Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst (response toarrowlessness)

[Victor]

Steve,
Enjoyed it immensely.  Also helped considerably in "finalizing" (if that's 
possible) the concepts I've been working with.  Must do it again some time.

Regards,
Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 13:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst (response 
toarrowlessness)



At 12:00 PM 7/5/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote: "Steve, I really do not have 
enough time to devote to answering this message as it deserves.  So please 
excuse the briefness of my responses."


No problem at all.  I am happy to let that response be the last major word 
on this discussion for now, which we can certainly return to when time 
permits.


As for the final question asked, "What say you comrade?" I say, thank you 
for the stimulating discussion, we'll get back to these important and 
stimulating topics as time goes on.


Below are some passages that stand out for me as excellent thinking and 
research points for me to work with.


Victor suggests, asks, points out:

*  that I am "... arguing that all reflective thought is ideal ..."

* "So what do you call reality?  Ilyenkov is quite clear as to what he 
calls reality ..."


* "What is virgin materiality?  If by virgin materiality you mean that 
part of nature men have yet to have contacted ..."


* Sorry, but I'm afraid your argument that thought as a function of 
practice and thought as received social wisdom are both ideal are not 
acceptable to me or to Ilyenkov."


* "Your views that all reflective thought is ideal is much more consistent 
with the views of Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer and more recently 
of Habermas than with Ilyenkov ..."


* "... you've determined that all human consciousness is ideal ..."

* "Wow! I wrote the previous paragraph before reading this one ..."

* " ... you are confirming my description of your argument as more 
consistent with Critical Theory than with EVI's Marxist-Leninism."


* "The identification of scientific theory as an integral part of the 
ideal is an invention of Lukacs that was expanded by his Critical Theorist 
epigones."


* "At no point does Ilyenkov describe scientific work as ideal."

* "What say you comrade?"  Oudeyis

I say: thanks again,
- Steve





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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst (response to arrowlessness)

[Steve Gabosch]

At 12:00 PM 7/5/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote: "Steve, I really do not 
have enough time to devote to answering this message as it 
deserves.  So please excuse the briefness of my responses."


No problem at all.  I am happy to let that response be the last major 
word on this discussion for now, which we can certainly return to 
when time permits.


As for the final question asked, "What say you comrade?" I say, thank 
you for the stimulating discussion, we'll get back to these important 
and stimulating topics as time goes on.


Below are some passages that stand out for me as excellent thinking 
and research points for me to work with.


Victor suggests, asks, points out:

*  that I am "... arguing that all reflective thought is ideal ..."

* "So what do you call reality?  Ilyenkov is quite clear as to what 
he calls reality ..."


* "What is virgin materiality?  If by virgin materiality you mean 
that part of nature men have yet to have contacted ..."


* Sorry, but I'm afraid your argument that thought as a function of 
practice and thought as received social wisdom are both ideal are not 
acceptable to me or to Ilyenkov."


* "Your views that all reflective thought is ideal is much more 
consistent with the views of Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer 
and more recently of Habermas than with Ilyenkov ..."


* "... you've determined that all human consciousness is ideal ..."

* "Wow! I wrote the previous paragraph before reading this one ..."

* " ... you are confirming my description of your argument as more 
consistent with Critical Theory than with EVI's Marxist-Leninism."


* "The identification of scientific theory as an integral part of the 
ideal is an invention of Lukacs that was expanded by his Critical 
Theorist epigones."


* "At no point does Ilyenkov describe scientific work as ideal."

* "What say you comrade?"  Oudeyis

I say: thanks again,
- Steve





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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst (response to arrowlessness)

[Victor]

Wha' happened to the arrows??
- Original Message - 
From: "Victor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marxand 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:47
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


Steve,
I really do not have enough time to devote to answering this message as it
deserves.  So please excuse the briefness of my responses.
__
- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
thethinkers he inspired" 
Sent: Monday, July 04, 2005 19:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


Here is a follow-up on a passage Victor offered
in an interpretation of an Ilyenkov quote.  I
made some claims and promised to try to show
their basis.  First, I deconstruct both of these
passages from my viewpoint and criticize Victor's
formulation.  Second, I touch on why Victor's
formulation reminds me more of Hegel than
Ilyenkov.  But I do this in a (hopefully) more
relaxed way than the manner in which I initiated
this thought on 6/26, which on retrospect may
have been unnecessarily sharp and
argumentative.  I hope this post does not come off in that way.

At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to 
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly 
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively 
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of 
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established 
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from 
its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience". 
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)


[Victor's interpretation:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised world 
of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside and apart 
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience." 
can only be based on the distinction between the socially learned and 
confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts formulated by 
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the 
operations carried out, the physical and material response of the 
instruments and material of production to these activities and finally the 
effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


Allow me to break these complex passages into
smaller pieces and comment on them:

Paragraph 54 (Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977):
It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, therefore,
the main problem of philosophy
is not to distinguish and counterpose everything
that is "in the consciousness of the individual"
to everything that is outside this individual consciousness
(this is hardly ever difficult to do),
but to delimit the world of collectively acknowledged notions,
that is,
the whole socially organised world of intellectual culture
with all its stable and materially established universal patterns,
and
the real world as it exists outside and apart
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience".

Steve comments:
This is a huge statement by EVI: he is defining
"the main problem of philosophy."  He is
suggesting that the main historical division of
philosophy between idealism and materialism,
emphasized so much by Marx and Engels, revolves
around a different kind of boundary than is
usually assumed.  The usual boundary is between
that which is "inside" and "outside" individual
consciousness.  EVI polemicizes again and again
against using this division in this
essay.  Instead, EVI proposes a different
boundary.  It is where EVI places this
alternative boundary that is the source of debate.

I believe, although his formulations are less
than transparent, that EVI is delimiting the
fundamental difference as that between the ideal
- "the world of collectively acknowledged
notions" - and the "real world as it exists outside and apart" from the
ideal.


[Victor 6/22:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the
"whole socially organised world of intellectual culture"
and the "real world as it exists outside and
apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of
"experience."
can only be based on the distinction between
the socially learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe
and
the concepts formulated by reflecting on practical material activity,
i.e. labour activit

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Steve,
I really do not have enough time to devote to answering this message as it 
deserves.  So please excuse the briefness of my responses.
- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Monday, July 04, 2005 19:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


Here is a follow-up on a passage Victor offered
in an interpretation of an Ilyenkov quote.  I
made some claims and promised to try to show
their basis.  First, I deconstruct both of these
passages from my viewpoint and criticize Victor's
formulation.  Second, I touch on why Victor's
formulation reminds me more of Hegel than
Ilyenkov.  But I do this in a (hopefully) more
relaxed way than the manner in which I initiated
this thought on 6/26, which on retrospect may
have been unnecessarily sharp and
argumentative.  I hope this post does not come off in that way.

At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to 
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly 
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively 
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of 
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established 
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from 
its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience". 
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)


[Victor's interpretation:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised world 
of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside and apart 
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience." 
can only be based on the distinction between the socially learned and 
confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts formulated by 
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the 
operations carried out, the physical and material response of the 
instruments and material of production to these activities and finally the 
effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


Allow me to break these complex passages into
smaller pieces and comment on them:

Paragraph 54 (Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977):
It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, therefore,
the main problem of philosophy
is not to distinguish and counterpose everything
that is "in the consciousness of the individual"
to everything that is outside this individual consciousness
(this is hardly ever difficult to do),
but to delimit the world of collectively acknowledged notions,
that is,
the whole socially organised world of intellectual culture
with all its stable and materially established universal patterns,
and
the real world as it exists outside and apart
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience".

