series of claims with pretenses to the empirical that never change. Marxism is not some kind of holistic hypotheses, it is a scientific paradigm, it is a scientific movement.

The point of a scientific conception of the social would then be to evaluate the workings of a society by merit of its own processes. That means words like "primitive" are used very carefully with great consideration for, for example, the level of external influence and inclusion into a wider totality, how specifically this effects the society, the presence of agriculture or a transition to it, ETC.

will franklin

13th July 2015, 01:52

Lots of classical accounts indicate that 'kapelike' behavior offered higher returns for an individual than 'metadosis'. In other words, the Aristotelian, clan-bases (gens ) redistribution scheme of communism turned out to be an ideology. But red-crayon peeple can't see this---only real Marxists can.

Can we ban this one now? What, is he just going to come everyday, solely in this one thread, to regurgitate the same bullshit? He clearly isn't for revolution, he doesn't even appear to be a fucking leftist.

No, it is because Marx recognizes that the basis of "markets", if we are supposed to contrast it with the "communal", an already false - idealist - dichotomy, is in private property, and that the proletariat has absolutely no means by which it can transform itself into some new propertied class. The negation of the proletariat is Communism, the end of classes, and the negation of the bourgeoisie is the proletariat - the propertied-less, the exploited. Keep touting that "primitive Communism" as it was conceived was a "falsification of history" when to deny it amounts to pure delusion.

There was never a "communal pot of redistribution", because Aristotle wasn't the founder of Athenian society. What you are insinuating is that because of the disparity between classical ethics and "the reality" that this somehow constitutes a basis for the ethics to reflect practice, but this ignores the fact that the stoics of Rome (as well as all enlightenment thinkers), too, had egalitarian fantasies all the while being ruling class functionaries. The point is that these "ethics" express ideological truths that could only be expressed through fantasy. Will here wants to tell all of us that Athens was somehow an example of a failed "Communist experiment" (gag). He goes on to repeat stupid fucking arguments about "workers in factories" that have already been decimated, namely, that these were hardly exploited workers in the sense of how exploitation was conceived, because the basis of production was in slave labor, not generalized wage labor.

No, it's much worse actually, it is attempting to trivialize a the imminence of a struggle that derives from our present condition as being an eternal problem of mankind, which makes our struggle just as futile as the 200,000 years of human history wherein apparently we're supposed to believe capitalism existed.

will franklin

13th July 2015, 05:46

I wasn't aware that Imams were fond of using profanity. My Arabic is poor; however, I do know that Baghdad transcribers did produce nine different versions of the Koran that were based upon arguments by The Companions.

So perhaps my own English version is the text in which profanity was not used? Or rather, it was simply purged from the text for connotative reasons?

Brother Rafiq, you remind me very much of the imam at my mosque. Do you have a Sufi background, by any chance? Your sermons have a very similar substance.

will franklin

13th July 2015, 06:46

In terms of basic probability density or otherwise, one can assume that red crayon peeple would not understand Quantum Mechanics.

So let's go fishing for the meaning of the term 'nature' of light as written:

* Bell's Theorem was resolved by the Aspect experiments, c1978.
** Feynman demonstrated that all wave functions can be transcribed as particles--but the opposite is not true.

Predictably, as well, red crayon peeple would say that 'useful' induction supports their claims, whereas useless induction does not.

The unappealing ad hoc assumptions that were built into Marshall's S/D model were first exposed by Keynes, in 1922. The red crayon peeple were too busy arguing with the austrian (pre)-skoolers to understand.

Keynes in 1929 demonstrated that the bizness cycle 'wave' failed to stand up to logical scrutiny. I'm curious if red crayoners can figure out why.

Samuelson was the first to submit pricing data to basic Fourrier Series. Cambridge and LSE economists--Ricardian to the core-- found mathematical ad hocs within based upon Euler's 'drunk under a streetlamp' theorem.

Krugman uses The Euler, too, as does 'Chaos Theory', btw.

Pareto Optomality was put to bed, finally, by Arrow--yet another bourgeois progressive for higher taxes.

Certain amerikan economists still insist that prices generally fall under Gaussian Distribution. However, amusingly, even the better bizness skools (who normally teach at the red crayon rhetoric level) employ Cauchy or even Levi-based Models: there is no 'inside the bell curve because the bell itself is an ad hoc.

On the level of mathematical theory, in the 1930's, von Neuman demonstrated that prices decohere Nash's theorem said that because there are many solutions to any situation involving choice, S/D intersections are more or less negotiated, not natural.

So where's the red-crayon/marxo-paranoid contribution as to how economic things work? Caution: your answer must use quantities larger than the number of fingers on both hands.

