"Mechanical materialism" vs. "dialectics"

[Die Neue Zeit]

The only reason why I'm posting this is because, in RP's Dialectics user group (http://www.revleft.com/vb/study-group-orthodox-t91337/index.html?p=1256898&highlight=kautsky), there are misplaced "criticisms" of the true founder of "Marxism" and his particular dialectic, so well appreciated in fact by his most well-known disciple.

Notwithstanding my position on dialectics, the materialist conception of history, and the materialist conception of dynamics, I'd like to quote Lars Lih extensively to clarify the record (from the disciple's POV).

Dialectics

Introduction

The label “dialectics” is derived from the citation given below from Left-Wing Communism. The other citations do not use this word, but they illustrate the same argument: When he was a Marxist, Kautsky understand the need for flexible tactics, for adjusting to new and unexpected situations while remaining true to basic positions. But when he was confronted with the new realities created by war and revolution, he was completely unable to adjust. Lenin makes this argument sometimes in an angry tone of voice, sometimes in a more regretful tone of voice.

Citations

1) 1914. Philosophical Notebooks. Lenin does not take notes on any Kautsky work in these notebooks. Kautsky is mentioned twice by other writers. In case, V. Shuliatikov mentions that both Marx and Kautsky show a connection between a commodity economy and abstract religious views. Lenin comments: “Not in the same spirit as you do” (29:462). In the other case, Iu. Steklov cites Kautsky’s Social Revolution in connection with his, Steklov’s analysis of Chernyshevsky. Lenin comments: “Oho! Com. Steklov is tangled up in his lies!” At present, Lenin’s point here is opaque to me.

2) May 1919. “Heroes of the Bern International.” “The record in substituting reactionary whining for Marxism is taken by Mr. Kautsky. He holds one note: cries about what is happening, is upset, weeps, is horrified, preaches conciliation! All his life this knight of the doleful countenance wrote about class struggle and about socialism, and when matters came to the maximum sharpening of the class struggle and the eve of socialism, our wise man lost his bearings, wailed away and became an out-and-out philistine. [He forgets what he wrote when he was a Marxist about the link between revolution and war (see above under Road to Power).] Now, instead of a sober, fearless analysis of what changes in the form of revolution are inevitable as a consequence of the war, our ‘theoretician’ weeps and wails over his smashed ‘expectations’.” (This is in response to a Kautsky comment in 1919 that the revolution came about, not as a result of a class struggle, but rather as a result of a war-induced collapse of the dominant system, contrary to expectations.) 38:394 (See also 38:365-6 for a similar point about Kautsky’s “frightened” attitude toward civil war.)

3) September 1919. “How the bourgeoisie utilizes renegades.” Lenin reacts to Kautsky’s latest anti-Soviet book, although all he has to go on is a newspaper account. Kautsky evidently called the Bolsheviks hypocrites for installing the death penalty after being opposed to it, and Lenin brings up material about the 1903 debate on this topic at the Second Congress. “Kautsky has to such an extent unlearned [razuchilsia] to think in revolutionary fashion, so such an extent mired himself in philistine opportunism, that he can’t even image how a revolutionary proletarian party, long before its victory, could openly acknowledge the necessity of the death penalty for counter-revolutionaries!” (I include this comment because (a) it implies that Kautsky did once think in revolutionary fashion, and (b) it documents the argument that Kautsky’s principal fault is his inability to apply his Marxist principles to the new era of revolutions.) 39:184

4) Summer 1920. Left-Wing Communism: A Symptom of Growing Pains. “What happened to such highly learned Marxists as Kautsky, Otto Bauer, and others—vozhdi of the Second International who are devoted to socialism—can (and should) serve as a useful lesson. They were completely aware of the necessity for flexible tactics, they studied and they taught Marxist dialectics to others (and much of what they did in this connection will forever remain a valuable acquisition of socialist literature), but in the application of this dialectic, they made such mistakes or showed themselves in practice not to be dialecticians, they turned out to be people who could not take into account the swift change of forms and the swift filling of old forms with new content, that their fate is little more envious than the fate of Hyndman, Guesde, and Plekhanov.” 41:87-8

