Socialists on homosexuality

[The Disillusionist]

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

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

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

[The Disillusionist]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[The Feral Underclass]

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

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

[MethodMania]

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

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

read some feyerabend

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

[Rafiq]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't have a monopoly...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and thus we are more equipped to change it.

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

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

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

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

However...

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

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

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

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

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

[Thirsty Crow]

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

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

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

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

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

[Rafiq]

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

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

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

[Rafiq]

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

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

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

[Luís Henrique]

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

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

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

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

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

Luís Henrique

[Thirsty Crow]

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

Luís Henrique

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

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

[RedWorker]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[RedWorker]

Now, as for my personal opinion.

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

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

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

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



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

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

[Thirsty Crow]

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

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

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