I would say that this scheme that contains what you term "classic" stages is the work of Kautsky and, to a lesser extent, Plekhanov, rather than Stalin. And in fact, no one on this thread has argued for a similar scheme. All of us recognise that there was a period between the end of the primitive classless society and the point where slave-owning became the dominant economic form; all of us recognise that there were several modes of production between the slave-owning society and feudalism.

However, if we dispense with the notion of productive forces (which are surely not trans-historic - a steam engine would have been part of the productive forces in 19th century England, but not in Roman Egypt for example), and the notion that certain forms of social organisation are progressive compared to others, we are left unable to explain quite a few historical facts - the near universal dissolution of the primitive classless society for one thing (what little hunter-gatherer groups still exist being mostly the descendants of pastoral groups, and all occupying precisely the stage between the end of what Marx termed "primitive communism" and the first state societies).

Yes, that's the standard falsificationist account of how science is done.

And immediately, you run into several problems. First of all, you say that "the first thing to do is... to make sure that the experiment was properly conducted - and properly designed, too". But that is not all. The experiment can be meticulously designed and meticulously conducted and be completely irrelevant because it is based on an incorrect theory. The many experiments designed to "resolve" the debate on the nature of light are a good example.

And second, scientists of course don't merely say that a theory has failed to be falsified. They say that certain theories have been confirmed. So you need a strong reason to go against this use - for the first falsificationists it was the so-called problem of induction. But the problem of induction is not a problem for Marxists - for us the chief thing is the usefulness of induction (properly understood) in human practice.

Yes, but that's the thing, even when it comes to fluctuations of price, the supply-demand model fares poorly unless it's loaded down with several unappealing ad hoc hypotheses.

I notice troll franklin (well, I suppose he's a troll because of his racist outbursts; he could just as easily be a populist rightist who thinks he's a socialist because he wants higher taxes) still hasn't provided any citation for his claims, oh dear.

Rafiq

13th July 2015, 07:36

Human behavior is qualified all of the time. That's because social scientists try to see human behavior as natural as possible; the language of nature is math.

Which then becomes a game of ideological tautologies, because conceiving human behavior as "natural as possible" implies a wide array of assumptions, namely that our present social formation is as "natural" as the gorilla or chimpanzee troop. My point is not that human behavior isn't the subject of concern to "social scientists", the cosmos, after all, were extensively studied and examined much earlier than the emergence of astronomy during the Renessiance. The point is that this was not scientific, as the study of the cosmos couldn't be divorced from the theological, metaphysical, or ideological designations inevitably bound up with its approximation to humans (i.e. the Greeks, for example, proposed that our solar system was composed of perfect orbiting spheres/circles, i.e. they could not think outside of this metaphysical holism). Likewise, attempting to conceive human behavior as "natural as possible" betrays a profound prerogative to designate it ideologically, because the social field, history, itself is not up for critical evaluation, only its consequences are.

For this reason, all of the 'examples' you've provided rely on tacitly recognized axioms from which ONLY AFTER we are able to work with numbers. My point is that it is impossible to directly quantify the background of designation itself, i.e. - it is for this reason we, for example, get nonsensical drivel about how "Intelligence" among other things (i..e political views) are heritable because of twin studies, unable to account for other variables, like shared proximity of social space, which makes "scientists" ignore class differences (NOT simply income differences) in measuring differences in "environment", moreso, even creating ridiculous dichotomies about what is our 'environment' and what is heritable, as though humans are merely passively shaped by their "environment". The reality that twins are more likely to share "beliefs", leads them to believe there is a genetic basis for it, completely impervious to the reality that shared physiological development in a similar social setting, of course will make humans more similar in other regards - for such stupid preferences are largely chosen at random. This is why when one twin is reared in a rural setting, and another in an urban setting - surprise surprise, they turn out to be vastly different. If we take evolutionary psychology, which rests upon false premises about taking Darwin to his "logical conclusions" vis a vis humans once scientists realize that god isn't real after all, and that there is no soul, and conceive sociology in terms of zoology.

[]Lots of classical accounts indicate that 'kapelike' behavior offered higher returns for an individual than 'metadosis'. In other words, the Aristotelian, clan-bases (gens ) redistribution scheme of communism turned out to be an ideology. But red-crayon peeple can't see this---only real Marxists can.[/QUOTE]

To call this "Communism" is fucking nonsensical, when one takes into account the realities of its contingency of relations of private property, and so on. Again, this fetishism of the "communal" that we even find in Plato is by no means a direct reflection of the economic realities of antiquity, merely abstractions through which ruling ideology was expressed.