5) Spring 1921. “On the Food-Supply Tax.” Lenin introduces the term ‘war communism’ to describe the policy of taking from the peasants with very little compensation besides worthless paper money—a policy that Lenin says was forced on the Bolsheviks by circumstances. “We could not conquer the landlords and the capitalists in a devastated small-peasant country in any other way. … This fact also shows the role played in practice by the lackeys of the bourgeoisie—Mensheviks, SRs, Kautsky and Co.—when they said that this ‘war communism’ was our fault. It must in fact be put down as our merit.” 43:219-20

6) January 1923. “On Our Revolution” “There is no doubt that a textbook written à la Kautsky (po Kautskomu) was a very useful thing for its time. But the time has come nevertheless to renounce the thought that this textbook foresaw all forms of development of the rest of world history. It is high time that people who think like this are shown to be fools.” (The usual translation is: “a textbook written on Kautskyite lines.” But this is just a mistranslation, since anyone familiar with what Lenin meant by “Kautskyite” will realize that he could not have said that “a textbook written on Kautskyite lines” was ever useful.) (In the context of earlier statements on this theme, we see that Lenin is not being at all ironical when he says that a textbook à la Kautsky was once a very useful thing. Lenin is not making the claim that he or anybody else foresaw all the tactical changes made necessary by the actual “new era of revolutions.” His own merit is that he was able to dialectically adjust and draw the necessary tactical consequences, Kautsky’s demerit is his inability to do this.) 45:382



Ever since then, much overly philosophical fuss has been made about the flaws of so-called "mechanical materialism." If anything else, one could argue that Kautsky wasn't "mechanical" enough: by acting in a way that would have been consistent with his own remarks in The Road to Power and with the anti-war resolutions of the Basel Manifesto in 1912:

http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/sambol/bolwar/bolwar08.htm


If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.

Thoughts?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

This should be in Theory, or History, I think. It does not look philosophical.

[gilhyle]

It is very important to escape the mystification imposed by Korsch and Lukacs on the history of the Marxism - a mystification which served to enhance the standing of the their own neo Hegelian views by making nonsense of the Marxist inversion of Hegel.

Kautsky is not far off the correct position in his Materialist Conception of History when he cautions against treating the Hegelian schema as the necessary form of all change, and cautions in particular against assuming that the change is always the self-initiated result of one factor.

Thus he concludes: "As a scheme to characterise some processes, but not as a general law, the dialectical negation of the negation in the Hegelian sense can under certain circumstances be appropriate .....But it is by no means settled that Marx and Engels regarded this scheme as a general, necessary law of motion of the world....that is to say we need not at all accept the dialectic everywhere a priori as the necessary scheme of development; rather we must discover it where it does occur..."

So much for the lie of Kautsky the fatalist.....a charge against Kautskys method by Lukacs and Korsch. Lenin's point was quite different

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Kautsky is not far off the correct position in his Materialist Conception of History when he cautions against treating the Hegelian schema as the necessary form of all change, and cautions in particular against assuming that the change is always the self-initiated result of one factor.

Well, we already know that if dialectics were true, change could not happen.

By the way, have you sorted out the Hermetic conundrum that, according to Hegel, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and many others, a table must struggle with the wood from which it is to be made, and that carpenters should be expected to turn into tables, and vice versa?

For those who do not know, this is reference to a dialectical puzzle that foxed Gil earlier:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectics-t96890/index3.html

[gilhyle]

By the way, have you sorted out the Hermetic conundrum that, according to Hegel, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and many others, a table must struggle with the wood from which it is to be made, and that carpenters should be expected to turn into tables, and vice versa?


