Court System

[Thirsty Crow]

If dialectal materialism is going to deliver us communism, why even bother fighting for it? Why not just relax and let the dialectic do its work?

Because our very political work is already presupposed by the Grand Dialectic of Everything in Existence.

In other words, we have no choice, we're compelled to fight from outside and above as it were. Choice is an illusion, freedom the recognition of necessity.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Because our very political work is already presupposed by the Grand Dialectic of Everything in Existence.

In other words, we have no choice, we're compelled to fight from outside and above as it were. Choice is an illusion, freedom the recognition of necessity.

Absurd determinism.

[Left Voice]

We're fighting for change, not the inevitable coming of some kind of prophet.

[Loony Le Fist]

If dialectal materialism is going to deliver us communism, why even bother fighting for it? Why not just relax and let the dialectic do its work?

This has always been a puzzling question for me.

Consider this. What would you say to those that wanted to see slavery abolished. They must have believed slavery would be abolished, and yet they had to actively participate in the emancipation movement. By that I mean that we can take a given set of facts about a situation and make predictions intuitively. Humans have a certain ability to visualize the future, because we are participants in creating it!

Let's say I throw a ball at you. The minute your brain sees me throwing that ball it makes a prediction about it's future path. It may miscalculate and you might drop it. However, the attempt is made.

It seems reasonable to make the prediction: because humans are social creatures and must be able to make predictions about future social trends we most probably have a certain internal brain structures involved in making them--like language or the physics (cerebellum) example above.

This question is sort of like asking if determinism is true then why not simply subscribe to some kind of fatalism. Why have the desire to change things? I may part ways with many here on this issue, but I am a determinist. Nonetheless, I think that free-will can exist within a deterministic universe. Deterministic only means that events follow defined sequences. Yet simultaneously, we cannot precisely predict what those sequences will look like in advance.

We only have guiding principles when it comes to situations of social behavior. This doesn't mean we should give up improving and empirically testing principles for validity. It means that the initial starting point is principles. Only then can we run experiments to determine if our principles jibe with reality.

Rest assured I have had the real socialism debate. I understand that it may appear to be a No True Scotsman Fallacy. However, I invite you to consider the following.

Firstly, the association of socialism with the USSR and its satellite states was used in propaganda by the two major superpowers. Albeit, they used the term for vastly different underlying reasons. The term has truly become poisoned. Especially in modern times.

Secondly, there is nothing about the basic premise of socialism that requires a suspension of basic civil rights (which I consider inherent), such as punishment for the expression of dissenting ideas. The problem is that there is often a false equivalence drawn among the options of how to involve the community into the solutions of societal problems. Giving people universal healthcare through the involvement of community, is different than them acting as a community to spy on one another. These are actions of tyrannical dictatorships, not socialism.

[Thirsty Crow]

Absurd determinism.

On the contrary, this is the only truthful position and one based on the perennial achievements of dialectics throughout millennia.

Or in other words I'm being sarcastic.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

On the contrary, this is the only truthful position and one based on the perennial achievements of dialectics throughout millennia.

Or in other words I'm being sarcastic.

It can sometimes be hard to tell sarcasm from sincerity around here.

[Thirsty Crow]

It can sometimes be hard to tell sarcasm from sincerity around here.

It's not that easy in written form definitely, especially without emoticons, but I thought capital letters in "Grand Dialectic of Everything in Existence" would give it away

Incidentally, I think I recall Plekhanov arguing along precisely those lines when asked the same question, although not in a so absurd and caricature like way obviously.

[bropasaran]

"Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."

Marx, Preface to Capital Vol 1.

Which simply follows from materialism.

"The question of the correctness of the materialist interpretation of history is the question of the determining causes of historic necessity. To be a materialist means first of all to trace back all phenomena to the necessary movements of matter. These movements of matter are accomplished according to the materialist doctrine from beginning to end as a mechanical process, each individual process being the necessary result of preceding mechanical facts. Mechanical facts determine, in the last resort, all occurrences, even those which appear to be caused by ideas. It is, finally, always the movement of matter which determines the form of ideas and the directions of the will; and thus these also (and with them everything that happens in the world of humanity) are inevitable. The materialist is thus a Calvinist without God. If he does not believe in a predestination ordained by a divinity, yet he believes and must believe that starting from any chosen point of time all further events are, through the whole of existing matter and the directions of force in its parts, determined beforehand."

Eduard Bernstein, The Fundamental Doctrines of Marxist Socialism- The Materialist Interpretation of History and Historic Necessity

[Thirsty Crow]

Keep trying, just keep trying.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

It's not that easy in written form definitely, especially without emoticons, but I thought capital letters in "Grand Dialectic of Everything in Existence" would give it away

Sadly, some people do write like that when they're being serious!

[liberlict]

Because our very political work is already presupposed by the Grand Dialectic of Everything in Existence.

In other words, we have no choice, we're compelled to fight from outside and above as it were. Choice is an illusion, freedom the recognition of necessity.