LuÃs Henrique

13th July 2015, 16:10

I, personally believe that 'value' lies at the heart of philosophy because the concept endows life with meaning. And deriving meaning from events is what philosophy is all about.

Oh well, we are talking about "value" in the economic sence, not about "value" as a philosophical platitute. Yes, there is more artistic value in Mozart than in von Suppé, and Sarkozy has more value as a politician than Antonis Samaras, but those things cannot be measured or discussed in the same way as the fact that two chairs have twice the value of one single chair.

So, there is no meaning at all in your statement; consequently, it is very unphilosophical according to yourself. Which is unsurprising, as quid pro quos are seldom philosophical...

Luís Henrique

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

13th July 2015, 16:33

will franklin

14th July 2015, 02:13

Oh well, I 'spoze that for you red crayon peeple, the issue of the 'true nature' of light has nothing to do with Feynman's Path Integral or the resolution of the Bell Theorem (darn!). So can one of you kindly explain what you mean by said 'true nature? Or should I just read that great physics tract by Lenin?

My short digression into the history of economics demonstrates that bourgeois-positivism has more than adequately challenged the Marshallian S/D, whereas the marxo-paranoids have contributed absolutely nothing to this critique.

So yes, i do suspect you to be a cave-dweller.

And once again, will franklin, the great expert on everything but first and foremost on terms he himself has invented, graces our humble sites and proceeds to teach us how to do our jobs. Thank you once again, great master. For before you we sat ignorant and benighted in our caves, thinking that there are states that are not eigenstates of the particle number operator, and that not all field configurations can be usefully written down in terms of particles, among other things, but the economico-physico-theological tractates of our supreme teacher will franklin have convinced us otherwise. How fortunate are we that he simply observed the world as it was (the world here meaning mostly Wikipedia in my estimation) unburdened by theories. What a historical person (in the sense that he creates histories wherever he goes).

It's obvious at this point that you don't even read the posts you're ostensibly responding to but just using them as an excuse to go on one of your bizarre rants. So once again: put up or shut up. Post some evidence for your claims or go away and bother people on Stormfront, I'm sure they will be more receptive to your calls for increasing taxes and your horror stories about jurors who hate white women.

will franklin

14th July 2015, 02:28

True, Marx did try to give quantitative values to labor inputs independent of wage. This, as we know, would include the valuation of dead labor that's present in fixed capital. Doing this, he would have discovered a radical revision of the Ricardian in the sense that now prices would equal dead labor + living labor + exploitative part.

This, again, is the transformation problem. Having failed, marxist economics de-quantified. My claim is to give it legitimacy via philosophy as important and meaningful. OTH, it's not 'economics',which demands quantification as proof..

Oh well, we are talking about "value" in the economic sence, not about "value" as a philosophical platitute. Yes, there is more artistic value in Mozart than in von Suppé, and Sarkozy has more value as a politician than Antonis Samaras, but those things cannot be measured or discussed in the same way as the fact that two chairs have twice the value of one single chair.

So, there is no meaning at all in your statement; consequently, it is very unphilosophical according to yourself. Which is unsurprising, as quid pro quos are seldom philosophical...

Luís Henrique

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

14th July 2015, 02:32

No I believe it's a cramped attic rather than a cave. I imagine that in real life 870 is constantly shuffling stacks of papers and navigating around that weird physics gun that Dr. Connor used to shoot spider-man with to make him stop growing extra arms in the cartoon back in the day as he posts here.

QueerVanguard

14th July 2015, 02:46

This, again, is the transformation problem. Having failed, marxist economics de-quantified. My claim is to give it legitimacy via philosophy as important and meaningful. OTH, it's not 'economics',which demands quantification as proof..

http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/OSOT.doc

RedMaterialist

14th July 2015, 03:38

The evidence you're citing is overwhelmingly that which was falsified by Lowie, Malinowski & Cie. The standard kinship terminology in use can be researched with the HRAF, which was stared by Murdock some 60 years ago.

Here is a quote from Murdock:

"When any social system which has attained equilibrium begins to change, such change regularly begins with modification of the rule of residence. Alteration in residence rules is followed by development or change in form of descent consistent with residence rules. Finally adaptive changes in kinship terminology follow (Murdock 1949:221-222)."

Now, in plain English what does that mean? Social change begins with a modification of the "rule of residence." The change of rules of residence is followed by a change in the form of descent. Finally, kinship terminology changes. A change in behavior occurs while the old kinship terminology is still being used. After the rules of behavior are changed, then the kinship names are changed. Which is exactly what Morgan reported on the Hawiiaian punaluan marriage, then the Iroquois and finally the Greek kinship rules. The old legal relations (kinship) are the last to change, the change in behavior comes first. Or as Marx put it, the mode (legal property relations) of production changes only after the means of production changes.