A point on which Kautsky voiced a criticism of Engels, not in your destructive sophistic, slave-mentality fashion, but more constructively:

"Engels...regards movement and development not as the reciprocal effect of two factors, the individual and the environment, on one another but merely as the self-initiated movement of one factor, the individual and he seeks the antithesis as well as the thesis in the same individual"

However this criticism is inconsistent with his other criticism, just quoted unless one concludes that one factor change can never apply. The issue is the concpetualisation of particulars, 'individuals'

That reflects what was Kautsky's methodological flaw which is an undynamic conception of environment as a given

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


A point on which Kautsky voiced a criticism of Engels, not in your destructive sophistic, slave-mentality fashion, but more constructively:

"Engels...regards movement and development not as the reciprocal effect of two factors, the individual and the environment, on one another but merely as the self-initiated movement of one factor, the individual and he seeks the antithesis as well as the thesis in the same individual"

In other words, you haven't sorted it out.

So, Gil you are still foxed by this...

[peaccenicked]

It is a mistake to regard dialectics than anything other than a way of thinking. Hegel, Marx, Engels and many if his followers got it. The prime way to get at the truth of a matter, is to look at historically. This how Marx and Engels differentiated themselves from the Utopians
If you cant trace the self movement of an entity you are more likely not to see what that entity is all about. Dialectics needs this starting point or it appears as undifferentiated mass of contradictions. Dialectics is rooted in the actual study of life, not in its axioms.

These only shed light on movement when there is movement.

At the crux of this is the idea of weltanschung which means roughly world view. This universal is blind and empty and has to be made up of real things , entities , creatures.
The task for the sudent is to follow the basic line of development and their interconnections with each other.
Hence it is merely a guide to specific action. It is tool.
Academia sometimes points students in this direction.
The patterns that Engels developed were never meant to be set in stone but improved apon by future thinkers.

I sometimes wonder what the fuss is all about.

[KC]

Gil, you should know by now that ignoring Rosa is the best option; you're only feeding her.

[black magick hustla]

the universe is not blind or empty because it is not an organism, and obviously there is a lot of stuff going inside it to be empty. furthermore, sober materialism is not "mechanical" because the universe is not a machine. perhaps, what people mean when referring to a sober, crystal clear view of the universe as "mechanical" is that they dont find such an approach poetical or aesthetically pleasant enough. its a shame this people think we have to sacrifice clarity in the sciences in the name of poetical obfuscation.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

KC:


Gil, you should know by now that ignoring Rosa is the best option; you're only feeding her.

Ah, yet another 'brave' defender of the faith!

As if ignoring me has ever stopped me.:lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

PN:


It is a mistake to regard dialectics than anything other than a way of thinking. Hegel, Marx, Engels and many if his followers got it. The prime way to get at the truth of a matter, is to look at historically. This how Marx and Engels differentiated themselves from the Utopians

1) It's a very confused 'way of thinking'.

2) How can 'a way of thinking' run the entire universe, or power the class struggle?


If you cant trace the self movement of an entity you are more likely not to see what that entity is all about. Dialectics needs this starting point or it appears as undifferentiated mass of contradictions. Dialectics is rooted in the actual study of life, not in its axioms.

1) Once more: How can 'a way of thinking' 'self move' an object? Is this yet another example of psychokinesis?

2) If objects 'self-move', then the old anti-dialectical joke is correct:

Q: How many dialecticians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None at all, the light bulb changes itself.

So, when you throw a ball, the act of throwing does not make the ball move, it 'self-moves' from A to B, knowing unerring where to go and how to get there...

As I said, this is a very confused 'way of thinking'.


At the crux of this is the idea of weltanschung which means roughly world view. This universal is blind and empty and has to be made up of real things , entities , creatures.
The task for the sudent is to follow the basic line of development and their interconnections with each other.
Hence it is merely a guide to specific action. It is tool.
Academia sometimes points students in this direction.
The patterns that Engels developed were never meant to be set in stone but improved apon by future thinkers.

I sometimes wonder what the fuss is all about.