Steve comments:
This is a huge statement by EVI: he is defining
"the main problem of philosophy."  He is
suggesting that the main historical division of
philosophy between idealism and materialism,
emphasized so much by Marx and Engels, revolves
around a different kind of boundary than is
usually assumed.  The usual boundary is between
that which is "inside" and "outside" individual
consciousness.  EVI polemicizes again and again
against using this division in this
essay.  Instead, EVI proposes a different
boundary.  It is where EVI places this
alternative boundary that is the source of debate.

I believe, although his formulations are less
than transparent, that EVI is delimiting the
fundamental difference as that between the ideal
- "the world of collectively acknowledged
notions" - and the "real world as it exists outside and apart" from the 
ideal.



[Victor 6/22:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the
"whole socially organised world of intellectual culture"
and the "real world as it exists outside and
apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of 
"experience."

can only be based on the distinction between
the socially learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe
and
the concepts formulated by reflecting on practical material activity,
i.e. labour activity:
the operations carried out,
the physical and material response of the
instruments and material of production to these activities
and finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.

Steve comments:
Victor suggests the boundary EVI is speaking of
is revealed in the following distinction: between
the ideas/concepts of the tribe - and reflections
o

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

Here is a follow-up on a passage Victor offered 
in an interpretation of an Ilyenkov quote.  I 
made some claims and promised to try to show 
their basis.  First, I deconstruct both of these 
passages from my viewpoint and criticize Victor's 
formulation.  Second, I touch on why Victor's 
formulation reminds me more of Hegel than 
Ilyenkov.  But I do this in a (hopefully) more 
relaxed way than the manner in which I initiated 
this thought on 6/26, which on retrospect may 
have been unnecessarily sharp and 
argumentative.  I hope this post does not come off in that way.


At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that 
the main difficulty and, therefore, the main 
problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the 
consciousness of the individual" to everything 
that is outside this individual consciousness 
(this is hardly ever difficult to do), but to 
delimit the world of collectively acknowledged 
notions, that is, the whole socially organised 
world of intellectual culture with all its 
stable and materially established universal 
patterns, and the real world as it exists 
outside and apart from its expression in these 
socially legitimised forms of "experience". 
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)


[Victor's interpretation:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the 
"whole socially organised world of intellectual 
culture" and the "real world as it exists 
outside and apart from its expression in these 
socially legitimised forms of "experience." can 
only be based on the distinction between the 
socially learned and confirmed concepts or ideas 
of the tribe and the concepts formulated by 
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. 
labour activity: the operations carried out, the 
physical and material response of the 
instruments and material of production to these 
activities and finally the effectivity of the 
operations relative to their purposes.


Allow me to break these complex passages into 
smaller pieces and comment on them:


Paragraph 54 (Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977):
It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, therefore,
the main problem of philosophy
is not to distinguish and counterpose everything 
that is "in the consciousness of the individual"

to everything that is outside this individual consciousness
(this is hardly ever difficult to do),
but to delimit the world of collectively acknowledged notions,
that is,
the whole socially organised world of intellectual culture
with all its stable and materially established universal patterns,
and
the real world as it exists outside and apart 
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience".


Steve comments:
This is a huge statement by EVI: he is defining 
"the main problem of philosophy."  He is 
suggesting that the main historical division of 
philosophy between idealism and materialism, 
emphasized so much by Marx and Engels, revolves 
around a different kind of boundary than is 
usually assumed.  The usual boundary is between 
that which is "inside" and "outside" individual 
consciousness.  EVI polemicizes again and again 
against using this division in this 
essay.  Instead, EVI proposes a different 
boundary.  It is where EVI places this 
alternative boundary that is the source of debate.


I believe, although his formulations are less 
than transparent, that EVI is delimiting the 
fundamental difference as that between the ideal 
- "the world of collectively acknowledged 
notions" - and the "real world as it exists outside and apart" from the ideal.



[Victor 6/22:]
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the 
"whole socially organised world of intellectual culture"
and the "real world as it exists outside and 
apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience."

can only be based on the distinction between
the socially learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe
and
the concepts formulated by reflecting on practical material activity,
i.e. labour activity:
the operations carried out,
the physical and material response of the 
instruments and material of production to these activities

and finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.

Steve comments:
Victor suggests the boundary EVI is speaking of 
is revealed in the following distinction: between 
the ideas/concepts of the tribe - and reflections 
on practical/labor activity.  Simplifying even 
more what I believe Victor is suggesting, he 
appears to place the essential boundary between 
the ideal, on one hand, and reflections on activity, on the other.


My opinion - and of course, Victor's 
interpretation of his own words takes precedence 
over any opinions I may express - is that 
Victor's distinction does not capture the point 
EVI was making.  In fact, as I see it, Victor's 
formulation quite dramatically loses the very 
distinction between the ideal and the "real world 
as it e

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

CB,
Good points.  The one concerning the development of language as a instrument 
of reproduction is particularly interesting.  I've been playing around with 
the idea of a dialectical prehistory/history of information systems as the 
development of reproductive systems (starting with the highly abstract 
systems of subcellular organic reproduction to the very very concrete forms 
of learned human communication systems).  Maybe some day.


You are of course correct all human learning is always thoroughly saturated 
with talk and language.

BUT,
1. We tend to exaggerate the importance of linguistic communication or at 
least the importance of developed language in linguistic communication.[Noam 
Chomsky is the paragon of this.  He's so impressed by the size and 
complexity of the syntactic analytical system he developed to explain the 
formation of well-formed sentences that he despairs of men's ability to 
learn and use it].


Vygotsky among many others, especially novelists and playwrights, have noted 
just how little a vocabulary (much less syntax) is needed to communicate 
complex information.  Personally I've had quite a few fairly rich 
conversations consisting almost entirely of the F and S words.  Looking over 
some of the recordings made by discourse analysts like Potter and Antaki it 
appears in many cases that in elaborating of the language tool man has 
developed an A Bomb to crack a walnut.


Then too, much practical learning cannot really be carried out by verbal 
description.  For Ethiopian farmers one of the greatest hurdles for learning 
to use the computer  was simply to learn how to use the mouse and keyboard. 
The physical activity, that is, the logic they picked up right away. It was 
almost impossible to describe to them just how hard to hit the keys or how 
far to jiggle the mouse.  The best tool was demonstration, often with the 
instructor guiding the student's hand with his own.  I've also taught 
sketching and while there are a good many interesting tricks for teaching 
people how to see and translate what they see into marks on paper and so on, 
almost none are verbal.


It seems to me that our theories of language use are not nearly concrete 
enough to accurately explain many features of actual language use and its 
role in social life.


2. When we compare human information transmission systems with those of 
other life forms, we tend to use our own highly developed communication 
systems as the typical human system.  It isn't really very typical at all. 
In the some 200,000 years of H. Sapiens's existence on the planet, his 
technological array only began to show serious signs of surpassing that of 
his close relatives about 60,000 years ago.  Settled human life begins maybe 
10,000 years ago while writing is no older than about 5,000 years ago. 
Almost all the fancy equipment we now use to communicate with and by is less 
than 100 years of age.  But this is not all. The repertory of human 
artefacts remains disappointingly small (for most men) until up to nearly 
modern times.  The probability is that men had much less to say to each 
other than we are accustomed to and much of what they had to communicate 
could better (see above) by means other than language.


The point is that the development of modern human information systems and 
the rich collection of subjects of interest is the product of the 
dialectical development of human culture from very simple origins to its 
present developed state.  It is quite likely that we would find that the 
great gulf of language and culture that separates men from the more 
developed animals was far less evident for the first 120,000 years of human 
development and only now appears to be absolutely insurmountable.

Oudeyis



- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 20:03
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Victor :

CB,
Continued from last message.

First, let's not forget that a lot of human learning is "human see human
do."  And some of the things we learn this way are as complex as 
ant-fishing
with a straw.[it's actually quite a complicated affair to get it just 
right.