Thanks for confirming Marxist theory!

I studied the Tuareg, past tense, as in field work. Upper caste Tuareg warriors take a % of crops and metal crafts as 'protection. They likewise 'protect' the salt flats over which they claim ownership, and permit bedouin to work there, for a fee. The caravans and boats down the Niger are likewise 'protected'.

Here, being a real Marxist means cutting through the verbal behavior (emic) to discover what's really happening (etic).

So, you're the real Marxist?

To loop back into the loopiness of 19th century speculation, lots of official kinship terminology bears no resemblance to what's really happening--father and mother 'really' being considered 'uncle and aunt', etc....

"Father and mother" originally referred to all of the older male and female members of a social group, such as a tribe/clan. It was only later that the terminology "uncle and aunt" was added to the kinship terminology, i.e. after the residence rules changed.

The characteristics of the Tuareg you describe sound an awfully lot like feudalism. In fact, they sound exactly like feudalism. Taking a % of crops is what the feudal landlords did; taking protection money from people who traveled across their property is exactly what feudal lords used to do. In fact it was one reason the local burghers organized into armed self-protective groups (later becoming the bourgeoisie). But all this could easily be learned just from reading the Communist Manifesto. Why don't you try reading it?

Also, the HRAF is supposedly designed to learn about universally valid, rather than culture bound behavior. Also it supposedly is used to study GASP!! cultural evolution.

Why not be a real Marxist instead of a pretend one? Unless, of course, your job depends on being a fake Marxist, and there is a lot of that.

RedMaterialist

14th July 2015, 03:57

RedMaterialist

14th July 2015, 04:35

The evidence you're citing is overwhelmingly that which was falsified by Lowie, Malinowski & Cie. The standard kinship terminology in use can be researched with the HRAF, which was stared by Murdock some 60 years ago.

..

Thanks for referring me to Murdock. Here is a quote from "Kinship Terminology" from the University of Alabama (very respectable, non-Marxist):

Hawaiian Kinship Terminology: "A mode of kinship reckoning, usually associated with bilateral kinship or cognatic descent, in which relatives are distinguished only according to sex and generation."

Mothers and Fathers and Brothers and Sisters. Sound familiar? Like maybe what Henry Louis Morgan described?

will franklin

15th July 2015, 06:40

Yes, it's exactly what Morgan described. As a logical construct, it fits into the general scheme as the most inclusive, being bilaterallly inclusive, or bilineal The Eskimo system (ours) falls at the other end; most societies tend to be unilinear.

Three problems, however:

(minor): since other Polynesian groups are not 'Hawaiin', this raises the question as to why, here, specifically?

(minor): Again, pre-Morgonian observation was inadequate--ie did the Hawaiin system ever really exist? Here, it's rather bizarre that an extremely accurate observer would collate his own excellent material with basic junk to form a theory.

(major) For Morgan, the Hawaiian represented a vestige of group marriage. Again --to belabor the point a bit-- kinship systems concern social formalities, property usufruct, whom you cannot marry ('sisters') and inheritance. It says little or nothing about cohabitation.

Thanks for referring me to Murdock. Here is a quote from "Kinship Terminology" from the University of Alabama (very respectable, non-Marxist):

Mothers and Fathers and Brothers and Sisters. Sound familiar? Like maybe what Henry Louis Morgan described?

will franklin

15th July 2015, 06:58

Actually, amerikan economists as defined by the MIT/Chicago Schools see things a bit differently. Profit, for them, is the form of variable capital that owners pay themselves for their own labor. This was the basis of the 'Cambridge Controversy' of the 50's and 60's.

Robinson, Scraffa and the Cambridge/LSE nexus supported Ricardo via 'neo-Keynesianism'. The later, in a highly-axiomatic style reminiscent of his old friend and colleague Wittgenstein, wrote 'Production of commodities by means of commodities' to demonstrate that all real questions are answered by the Ricardian; those that cannot be answered (dead labor & ownership labor) are equally false metaphysicals that 'must pass into silence'.

Which is exactly how modern economics determines price: Non Labor (fixed costs, interest, etc.) + Labor + Profit = Price. The best examples are the cost-plus contracts of the defense industry with the Pentagon. The problem with the bourgeois economists is that they cannot see that the exploitation occurs within the process of production and, therefore, that profit originates within the process of production. Exactly as Marx explained surplus-value.