Indeed, this makes about as much sense a parapsychology -- so what is the fuss all about?

Let's ditch this useless theory, and do our movement a huge favour.

[Hit The North]

2) How can 'a way of thinking' run the entire universe, or power the class struggle?

Surely its the other way around. The class struggle powers the dialectic of history. The point of a dialectical approach is that it, as Peacenicked points out, focusses our attention on "the basic line of development [of phenomena] and their interconnections with each other."

Material reality is in a process of development and therefore a dialectical approach to its study is appropriate. This seems like an unremarkable claim today, but when Marx and Engels were formulating it (in The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy) this was a good ten years before the publication of Darwin's origin of species. It is worth remembering that Marx greeted the publication of Darwin's masterpiece as representing the same revolution in the natural sciences as Marx and Engels own approach to human history.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Surely its the other way around. The class struggle powers the dialectic of history. The point of a dialectical approach is that it, as Peacenicked points out, focusses our attention on "the basic line of development [of phenomena] and their interconnections with each other."

Yes, but he did not say this -- he denied it was a theory that ran the world.

Anyway, there is no 'dialectic of history' as traditionalists like you understand that phrase.

If there were, there'd be no change, no dead cats and no dead capitalists, either.:lol:


Material reality is in a process of development and therefore a dialectical approach to its study is appropriate. This seems like an unremarkable claim today, but when Marx and Engels were formulating it (in The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy) this was a good ten years before the publication of Darwin's origin of species. It is worth remembering that Marx greeted the publication of Darwin's masterpiece as representing the same revolution in the natural sciences as Marx and Engels own approach to human history.

Unfortunately for you, this is only half the truth. As Steven Jay Gould argued in an article about Ray Lankester, who was one of the few individuals to attend Marx's funeral):


"If Lankester showed so little affinity for Marx's worldview, perhaps we should try the opposite route and ask if Marx had any intellectual or philosophical reason to seek Lankester's company. Again, after debunking some persistent mythology, we can find no evident basis for their friendship.

"The mythology centres upon a notorious, if understandable, scholarly error that once suggested far more affinity between Marx and Darwin (or at least a one-way hero worshiping of Darwin by Marx) than corrected evidence can validate. Marx did admire Darwin, and he did send an autographed copy of Das Kapital to the great naturalist; Darwin, in the only recorded contact between the two men, sent a short, polite, and basically contentless letter of thanks. We do know that Darwin (who read German poorly and professed little interest in political science) never spent much time with Marx's magnum opus. All but the first 105 pages in Darwin's copy of Marx's 822-page book remain uncut (as does the table of contents), and Darwin, contrary to his custom when reading books carefully, made no marginal annotations. In fact, we have no evidence that Darwin ever read a word of Das Kapital.

"The legend of greater contact began with one of the few errors ever made by one of the finest scholars of this, or any other, century -- Isaiah Berlin, in his 1939 biography of Marx. Based on a dubious inference from Darwin's short letter of thanks to Marx, Berlin concluded that Marx had offered to dedicate volume 2 of Kapital to Darwin and that Darwin had politely refused.

"This tale of Marx's proffered dedication then gained credence when a second letter, ostensibly from Darwin to Marx but addressed only to 'Dear Sir,' turned up among Marx's papers in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. This letter, written on October 13, 1880, does politely decline a suggested dedication: 'I Shd. prefer the Part or Volume not be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as it implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.' This second find seemed to seal Isaiah Berlin's case, and the story achieved general currency....

"To shorten a long story, two scholars, working independently and simultaneously in the mid-1970s, discovered the almost comical basis of the error (see Margaret A. Fay, 'Did Marx offer to dedicate Capital to Darwin?' Journal of the History of Ideas 39, 1978, and Lewis S. Feuer, 'Is the "Darwin-Marx correspondence" authentic?' Annals of Science 32, 1975). Marx's daughter Eleanor became the common-law wife of the British socialist Edward Aveling. The couple safeguarded Marx's papers for several years, and the 1880 letter, evidently sent by Darwin to Aveling himself, must have strayed into the Marxian collection.