It's kind of emancipating in a way to know that I'm an automaton. It takes the chore of thinking out of my life. I wonder what the dialectic has in store for me today ..

[QueerVanguard]

I wonder what the dialectic has in store for me today ..

Vehicular homicide.

[liberlict]

This has always been a puzzling question for me.

Consider this. What would you say to those that wanted to see slavery abolished. They must have believed slavery would be abolished, and yet they had to actively participate in the emancipation movement. By that I mean that we can take a given set of facts about a situation and make predictions intuitively. Humans have a certain ability to visualize the future, because we are participants in creating it!

Let's say I throw a ball at you. The minute your brain sees me throwing that ball it makes a prediction about it's future path. It may miscalculate and you might drop it. However, the attempt is made.

It seems reasonable to make the prediction: because humans are social creatures and must be able to make predictions about future social trends we most probably have a certain internal brain structures involved in making them--like language or the physics (cerebellum) example above.

This question is sort of like asking if determinism is true then why not simply subscribe to some kind of fatalism. Why have the desire to change things? I may part ways with many here on this issue, but I am a determinist. Nonetheless, I think that free-will can exist within a deterministic universe. Deterministic only means that events follow defined sequences. Yet simultaneously, we cannot precisely predict what those sequences will look like in advance.

We only have guiding principles when it comes to situations of social behavior. This doesn't mean we should give up improving and empirically testing principles for validity. It means that the initial starting point is principles. Only then can we run experiments to determine if our principles jibe with reality.

Rest assured I have had the real socialism debate. I understand that it may appear to be a No True Scotsman Fallacy. However, I invite you to consider the following.

Firstly, the association of socialism with the USSR and its satellite states was used in propaganda by the two major superpowers. Albeit, they used the term for vastly different underlying reasons. The term has truly become poisoned. Especially in modern times.

Secondly, there is nothing about the basic premise of socialism that requires a suspension of basic civil rights (which I consider inherent), such as punishment for the expression of dissenting ideas. The problem is that there is often a false equivalence drawn among the options of how to involve the community into the solutions of societal problems. Giving people universal healthcare through the involvement of community, is different than them acting as a community to spy on one another. These are actions of tyrannical dictatorships, not socialism.

Yes I think determinism is philosophically defensible. If you take for granted that organisms respond to external stimuli---sights, sounds etc.---then determinism follows quite easily.

But common sense suggests to me that it would be extremely unlikely for any one man to become conscious of the volition of the universe. Whatever we are determined to be, I doubt we will know ahead of time.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Indeed, we should call it quits, particularly since you are repeating the same basic misunderstandings over and over. Now, the problem is, I'm an idiot. It might not seem like such a problem on a site like this where, indeed, a lot of people are idiots just as I am, but in practice it means that I continue discussions long after it has become apparent that they are pointless.

My idiocy, however, is not boundless. Sooner or later, laziness or bloody-mindedness will prevail. So this will be my last reply to you on this topic.

No.

I do have to say that I love the effort you've put into these replies.

They blinded you with science, Tim. Saying that your position is "backed by science" might impress gullible people, but the rest of us will try to analyse the facts (or "facts", in much of the social sciences, as cases like that of C. Burt show) you cite. Science is, in fact, the most successful of our various explanatory projects, but it is not magically protected from the influence of the dominant ideology. This is true of the research of people like Mead etc. - who were great scientists, with the closest thing approximating the "open mind" of vulgar empiricism - and it is especially true of people who are writing with an agenda, particularly intolerable liberals like Pinker etc.

Mmmk.

Right, "mmmk". Bordiga's rejection of democracy is fairly well-known (in fact it's the one thing most people know about him), so to try and portray him as an advocate of a particular voting scheme is truly beyond ridiculous. But as we've already established, you have a knack for quoting selectively and out of context, trying to prove that Bordiga was a council democrat, Lenin an advocate of subordinate bodies "voluntarily" deciding to follow the centre etc.

In Dutch, as I explained, there's vrijblijvend (non-committal) vrijwillig, which are often used interchangeably

That's nice, but we aren't conversing in Dutch, and if these terms are "often used interchangeably", this further undermines your previous claims about the enormous difference between the subordinate bodies doing something "voluntarily" and "non-committally" (which means something else in English).

What you should have addressed is how your proposal is even supposed to work. Either subordinate bodies are formed by the centre, in which case they are not free to accept or reject the authority of the centre, or they precede the centre, and your "voluntary acceptance of accepting the decisions of the centre" is still an act of federation. Perhaps it is a lasting federation where the newly-subordinated organs can not go against the centre, but it is a federation nonetheless, since the subordination of the sectoral organs to the central organs is predicated not on the general principle of centralism, but on what is effectively a treaty signed by formerly independent parties.

That's what you want to read really.

That is what Lenin implies is the purpose of the entire section:

"To confuse Marx's view on the 'destruction of state power, a parasitic excrescence', with Proudhon's federalism is positively monstrous! But it is no accident, for it never occurs to the opportunist that Marx does not speak here at all about federalism as opposed to centralism, but about smashing the old, bourgeois state machine which exists in all bourgeois countries.