I've tried
it though I drew a line at eating the ants.]



CB: Yes, but, the human see-do learning is always thoroughly saturated 
with

talk and language. Imagine trying to teach all the human see-do stuff
restricted to pantomime.  It is not close. Symbols allow the "imitation" 
of

the actions of dead people; "imitation" without direct observation.

^^^


According to Vygotsky, a truly creative relation to cultural conventions
(the development of conceptual speech) is a rather late stage in the
development of the child.


CB: Most of the symbols are preexisting to anyone individual. The
"creativity" is not the critical issue, rather the conventionality is, or
the esta

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

I've not had time to keep up with your ongoing debate on Ilyenkov.  Since 
you are apparently preparing something for publication, I hope you will 
apprise us of the finished product.  This line of enquiry, it seems to me, 
is much more important than most philosophical projects being undertaken.


I have yet to address our last round on science as labor.  I'll have to 
review the last few posts so that I can state my misgivings more 
clearly.  I seem to be suffering from the aftereffects of the Stalinist 
equation of science with production.


At 09:03 AM 6/27/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Steve and Ralph,
Thanks for all the help.
Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :BakhurstVictor

[Victor]

CB,
Continued from last message.

First, let's not forget that a lot of human learning is "human see human 
do."  And some of the things we learn this way are as complex as ant-fishing 
with a straw.
[it's actually quite a complicated affair to get it just right.  I've tried 
it though I drew a line at eating the ants.]
According to Vygotsky, a truly creative relation to cultural conventions 
(the development of conceptual speech) is a rather late stage in the 
development of the child.


Second, Ilyenkov sees the origins of ideality in social labour, i.e. direct 
cooperation, rather than in tool using.  If I were to search for examples of 
pre-human ideality I would look for collective work activity rather than 
tool use.  A number of pre-human predators; female lions and house cats, 
canines of all sorts, and chimpanzee males engage in cooperative chase and 
ambush of game (and in the case of chimpanzees of each other).  Chase and 
ambush of living game is a complex and very fluid activity requiring 
considerable coordination between participants if it's to succeed, and could 
conceivably be a basis for the establishment of ideal forms (rules or 
principles of action designed to collectively achieve communal goals). It's 
also possible that collective care and nursing of young characteristic of 
prides of lionesses and of house cats, most canines and many of the primates 
might also qualify here.   Like pre-human toolmaking and use these primitive 
ideals would be very abstract and particular to certain kinds of activities 
and never reach the concreteness and universality of human ideality.

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 17:08
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :BakhurstVictor



Victor
> 
> CB: Here we see why the transgenerational transmission of how to
make and use tools is the key type of social connection defining humans.
There are studies showing that chimps , on their own , int the wild, make
and use  tools, such as sticks to dig in ant hills. But they don't pass on
to the next generation how to do it.

But they do or at least the women do:

-clip-


Actually, we've known for a long time that social groups of monkeys
and apes develop special cultural traits that are intergenerational for 
the
group and distinctive from those of other groups.  This was first noticed 
by

Japanese researchers into the behaviour of different groups of Japanese
Macaques.
Some groups wash their food others don't, some bath in the hot
spring waters while others don't enter the water at all and so on.  Since
then animal ethologists in Africa and Asia have been mapping the "cultural
traditions" of our anthropoid brothers.

Clearly, monkeys and apes do have "cultural traditions" that are
passed between generations, but it is much less sure that these traditions
are anything more than particular features of an otherwise "non-cultural"
array of practices.  What distinguishes human culture from that of other
creatures is its universality, i.e. man's absolute dependence on culture 
to

learn how to behave at all.


^
CB: Yes, however, what apes and monkeys have is "monkey see monkey do"
traditions, i.e. imitation. They don't have culture, because they don't 
have
symbolling or _ideality_ .  They are limited in what can be passed on to 
new

generations by what can be taught through imitation. The distinguishing
characteristic of humans is ideality which allows a qualitatively 
different

passage of experiences between generations.

^^




In truth, we should expect that ideality (and tool making) would
appear
historically, first, as a particularity, an abstracted individual
feature of
the universal life activity that preceeded it, rather than as a
full-blown
universal as it is for modern humans.  In principle, the development
of a
universal such as social labour, tool making and commodity
production should
first appear as an individual case, become a particular class of
phenomena
as it expands beyond the individual case (as it does for learned
termite
fishing among chimpanzees) and only become a universal when it
becomes the
way things are done by everyone.

> Ideality is necessary for this transgenerational transmission to
become as
> efficient and extensive as it has among humans.
>
> Thus , "imagination" ( ideality) , planning, focus for days,
weeks, years
> at
> a time on the same goal and purpose, all based on ideality and
> imagination,
> are the distinguishing characteristics of human labor, not tool
use.
>
> On the other hand, the individual hunter or laborer's imagination
and
> ideality contains so much information because many others are able
to
> "put"
> info into the "system" or ideological system or cultural tradition
that
> makes that imagination.
>
> Notice for example, that the significance of upright posture 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

CB,
Sorry for the delay.
Getting through a real tough passage in my rewrite on Ilyenkov.

No argument with you concerning the tool using activities of non- and 
proto-human life forms.  I would distinguish between their toolmaking and 
that of men , as I understand you do, by the universal relevance of tool 
making and using for all human life activity.  All human activity is 
instrumentally enhanced if not enabled.


While I agree that ideality is the essence of tradition, it appears to me 
that primitive and particularistic manifestations of ideality precede its 
universality in human social activity.

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 16:49
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst






Victor:


I'm not sure of it either.

However, it appears to me that we can distinguish social labour, direct
cooperation, from characteristically human labour, that is social labour
that is special since it involves the production and use of tools for
realization of material social goals.  This distinction allows us to talk
about the simplest and most abstract kinds of ideality as being pre or
proto-human.  It also appears to me that labour has to be social before it
can be instrumental, i.e. involve the development of social practices of
making and use of tools.

^^^
CB: If I might argue with you comradely here. I would say that though
toolmaking and use are famously characterized as uniquely human, there are
examples of chimps and other animals using tools. The qualitative aspect 
of
instrumental action is not unique to humans.  Humans are unique in the 
scale

and complexity of their toolmaking and use, which is possible because
ideality allows a toolmaking _tradition_ to develop.

^^^

Of course once men make and use tools they expand their labour practice 
and
thereby the inventory of objectified activities embodied in idealities, 
and

thereby make culture a universal of human life activity


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Steve and Ralph,
Thanks for all the help.
Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 21:31
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


This 6/26 post by Victor seems like a good
stopping place for the moment - I need to put our
discussion about ideality aside for just a little
while to tend to other projects, but I am
certainly interested.  I will follow up.  Victor
is perfectly correct, I must show what I claim.

BTW, for anyone trying to follow this discussion,
two different essays by Ilyenkov are quoted in
Victor's post, both available on the internet at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/index.htm

The main essay Victor and I have been debating interpretations of is:
The Concept of the Ideal
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

This essay appeared in the book Problems of
Dialectical Materialism; Progress Publishers,
1977 and was scanned by Andy Blunden.  The
numbering both Victor and I have been using
refers to the sequence of 142 paragraphs in that
essay.  In Victor's 6/26 post, he quotes from paragraphs 49, 50 and 51.

I have an important side point to bring up about
this essay.  In my scrutiny of this on-line
version, the only version I have, I believe there
are some scanning errors and possibly some
original translation errors to contend
with.  There is also some reason to wonder if the
original Russian that the translation was based
on may also contain editorial errors.  In other
words, this version must be read with caution,
and if something does not make sense, it may not
be Ilyenkov's original writing.  I bring this up
because there are a handful of places in the
essay where publishing errors like these seem to
contribute to confusion over what Ilyenkov was really saying.