"Aveling belonged to a group of radical atheists. He sought Darwin's official approval, and status as dedicatee, for a volume he had edited on Darwin's work and his (that is, Aveling's, not necessarily Darwin's) view of its broader social meaning (published in 1881 as The Student's Darwin, volume 2 in the International Library of Science and Free-thought). Darwin, who understood Aveling's opportunism and cared little for his antireligious militancy, refused with his customary politeness but with no lack of firmness. Darwin ended his letter to Aveling (and not to Marx, who did not treat religion as a primary subject in Das Kapital) by writing:


"'It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science.'

"Nonetheless, despite this correction, Marx might still have regarded himself as a disciple of Darwin and might have sought the company of a key Darwinian in the younger generation -- a position rendered more plausible by Engels's famous comparison (quoted earlier) in his funerary oration. But this interpretation must also be rejected. Engels maintained far more interest in the natural sciences than Marx ever did (as best expressed in two books, Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature). Marx, as stated above, certainly admired Darwin as a liberator of knowledge from social prejudice and as a useful ally, at least by analogy. In a famous letter of 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin's Origin of Species: "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

But Marx also criticized the social biases in Darwin's formulation, again writing to Engels, and with keen insight:


"'It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division pf labour, competition, opening up of new markets, invention and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.' It is Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all].' [Marx to Engels, 18/06/1862.]

"Marx remained a committed evolutionist, of course, but his interest in Darwin clearly diminished through the years. An extensive scholarly literature treats this subject, and I think that Margaret Fay speaks for a consensus when she writes (in her previously cited article):


"'Marx...though he was initially excited by the publication of Darwin's Origin...developed a much more critical stance toward Darwinism, and in his private correspondence of the 1860s poked gentle fun at Darwin's ideological biases. Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, compiled circa 1879-81, in which Darwin is cited only once, provide no evidence that he reverted to his earlier enthusiasm.'" [Gould (2002c), pp.123-25. Spelling altered to conform to UK English; formatting and quotation marks altered to conform to the conventions adopted here. I have not been able to check the articles Gould cites. I have added a reference to Marx's correspondence.]

It is odd, however, that Gould does not quote a letter Engels wrote which is far more negative in its opinions about Darwin:


"1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin#s time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature -- inanimate as well as animate -- includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meagre phrase 'struggle for existence,' a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis [with a grain of salt -- RL], such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

"...I should therefore attack -- and perhaps will when the time comes -- these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

"The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

"4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies....

"At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence -- if we permit this category for the moment to be valid -- is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -- what sense is their left in all this talk of 'struggle for existence'? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

"...Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the 'struggle for existence.' I would therefore never do this favour to these false naturalists....

"6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the 'bellum omnium contra omnes' was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case...." [Engels to Lavrov, 17/11/1875. Spelling altered to conform to UK English; formatting and quotation marks altered to conform to the conventions adopted here.]

Which seems to me to get things about right. So, there is little substantial affinity between Marxism and Darwinism, despite what you have been told

[The above is an extract from the next Essay I am about to publish in the next week or so. You will be able to find the references there.]

Gould's article can be read here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_7_108/ai_55698600

[Hit The North]

Thanks for posting this interesting literature, however, it has no bearing on my claim that Marx hailed Darwin's work as "representing the same revolution in the natural sciences as Marx and Engels own approach to human history." This is only my own clumsy effort to paraphrase Marx's remark that
"Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view." I would not want to claim that there was any other connection between the two writers or their ideas.

My only purpose was to point out that both Darwin's work and Marx's work are, in their respective fields, powerful refutations of mechanical materialism.