The only thing that does occur to the opportunist is what he sees around him, in an environment of petty-bourgeois philistinism and reformist stagnation, namely, only 'municipalities'! The opportunist has even grown out of the habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.


It is ridiculous. But the remarkable thing is that nobody argued with Bernstein on this point. Bernstein has been refuted by many, especially by Plekhanov in Russian literature and by Kautsky in European literature, but neither of them has said anything about this distortion of Marx by Bernstein.


The opportunist has so much forgotten how to think in a revolutionary way and to dwell on revolution that he attributes 'federalism' to Marx, whom he confuses with the founder of anarchism, Proudhon. As for Kautsky and Plekhanov, who claim to be orthodox Marxists and defenders of the theory of revolutionary Marxism, they are silent on this point! Here is one of the roots of the extreme vulgarization of the views on the difference between Marxism and anarchism, which is characteristic of both the Kautskyites and the opportunists, and which we shall discuss again later.


There is not a trace of federalism in Marx's above-quoted observation on the experience of the Commune. Marx agreed with Proudhon on the very point that the opportunist Bernstein did not see. Marx disagreed with Proudhon on the very point on which Bernstein found a similarity between them.


Marx agreed with Proudhon in that they both stood for the 'smashing' of the modern state machine. Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyites wish to see the similarity of views on this point between Marxism and anarchism (both Proudhon and Bakunin) because this is where they have departed from Marxism.


Marx disagreed both with Proudhon and Bakunin precisely on the question of federalism (not to mention the dictatorship of the proletariat). Federalism as a principle follows logically from the petty-bourgeois views of anarchism. Marx was a centralist. There is no departure whatever from centralism in his observations just quoted. Only those who are imbued with the philistine 'superstitious belief' in the state can mistake the destruction of the bourgeois state machine for the destruction of centralism!"


But of course, recognising this requires actually reading the work in question, instead of relying on one paragraph in your feeble attempts to portray federalism as Marxism.

Bernstein simply cannot conceive of the possibility of voluntary centralism, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes, for the sole purpose of destroying bourgeois rule and the bourgeois state machine. Like all philistines, Bernstein pictures centralism as something which can be imposed and maintained solely from above, and solely by the bureaucracy and military clique.

Once again, the term "voluntarily" refers to the entire class here. The proletariat voluntarily organises itself in a centralist manner, in opposition to the bourgeois state machine, instead of through the bourgeois state machine as advocated by Bernstein. And how does the proletariat maintain cohesion? Through coercive means, both toward the non-proletarian elements and toward strata of the proletariat that have turned against the dictatorship of the proletariat. Again, the history of the Bolshevik government shows this - at no point did Lenin or the RKP(b) fail to crush whatever guild, decentralist or sectoral consciousness existed within the proletariat (during the VIKZhel affair, the strikes in Petrograd etc.).

Associations of producers and consumers.

Undoubtedly with Cornelis instead of bonhomme Proudhon as the general manager.

No it isn't. This logically follows from how communism is realised and what communism is. If there's an unequal distribution of power it means one section of the population can impose decisions, and so we have, at least, proto-class relations.

Again, this is Proudhonist nonsense. Classes are defined by their relation to the process of production, not some abstract "power" that accumulates in people and undoubtedly corrupts them.

I really wanted to reply to the whole post, but looking at it, I really can't be arsed. There's no real point in talking about gay liberation with a straight, no point in talking about the function of the "mental illness" ideology in perpetuating capitalism with a straight, and as for cats, I've addressed that something like three or four times, and that argument isn't getting any smarter with age.

As for your assertion that Marx (once he got rid of his Feuerbachian baggage) believed in nonsense like dog-natures and human natures, it takes a particularly perverse reading of the footnote in question - the relevant part beginning with "he that would criticise all human acts... by the principle of utility", something Marx obviously doesn't do - to suggest anything like that.

Honestly, it makes no sense to even talk to a Proudhonian, and a straight lover of Boers and other white people at that.

[liberlict]

I would have thought the role of human agency in Marx's though was obvious in the words inscribed on his grave ...

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

[Loony Le Fist]

But common sense suggests to me that it would be extremely unlikely for any one man to become conscious of the volition of the universe. Whatever we are determined to be, I doubt we will know ahead of time.

No. It it doesn't seem likely we will know exactly what we will be ahead of time. In fact, I think the Church-Turing conjecture makes it impossible to predict in general. Despite actions having deterministic outcomes. This is why we must fight for our ideas: because conflict in the face of changing circumstances is always inevitable.

For example, I don't think socialism arises naturally as a result of class conflict. That might make me a heretic around here, but so be it. I just think it is the best way to organize society and maximize benefit for the most people. The only way to have true liberty is to ensure that liberty cannot be exchanged for a rental fee (wage). I do not feel there is a way to justify the exchange of liberty--either through a fixed cost (chattel slavery) or rental (wage slavery). Admittedly, that is a moral position.