In his 6/26 post Victor also quotes Ilyenkov
using paragraph numbers  57, 58, 59,
60.  However, these are from a different essay -
chapter 8 in DIALECTICAL LOGIC (1974), Part Two ­
Problems of the Marxist-Leninist Theory of Dialectics
8: The Materialist Conception of Thought as the Subject Matter of Logic
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

The scanned book is Dialectical Logic, Essays on
its History and Theory; Progress Publishers,
1977; English translation 1977 by H. Campbell
Creighton; Transcribed: Andy Blunden; HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.

BTW, these paragraphs (found on pages 285-288)
are from the same essay Victor mentioned on 5/26
and I quoted from on 5/30, and which were
discussed a little on this list.  The question of
the ideal is a major topic of this essay and I
agree with Victor that it should be discussed in
conjunction with the Concept of the Ideal essay
when we take this topic up again.

The philosophical work we are doing here is to
try to untangle the ideal and the material,
closely studying Ilyenkov's work on this complex
question in doing so.  In the process, it seems
we should also seek to keep untangled which
citation by our philosopher-teacher we are talking about.

:-))
Best,
~ Steve




___
At 07:32 PM 6/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis (Victor) wrote:


- Original Message - From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:40
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.

The quote below is a good example of where I think Victor gets Ilyenkov 
wrong 180 degrees.  In the general section of Ilyenkov's 1977 essay "The 
Concept of the Ideal" that Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is 
making just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.


Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53:  It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the 
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are 
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available 
language of natural science, the "language of science" with its 
established and generally understood "meanings". It is this, 
specifically, which forms the basis of the arguments of logical 
positivism, which quite consciously identifies "nature" with the 
"language" in which people talk and write about nature.


Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" 
to everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is 
hardly ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively 
acknowledg

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

This 6/26 post by Victor seems like a good 
stopping place for the moment - I need to put our 
discussion about ideality aside for just a little 
while to tend to other projects, but I am 
certainly interested.  I will follow up.  Victor 
is perfectly correct, I must show what I claim.


BTW, for anyone trying to follow this discussion, 
two different essays by Ilyenkov are quoted in 
Victor's post, both available on the internet at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/index.htm

The main essay Victor and I have been debating interpretations of is:
The Concept of the Ideal
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

This essay appeared in the book Problems of 
Dialectical Materialism; Progress Publishers, 
1977 and was scanned by Andy Blunden.  The 
numbering both Victor and I have been using 
refers to the sequence of 142 paragraphs in that 
essay.  In Victor's 6/26 post, he quotes from paragraphs 49, 50 and 51.


I have an important side point to bring up about 
this essay.  In my scrutiny of this on-line 
version, the only version I have, I believe there 
are some scanning errors and possibly some 
original translation errors to contend 
with.  There is also some reason to wonder if the 
original Russian that the translation was based 
on may also contain editorial errors.  In other 
words, this version must be read with caution, 
and if something does not make sense, it may not 
be Ilyenkov's original writing.  I bring this up 
because there are a handful of places in the 
essay where publishing errors like these seem to 
contribute to confusion over what Ilyenkov was really saying.


In his 6/26 post Victor also quotes Ilyenkov 
using paragraph numbers  57, 58, 59, 
60.  However, these are from a different essay - 
chapter 8 in DIALECTICAL LOGIC (1974), Part Two ­ 
Problems of the Marxist-Leninist Theory of Dialectics

8: The Materialist Conception of Thought as the Subject Matter of Logic
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

The scanned book is Dialectical Logic, Essays on 
its History and Theory; Progress Publishers, 
1977; English translation 1977 by H. Campbell 
Creighton; Transcribed: Andy Blunden; HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.


BTW, these paragraphs (found on pages 285-288) 
are from the same essay Victor mentioned on 5/26 
and I quoted from on 5/30, and which were 
discussed a little on this list.  The question of 
the ideal is a major topic of this essay and I 
agree with Victor that it should be discussed in 
conjunction with the Concept of the Ideal essay 
when we take this topic up again.


The philosophical work we are doing here is to 
try to untangle the ideal and the material, 
closely studying Ilyenkov's work on this complex 
question in doing so.  In the process, it seems 
we should also seek to keep untangled which 
citation by our philosopher-teacher we are talking about.


:-))
Best,
~ Steve




___
At 07:32 PM 6/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis (Victor) wrote:


- Original Message - From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical 
issues raised by Karl Marx and thethinkers he 
inspired" 

Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:40
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.

The quote below is a good example of where I 
think Victor gets Ilyenkov wrong 180 
degrees.  In the general section of Ilyenkov's 
1977 essay "The Concept of the Ideal" that 
Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is 
making just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.


Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53:  It is this fact, 
incidentally, that explains the persistent 
survival of such "semantic substitutions"; 
indeed, when we are talking about nature, we 
are obliged to make use of the available 
language of natural science, the "language of 
science" with its established and generally 
understood "meanings". It is this, 
specifically, which forms the basis of the 
arguments of logical positivism, which quite 
consciously identifies "nature" with the 
"language" in which people talk and write about nature.


Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that 
the main difficulty and, therefore, the main 
problem of philosophy is not to distinguish 
and counterpose everything that is "in the 
consciousness of the individual" to everything 
that is outside this individual consciousness 
(this is hardly ever difficult to do), but to 
delimit the world of collectively acknowledged 
notions, that is, the whole socially organised 
world of intellectual culture with all its 
stable and materially established universal 
patterns, and the real world as it exists 
outside and apart from its expression in these 
socially legitimised forms of "experience&quo

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:40
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.

The quote below is a good example of where I think Victor gets Ilyenkov 
wrong 180 degrees.  In the general section of Ilyenkov's 1977 essay "The 
Concept of the Ideal" that Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is 
making just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.


Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53:  It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the 
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are 
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available language 
of natural science, the "language of science" with its established and 
generally understood "meanings". It is this, specifically, which forms the 
basis of the arguments of logical positivism, which quite consciously 
identifies "nature" with the "language" in which people talk and write 
about nature.


Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to 
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly 
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively 
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of 
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established 
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from 
its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience". 
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)



Victor comments:
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised 
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside 
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of 
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially 
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts 
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour 
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response 
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and 
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


Victor says the delimitation that Ilyenkov makes (I am adding ...'s to 
make Victor's complex sentence a little more readable) "can only be based 
on the distinction"  "between the socially learned and confirmed 
concepts or ideas of the tribe" ... and  ... "the concepts formulated by 
reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the 
operations carried out, the physical and material response of the 
instruments and material of production to these activities and finally the 
effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes."


But this is decidedly *not* the distinction Ilyenkov makes.

The essential discussion we are having here is over this question: where, 
precisely, is the boundary between ideality and materiality?


Victor draws the boundary between socially learned concepts, on one hand, 
and conceptualizing practical activity/carrying out practical activity/the 
consequences of practical activity - on the other.


Ilyenkov draws a very different distinction.  Ilyenkov is investigating 
the distinction - and he refers to this as the "main problem of 
philosophy" - between the "whole socially organised world of intellectual 
culture" and "the real world as it exists outside and apart from" this.


I believe I can draw on Ilyenkov, and: a) show where Ilyenkov makes his 
distinction between the ideal and the real and b) demonstrate that Victor 
is committing the very idealist error that Ilyenkov criticizes Hegel and 
Bogdanov for making.  In the essay "The Concept of the Ideal," my 
annotations offer the subtitles "Hegel's Concept of the Ideal" to 
paragraphs 45-49, "The Secret Twist of Idealism" to paragraphs 50-53, and 
"The Distinction Between the Ideal and the Real" to paragraphs 54-57. 
Interestingly, my reading of Victor's writings on the question of the 
ideal, such as in the quote above, is that his concept of the ideal is 
much closer to Hegel's than Ilyenkov's or Marx's, he is actually 
performing the same kind of "secret twist of idealism" that Ilyenkov 
attributes to Hegel and others, and Victor's distinction or boundary 
between the ideal and the real is not consistent with Ilyenkov's.