It is, however, interesting to speculate on what Marx meant by "the crude English style" and on how he and Engels regarded their method as superior to Darwin's.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Thanks for posting this interesting literature, however, it has no bearing on my claim that Marx hailed Darwin's work as "representing the same revolution in the natural sciences as Marx and Engels own approach to human history." This is only my own clumsy effort to paraphrase Marx's remark that


"Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

But it doesn't, as Engels pointed out. Where in the animal and/or plant kingdoms does struggle take place between classes, or where is it fuelled by the interplay between the forces and relations of production? And where is there the pitiless struggle for existence among conspecifics in, say, the proletariat? Where does every human couple strive to have as many offspring as possible? Not even the rich, who can afford them, do that!

There is very little in Darwin's theory that illuminates Historical Materialism.

Now wonder both Marx and Engels later cooled in their praise for Darwin, as Gould pointed out.


My only purpose was to point out that both Darwin's work and Marx's work are, in their respective fields, powerful refutations of mechanical materialism.

Where in Marx or Darwin's theory is there this 'refutation'? Even though I reject mechanical materialism, I can't see where they do this.


It is, however, interesting to speculate on what Marx meant by "the crude English style" and on how he and Engels regarded their method as superior to Darwin's.

He's referring to Darwin's alleged empiricism.

[Hit The North]

But it doesn't, as Engels pointed out. Where in the animal and/or plant kingdoms does struggle take place between classes, or where is it fuelled by the interplay between the forces and relations of production? I'm not arguing that the two theories have any content in common, or that one confirms the other. Nevertheless, they both demonstrate, in their respective fields, that phenomena are subject to change on the basis of particular laws of development.


He's referring to Darwin's alleged empiricism. Yes. So what method does Marx employ which he thinks is superior to Darwin's alleged empiricism?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Nevertheless, they both demonstrate, in their respective fields, that phenomena are subject to change on the basis of particular laws of development.

In that case, Marxism and Hinduism, in their repsective fields hold that phenomena are subject to change on the basis of particular principles of development.

With such weak criteria, you could even equate Marxism with Fascism.


So what method does Marx employ which he thinks is superior to Darwin's alleged empiricism?

Historical Materialism -- how many more times?

Sheesh...!

[Die Neue Zeit]

There was an interesting remark on so-called "mechanical materialism" in another thread:


I joined a long, long time ago, perhaps when the League was still in its infancy (I don't remember when it was started), when I was just emerging from my RedStarist phase; Miles' politics and solid means of presenting them attracted me, so I joined.

The majority of the work I did while I was in the League was working on the website (uploading articles, tweaking the site, etc...), as I was in no contact with anyone in the League outside of the internet (there was simply nobody around here), however I did hand out League flyers at numerous events. I also provided input on organizational documents, although I don't remember to what length that was discussed (I just remembered reading them).

The only thing I remember besides that is attempting to get an editorial board formed, as Miles was doing all of the work of basically the entire organization; many people stepped forward, but it never worked, for various reasons (due to the failure on Miles' part to hand out work, as I stated earlier, and on the members' parts to stand up and start submitting articles and to take responsibility).

Shortly following that, I think, I left, as my politics were changing and I began realizing that the League's worker-only policy, the only real thing that set it apart from any other organization (aside from some of its curious politics, which if I remember correctly is a blend of various tendencies), was incredibly mechanistic in nature and contrary to Marxism because of it.

I think the split happened a few months after I left, but didn't follow it too much (although I was obviously interested). It certainly didn't surprise me, the way the organization was developing, though.

What's so "mechanistic" about proletarian separatism, which originated in the SPD? [The irony being that a dying Lenin suggested letting in peasants into what was formerly a workers' party]

[Hyacinth]

This is something that I really find curious, mechanistic models and metaphors are something that science has long dispensed with, except perhaps in an introductory physics class when you're concerned with basic Newtonian mechanics. So this supposed debate between mechanical materialism (of a Newtonian sort) and dialectics over the nature of change is, at best, antiquated and something which contemporary science has long left behind. Dialecticians—setting aside all other issues for a moment—are attacking a strawman, as no one is a mechanist in this crude Newtonian sense anymore, if anyone ever was.