It'

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

This is going to take a little time, you raised some heavy questions here.
Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 17:17
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



At 02:12 PM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Hegel regards objectification as simply the alienation of spirit in the
object.  The ideal itself is the alienated spirit that has become a
universal through the mediation of language.  True, I've not addressed the
problem of whether Hegel regarded labour activity (transformation of the
ideal as consciousness joined with language forms by its expression in
labour activity) but if I recall correctly he does not really concern
himself with this problem. The question of the effect, if any, of labour
activity on the ideal certainly does not appear in the Logic. Marx in his
1844 Critique of Hegelian Philosophy takes Hegel to task for regarding the
nature that becomes the subject of logos as the abstracted nature of
theory rather than the material nature external to intellect.  It is
however an interesting question, and I would appreciate any additional
information on this.  Meanwhile I'll do some investigation on my own.


I can't help you answer my question, but it _is_ the question (Hegel's
specific view of labor activity) which you did not clearly address in your
exposition.


Hegel wrote quite a bit on labour, but it appears that most of his
commentary on the subject is in regards to its social rather than
epistemological role.  The master-slave stuff from the Phenomenology and his
discourses on the Korporations and such in his Philosophy of Right.  See
Ashton's interesting discussion on the subject in the MIA:
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/ashton.htm

Hegel's discussion of the relation of the ideal to life is about as close as
one can get to a Hegelian epistemology of the relation of
the ideal to the practical:

Interestingly, but expectedly, the resemblances and differences between
Hegel and Marx's concepts of the practical are exactly paralleled in those 
of

their respective concepts of the ideal.  Ilyenkov describes Marx as adopting
the meaning or essence of Hegel's ideal  but revising Hegel's
concept of ideality:

61.  In Capital Marx quite consciously uses the term "ideal" in this formal
meaning that it was given by Hegel, and not in the sense in which it was
used by the whole pre-Hegelian tradition, including Kant, although the
philosophical-theoretical interpretation of the range of phenomena which in
both cases is similarly designated "ideal" is diametrically opposed to its
Hegelian interpretation. The meaning of the term "ideal" in Marx and Hegel
is the same, but the concepts, i.e., the ways of understanding this "same"
meaning are profoundly different. After all, the word "concept" in
dialectically interpreted logic is a synonym for understanding of the
essence of the matter, the essence of phenomena which are only outlined by a
given term; it is by no means a synonym for "the meaning of the term", which
may be formally interpreted as the sum-total of "attributes" of the
phenomena to which the term is applied." Concept of the Ideal 1977)

Hegel describes the ideal as the reification of human activity, i.e. the
embodiment of activity - "pure activity", "pure form-creating activity"in
the form of a thing.  Hegel's explanation of the relation of activity to its
objective form is, of course, his theory of activities as a function
conceptualised (objective) social ideas that describe and circumscribe
ethical social life.  To explain how concepts become material activity Hegel
describes the production of activity as the consequences of the operations
of consciousness and will. Consciousness and will are the "transcendental"
pattern of the psyche and the will that realises the ideal form, the ideal
form being the law that guides man's consciousness and will, as the
objectively compulsory pattern of consciously willed activity.

While Marx adopts the essence of the Hegelian ideal as the embodiment or
reification of activity as social practice, he regards the ideal as a
product of activity rather than as its law and guide.  Take for example the
ideal concept of Value: " Value-form is understood in Capital precisely as
the reified form (represented as, or "representing", the thing, the
relationship of things) of social human life activity. Directly it does
present itself to us as the "physically palpable" embodiment of something
"other", but this "other" cannot be some physically palpable matter... in
the sphere of economic activity this substance was, naturally, decoded as
labour, as man's physical labour transforming the physical body of nature,
while "valu

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

I am responding to a 6/22/2005 post from Victor, which I quote from.

The quote below is a good example of where I think Victor gets Ilyenkov 
wrong 180 degrees.  In the general section of Ilyenkov's 1977 essay "The 
Concept of the Ideal" that Victor quotes from, I believe Ilyenkov is making 
just the opposite point that Victor attributes to him.


Victor quotes Ilyenkov:
"Paragraph 53:  It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the 
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are 
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available language 
of natural science, the "language of science" with its established and 
generally understood "meanings". It is this, specifically, which forms the 
basis of the arguments of logical positivism, which quite consciously 
identifies "nature" with the "language" in which people talk and write 
about nature.


Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to 
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly 
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively 
acknowledged notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of 
intellectual culture with all its stable and materially established 
universal patterns, and the real world as it exists outside and apart from 
its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience". 
(Ilyenkov The Concept of the Ideal 1977)



Victor comments:
The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised 
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside 
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of 
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially 
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts 
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour 
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response 
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and 
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


Victor says the delimitation that Ilyenkov makes (I am adding ...'s to make 
Victor's complex sentence a little more readable) "can only be based on the 
distinction"  "between the socially learned and confirmed concepts or 
ideas of the tribe" ... and  ... "the concepts formulated by reflecting on 
practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the operations carried 
out, the physical and material response of the instruments and material of 
production to these activities and finally the effectivity of the 
operations relative to their purposes."


But this is decidedly *not* the distinction Ilyenkov makes.

The essential discussion we are having here is over this question: where, 
precisely, is the boundary between ideality and materiality?


Victor draws the boundary between socially learned concepts, on one hand, 
and conceptualizing practical activity/carrying out practical activity/the 
consequences of practical activity - on the other.


Ilyenkov draws a very different distinction.  Ilyenkov is investigating the 
distinction - and he refers to this as the "main problem of philosophy" - 
between the "whole socially organised world of intellectual culture" and 
"the real world as it exists outside and apart from" this.


I believe I can draw on Ilyenkov, and: a) show where Ilyenkov makes his 
distinction between the ideal and the real and b) demonstrate that Victor 
is committing the very idealist error that Ilyenkov criticizes Hegel and 
Bogdanov for making.  In the essay "The Concept of the Ideal," my 
annotations offer the subtitles "Hegel's Concept of the Ideal" to 
paragraphs 45-49, "The Secret Twist of Idealism" to paragraphs 50-53, and 
"The Distinction Between the Ideal and the Real" to paragraphs 
54-57.  Interestingly, my reading of Victor's writings on the question of 
the ideal, such as in the quote above, is that his concept of the ideal is 
much closer to Hegel's than Ilyenkov's or Marx's, he is actually performing 
the same kind of "secret twist of idealism" that Ilyenkov attributes to 
Hegel and others, and Victor's distinction or boundary between the ideal 
and the real is not consistent with Ilyenkov's.


None of my opinions or claims, of course, negate Victor's good advice and 
inspiration to me to study and make copious notes about the other books 
Ilyenkov has in English, as well as study relevant writings by Marx, Lenin, 
and Hegel.  Nor do my philosophically sharp criticisms of what I perceive 
as erroneous interpretations by Victor of Ilyenkov's theory of the ideal 
take away from the respect and admiration I have for Victor's many 
intellectual accomplishments, which I have been privileged to learn much 
from in various internet venues.  In all worthwhile discus

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :BakhurstVictor

[Victor]

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 19:01
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :BakhurstVictor





Victor

The second comment is based on Marx's discussion of the role of direct
cooperation in the initial development of social labour. See Economic
Manuscripts 1861-63 Section 3 Relative Surplus Value Notebook IV
Cooperation. Marx discussion is interesting because his discussion of 
crude

direct cooperation could apply to intra-genus  cooperation between
non-toolmaking and using thinking and learning creatures such as wolves,
apes, and lionesses just as well as to men.  Could this serve as an 
argument


for the primacy of direct social cooperation as a condition for the
development of tool making and using?

Oudeyis


CB: Here we see why the transgenerational transmission of how to make and
use tools is the key type of social connection defining humans. There are
studies showing that chimps , on their own , int the wild, make and use
tools, such as sticks to dig in ant hills.

But they don't pass on to the next generation how to do it.



But they do or at least the women do:
NYT Science Desk June 14, 2005, Tuesday

FINDINGS; She's Studying. He's Playing.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ (NYT) 413 words
Late Edition - Final , Section F , Page 1 , Column 1

DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 413 WORDS - Little girls watch and learn; little boys
goof off and horse ... At least this seems to be the case with chimpanzees,
according to new research. ...
Chimpanzees like to snack on termites, and youngsters learn to fish for them
by poking long leaf spines and other such...



Actually, we've known for a long time that social groups of monkeys and apes
develop special cultural traits that are intergenerational for the group and
distinctive from those of other groups.  This was first noticed by Japanese
researchers into the behaviour of different groups of Japanese Macaques.
Some groups wash their food others don't, some bath in the hot spring waters
while others don't enter the water at all and so on.  Since then animal
ethologists in Africa and Asia have been mapping the "cultural traditions"
of our anthropoid brothers.

Clearly, monkeys and apes do have "cultural traditions" that are passed
between generations, but it is much less sure that these traditions are
anything more than particular features of an otherwise "non-cultural" array
of practices.  What distinguishes human culture from that of other creatures
is its universality, i.e. man's absolute dependence on culture to learn how
to behave at all.

In truth, we should expect that ideality (and tool making) would appear
historically, first, as a particularity, an abstracted individual feature of
the universal life activity that preceeded it, rather than as a full-blown
universal as it is for modern humans.  In principle, the development of a
universal such as social labour, tool making and commodity production should
first appear as an individual case, become a particular class of phenomena
as it expands beyond the individual case (as it does for learned termite
fishing among chimpanzees) and only become a universal when it becomes the
way things are done by everyone.


Ideality is necessary for this transgenerational transmission to become as
efficient and extensive as it has among humans.

Thus , "imagination" ( ideality) , planning, focus for days, weeks, years 
at
a time on the same goal and purpose, all based on ideality and 
imagination,

are the distinguishing characteristics of human labor, not tool use.

On the other hand, the individual hunter or laborer's imagination and
ideality contains so much information because many others are able to 
"put"

info into the "system" or ideological system or cultural tradition that
makes that imagination.

Notice for example, that the significance of upright posture for hunting 
is
not only , as Engels refers to, the freeing of the hands for tool and 
weapon
making and use. Ancient humans defeated their prey by long distance 
running.

Upright posture slowed humans down so that in a short sprint, they didn't
catch the faster prey, but they would trek the prey down with long 
distance

running. This requires longer focus of attention, planning than quick
instinctive attacks. The legs are as significant as the hands in the
original human labors.

The cooperation among those in the living generation, among the living, is
also potentially enhanced by ideality.

Of course, after the rise of class exploitative society, ideality becomes
the basis for more anti-cooperation among humans than among chimps. 
Ideality

turns into its opposite with the rise of class divided society. In
particular, predominantly physical labor is

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 17:38
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Victor:
Ilyenkov (and I suggest Marx as well) argue that the ideal originates as a
tool for regulation of social life and only later is appropriated 
(hijacked

may be too strong a word) to the purposes of describing material reality
(labour activity).


> CB: I'm not so sure about this. At the origin of the ideal, symboling, 
> the

"social" and social labor are all kind of one big thing together. There
isn't the separation between "social life" and "labour activity" implied
above. The origin of humanly unique labor is in its sociality. The leap in
productivity of human labor is due precisely to its increased sociality. 
The

ideal thrives at its origin in human society _because_ it allows expansion
of the sociality or socialness exponentially and qualitatively.


I'm not sure of it either.

However, it appears to me that we can distinguish social labour, direct 
cooperation, from characteristically human labour, that is social labour 
that is special since it involves the production and use of tools for 
realization of material social goals.  This distinction allows us to talk 
about the simplest and most abstract kinds of ideality as being pre or 
proto-human.  It also appears to me that labour has to be social before it 
can be instrumental, i.e. involve the development of social practices of 
making and use of tools.


Of course once men make and use tools they expand their labour practice and 
thereby the inventory of objectified activities embodied in idealities, and 
thereby make culture a universal of human life activity.



The ideal doesn't just regulate social life,though it does that. The idea
allows expansion of the amount and qualitity of social connections through
expanded communication.

The word "communication" is perfect here. The ideal allows creation of the
original communes.


Agreed.
Oudeyis

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 17:45
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

This is pure Ilyenkov.  He uses this argument to explain how
ethical/cultural descriptions are given the status of statements on
Nature. For example a statement that nature provides man with a natural
calendar in the yearly solar and lunar cycles, a natural compass in the
North star and a clock in the revolution of the zodiac and the daily
changes of position of the sun are all pseudo-scientific statements about
nature that accord to humanly created instruments the status of natural
phenomena.  On the one hand they accord to nature the tool-making faculty
of man and on the other anthropomorphize nature imparting to it the
purposes of men.


I have a vague idea of what you're getting at, but the logic of this
argument escapes me.  Calendars, compasses, and the movements of heavenly
bodies as time markers are human conceptual or material artifacts built up
on objective realities.  The meaning of the word 'natural' in your
sentence above is not sufficiently specific to enable determination as to
whether this is anthropomorphizing nature.  None of these assertions would
be considered scientific statements by anyone.  They are metaphorical
expressions.  It well may be 'natural' for us to orient ourselves to
natural phenomena in this way, even though 'nature' didn't intend for us
to do this.



The logic of the argument:

1. Calendars, compasses, and clocks are human idealities (material 
representations of concepts) that objectify the active division of duration
into hierarchies of commensurable units. The function of these concepts and 
the material forms embodying them is as a means for imaging and transmitting 
information about the timing, sequence, and duration of activities essential 
for coordinating  objective collaborative operations.


2. Regular celestial phenomena used to indicate regular units of time are 
not self-evident natural phenomena.  All represent selection of some
objective celestial phenomena over others because of the appropriateness of 
their regular manifestations to the particular social requirements to be 
fulfilled by their use.  As with the use of gold as a universal commodity of 
trade, the determination of the utility of a celestial regularity is a
function of the fitness of its duration as useful units for temporal 
organization of social activity.  The orientation of human time measuring 
practice to regular natural occurrences is natural is only true to the 
extent that all human social practice has its ultimate origins in pre or 
proto-intellectual conditions.


3.The concept of  clock, compass, or calendar as having their origins in 
nature were not invented by me.  They are common usage and reflect the 
normal human practice of treating ideality as identical to material reality:
"Ideality" in general is in the historically formed language of philosophy a 
characteristic of the materially established (objectivised, materialised, 
reified) images of human social culture, that is, the historically formed 
modes of human social life, which confront the individual possessing 
consciousness and will as a special "supernatural" objective reality, as a 
special object comparable with material reality and situated on one and the 
same spatial plane (and hence often identified with it)." (Ilyenkov 1977 
Concept of the Ideal, paragraph 42)
Marx's discussion of the common interpretation of reified social practice as 
natural phenomena may be found in Capital, Chapter 1, Section 4, "The 
Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof"


4. I'm not familiar enough with the relevant fields to discuss whether the 
transmutation of reified social practices of measuring duration are or are 
not incorporated into scientific theory, but I have no problem arguing that 
the identification of reified social productive practice with natural 
(material) reality forms a basis for most modern economic theory starting 
with game theory and extending into virtually every nook and cranny of this 
supposedly scientific field.



The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


I&

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

At 11:18 AM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
This is pure Ilyenkov.  He uses this argument to explain how 
ethical/cultural descriptions are given the status of statements on 
Nature. For example a statement that nature provides man with a natural 
calendar in the yearly solar and lunar cycles, a natural compass in the 
North star and a clock in the revolution of the zodiac and the daily 
changes of position of the sun are all pseudo-scientific statements about 
nature that accord to humanly created instruments the status of natural 
phenomena.  On the one hand they accord to nature the tool-making faculty 
of man and on the other anthropomorphize nature imparting to it the 
purposes of men.


I have a vague idea of what you're getting at, but the logic of this 
argument escapes me.  Calendars, compasses, and the movements of heavenly 
bodies as time markers are human conceptual or material artifacts built up 
on objective realities.  The meaning of the word 'natural' in your sentence 
above is not sufficiently specific to enable determination as to whether 
this is anthropomorphizing nature.  None of these assertions would be 
considered scientific statements by anyone.  They are metaphorical 
expressions.  It well may be 'natural' for us ot orient ourselves to 
natural phenomena in this way, even though 'nature' didn't intend for us to 
do this.


The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised 
world of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside 
and apart from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of 
"experience." can only be based on the distinction between the socially 
learned and confirmed concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts 
formulated by reflecting on practical material activity, i.e. labour 
activity: the operations carried out, the physical and material response 
of the instruments and material of production to these activities and 
finally the effectivity of the operations relative to their purposes.


I'm having trouble understanding this sentence.  Furthermore, this constant 
use of phrases such as 'labor activity', 'production',  'practical material 
activity' unfortunately fail to characterize the nature of scientific 
research and theory construction.


 "the representation of scientific knowledge involves "hijacking" the 
mode of representation of ethos and using it to represent theories 
regarding the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization 
of ideas through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the 
work at hand."
Let's put it this way.  When we produce scientific theory the rational 
process for reflecting upon labour activity, i.e. the dialectical process 
and the tools we use to describe the outcomes of thought to others, i.e. 
language forms are exactly the same used by the idealist philosopher in 
his investigation and proclaimations concerning the ethical life and by 
the theologian in his construction and revelation of the true nature of 
god. The essential difference is in the subject of our rational activity 
and, social expression.


Ilyenkov (and I suggest Marx as well) argue that the ideal originates as a 
tool for regulation of social life and only later is appropriated 
(hijacked may be too strong a word) to the purposes of describing material 
reality (labour activity).


Does that help?


No.  To me this is nonsense.  I have an especial dislike for this sentence:

Ilyenkov (and I suggest Marx as well) argue that the ideal originates as a 
tool for regulation of social life and only later is appropriated 
(hijacked may be too strong a word) to the purposes of describing material 
reality (labour activity).




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

At 02:12 PM 6/22/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Hegel regards objectification as simply the alienation of spirit in the 
object.  The ideal itself is the alienated spirit that has become a 
universal through the mediation of language.  True, I've not addressed the 
problem of whether Hegel regarded labour activity (transformation of the 
ideal as consciousness joined with language forms by its expression in 
labour activity) but if I recall correctly he does not really concern 
himself with this problem. The question of the effect, if any, of labour 
activity on the ideal certainly does not appear in the Logic. Marx in his 
1844 Critique of Hegelian Philosophy takes Hegel to task for regarding the 
nature that becomes the subject of logos as the abstracted nature of 
theory rather than the material nature external to intellect.  It is 
however an interesting question, and I would appreciate any additional 
information on this.  Meanwhile I'll do some investigation on my own.


I can't help you answer my question, but it _is_ the question (Hegel's 
specific view of labor activity) which you did not clearly address in your 
exposition.


In respect to the relation between reason and nature for sure (see above). 
While it is true that the laws and principles that govern material 
practice directed towards the realization of the objectives of labour 
activity are abstract theoretical representations they or at least their 
application are subject to the test of nature which is not dependent 
solely on human knowledge but also involves phenomena that is entirely 
indifferent to the intellectual creations of men.


How does this differ from Hegel's view?  Hegel as an inheritor of idealist 
tradition would not express himself this way, but presumably he has a way 
of accounting for the testing of our subjective notions about nature.


Thus theory, even natural science theory, can never precisely describe 
actual labour activity if only because the natural conditions confronting 
labour are in a constant state of change. Thus the natural laws or 
application of natural laws incorporated into the design of any given 
labour activity will never be exactly  those encountered in the course of 
actual labour activity.


This is what bugs me about your conception of scientific theory, which is 
not about labor activity.  I don't like this way of expressing things.


 This, by the way, is how Lenin regards Engels theory of freedom and 
necessity in human activity.
"Secondly, Engels does not attempt to contrive "definitions" of freedom 
and necessity, the kind of scholastic definition with which the 
reactionary professors (like Avenarius) and their disciples (like 
Bogdanov) are most concerned. Engels takes the knowledge and will of man, 
on the one hand, and the necessity of nature, on the other, and instead of 
giving definitions, simply says that the necessity of nature is primary, 
and human will and mind secondary. The latter must necessarily and 
inevitably adapt themselves to the former. Engels regards this as so 
obvious that he does not waste words explaining his view. It needs the 
Russian Machians to complain of Engels' general definition of materialism 
(that nature is primary and mind secondary; remember Bogdanov's 
"perplexity" on this point!), and at the same time to regard one of the 
particular applications by Engels of this general and fundamental 
definition as "wonderful" and "remarkably apt"!


Thirdly, Engels does not doubt the existence of "blind necessity." He 
admits the existence of a necessity unknown to man. This is quite obvious 
from the passage just quoted. But how, from the standpoint of the 
Machians, can man know   of the existence of what he does not know? Is it 
not "mysticism," "metaphysics," the admission of "fetishes" and "idols," 
is it not the "Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself" to say that we know of 
the existence of an unknown necessity? Had the Machians given the matter 
any thought they could not have failed to observe the complete identity 
between Engels' argument on the knowability of the objective nature of 
things and on the transformation of "things-in-themselves" into 
"things-for-us," on the one hand, and his argument on a blind, unknown 
necessity, on the other. The development of con-sciousness in each human 
individual and the development of the collective knowledge of humanity at 
large presents us at every step with examples of the transformation of the 
unknown "thing-in-itself" into the known "thing-for-us," of the 
transformation of blind, unknown necessity, "necessity-in-itself," into 
the known "necessity-for-us." Epistemologically, there is no difference 
whatever between these two transformations, for the basic point of view in 
both cases is the same, viz., materialistic, the recognition of the 
objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external 
nature, and of the fact that this world and these laws are fully knowable 
to man but can never 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Comments on the commentary included below.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 10:25
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Comments to selected extracts below

At 01:43 PM 6/19/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Ideality like spoken language is not one thing or another, but two things, 
the objectified notion in consciousness and its material representation by 
some form of language, united as a more concrete concept, the ideal. The 
ideal cannot just be a manifestation of consciousness (Dubrovsky's 
argument) in which case it would be a purely subjective product, at best 
the internal expression of the individuality of the thinker (whatever that 
might be). Nor can it be just the symbolic representation since this after 
all is ultimately just a thing, a material object.  It is only when 
consciousness is given material form by symbolic representation and the 
material artefact is made significant by its embodiment of conscious 
reflective thought that the ideal can be said to exist.


Fascinating.

.In short, ideality is expressed in a cultural artefact through 
human labour informed by the image of the object of his labour activity. 
For an idealist such as Hegel who regards human activity as beginning and 
ending with the ideal, the outcome of human labour is a simple 
materialization of the ideal.


I can see the Hegelian view that the empirical world is a materialization 
of Geist, but does Hegel make this specific claim about human labor?


Hegel regards objectification as simply the alienation of spirit in the 
object.  The ideal itself is the alienated spirit that has become a 
universal through the mediation of language.  True, I've not addressed the 
problem of whether Hegel regarded labour activity (transformation of the 
ideal as consciousness joined with language forms by its expression in 
labour activity) but if I recall correctly he does not really concern 
himself with this problem. The question of the effect, if any, of labour 
activity on the ideal certainly does not appear in the Logic. Marx in his 
1844 Critique of Hegelian Philosophy takes Hegel to task for regarding the 
nature that becomes the subject of logos as the abstracted nature of theory 
rather than the material nature external to intellect.  It is however an 
interesting question, and I would appreciate any additional information on 
this.  Meanwhile I'll do some investigation on my own.


For a Marxist materialist, labour practice involves far more than just the 
expression of the ideal in material form.  Labour activity involves the 
interaction between men as creatures of nature (you know; arms, legs, 
hands, eyes and things like that.) and nature and therefore the 
"intervention" of natural laws and principles that are external to the 
ideal and are entirely indifferent to the social conventions of mankind. 
Thus the outcome of labour is a considerably more complex product than the 
idealists would have us believe it is.


OK, but is Hegel's view really contravene your characterization of labor?
In respect to the relation between reason and nature for sure (see above). 
While it is true that the laws and principles that govern material practice 
directed towards the realization of the objectives of labour activity are 
abstract theoretical representations they or at least their application are 
subject to the test of nature which is not dependent solely on human 
knowledge but also involves phenomena that is entirely indifferent to the 
intellectual creations of men.   Thus theory, even natural science theory, 
can never precisely describe actual labour activity if only because the 
natural conditions confronting labour are in a constant state of change. 
Thus the natural laws or application of natural laws incorporated into the 
design of any given labour activity will never be exactly  those encountered 
in the course of actual labour activity.  This, by the way, is how Lenin 
regards Engels theory of freedom and necessity in human activity.
"Secondly, Engels does not attempt to contrive "definitions" of freedom and 
necessity, the kind of scholastic definition with which the reactionary 
professors (like Avenarius) and their disciples (like Bogdanov) are most 
concerned. Engels takes the knowledge and will of man, on the one hand, and 
the necessity of nature, on the other, and instead of giving definitions, 
simply says that the necessity of nature is primary, and human will and mind 
secondary. The latter must necessarily and inevitably adapt themselves to 
the former. Engels regards this as so obvious that he does not waste words 
explaining his view. It needs the Russian Machians to complain of Engels' 
general definition of materialism (that nature is primary and mind 
secondary; remember Bogdanov's "perplexity" on this point!), and

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

I've isolated the difficult passages and commented on them below.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 10:16
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


I am confused by this beyond the reasonably clear first and third sentences 
of the first paragraph and the first sentence of the second paragraph.


At 07:51 PM 6/20/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
I regard Ilyenkov's contribution rather as the Logic (method or met) for a 
practical (materialist or natural science) of ethics (ethos).


There is a restriction as to what degree social relations are actually 
embodied in all cultural objects, this restriction being those imposed by 
the universal natural laws and principles as they apply to the interaction 
of labour, instruments and the subjects of production (materia, parts 
etc.) involved in the productive process.


It is the irreducible fact that production involves relations that are 
entirely indifferent to human social activity and to human consciousness 
collective
or otherwise that compromises any hypothesis that artefacts may be the 
'representations' of ideals or of social life.


You're right, 'representations' should be changed to "replications".  My 
problem here was how to respond to Bakhurst's argument that artefacts are 
ideal representations.


I would go further than this and argue that it is the very irreducibility 
of human labour to a simple replication of idealized objects that forms 
the material basis for the dynamics of human development and the 
indeterminism intrinsic to all human endeavor.


Ilyenkov by presenting a materialist theory of the ideal, the ideal as a 
product of men's "socialization" of productive experience be of his own 
labour or of mobilizing and controlling the labour of others, provides us 
with a model for explaining how practical activity becomes ethical 
activity.


This is extremely important not only to Marxist theory but to the general 
model of historical development, since the ideal as the means whereby men 
coordinate their activity with others is not the creative activity that 
enables

human adaptation to world conditions.


Less than crystal clear, but in essence correct.  The first part "the 
general model of historical development" refers to the serious difficulties 
reconciling synchronic and diachronic theories of culture history common to 
the whole body of social theory (including orthodox Marxism).  The second 
part of the sentence specifies that the problem with these theories is that 
they fail to distinguish, as does Ilyenkov between ethical theory and 
natural scientific theory or in other words theory regarding correct social 
practice and theory regarding effective labour activity.


It more than any other theory of social life explains the contradiction 
implicit in 'adaptively'; conservation of historical developments together 
with creative modification of labour and means of production in response to 
changing natural conditions.


'Adaptively' is a typo it should be "adaptivity".
Adaptation is a dialectic process in which  past historical developments are 
sublated in the creative response of labour activity to changing natural 
conditions.



Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

The originals were certainly rubbish and needed revision.  Your objections 
to the revisions need to be explained.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 10:11
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


As I see it, your clarifications are even more nonsensical than your 
original statements.


 "Science is the representation of reflections on practical labour 
activity rather than on social activity."


 "Comment: it is the identity of the means of representation of ethics and 
of science both in conscious thought and in material symbolical form that 
is the source of confusion regarding the distinction between the ideal and 
the real."


This is pure Ilyenkov.  He uses this argument to explain how 
ethical/cultural descriptions are given the status of statements on Nature. 
For example a statement that nature provides man with a natural calendar in 
the yearly solar and lunar cycles, a natural compass in the North star and a 
clock in the revolution of the zodiac and the daily changes of position of 
the sun are all pseudo-scientific statements about nature that accord to 
humanly created instruments the status of natural phenomena.  On the one 
hand they accord to nature the tool-making faculty of man and on the other 
anthropomorphize nature imparting to it the purposes of men.


"Paragraph 53:  It is this fact, incidentally, that explains the 
persistent survival of such "semantic substitutions"; indeed, when we are 
talking about nature, we are obliged to make use of the available language 
of natural science, the "language of science" with its established and 
generally understood "meanings". It is this, specifically, which forms the 
basis of the arguments of logical positivism, which quite consciously 
identifies "nature" with the "language" in which people talk and write about 
nature.


Paragraph 54: It will be appreciated that the main difficulty and, 
therefore, the main problem of philosophy is not to distinguish and 
counterpose everything that is "in the consciousness of the individual" to 
everything that is outside this individual consciousness (this is hardly 
ever difficult to do), but to delimit the world of collectively acknowledged 
notions, that is, the whole socially organised world of intellectual culture 
with all its stable and materially established universal patterns, and the 
real world as it exists outside and apart from its expression in these 
socially legitimised forms of "experience". (Ilyenkov The Concept of the 
Ideal 1977)




The delimitation of what Ilyenkov calls the "whole socially organised world 
of intellectual culture" and the "real world as it exists outside and apart 
from its expression in these socially legitimised forms of "experience." can 
only be based on the distinction between the socially learned and confirmed 
concepts or ideas of the tribe and the concepts formulated by reflecting on 
practical material activity, i.e. labour activity: the operations carried 
out, the physical and material response of the instruments and material of 
production to these activities and finally the effectivity of the operations 
relative to their purposes.



 "the representation of scientific knowledge involves "hijacking" the mode 
of representation of ethos and using it to represent theories regarding 
the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization of ideas 
through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the work at 
hand."


Let's put it this way.  When we produce scientific theory the rational 
process for reflecting upon labour activity, i.e. the dialectical process 
and the tools we use to describe the outcomes of thought to others, i.e. 
language forms are exactly the same used by the idealist philosopher in his 
investigation and proclaimations concerning the ethical life and by the 
theologian in his construction and revelation of the true nature of god. 
The essential difference is in the subject of our rational activity and, 
social expression.


Ilyenkov (and I suggest Marx as well) argue that the ideal originates as a 
tool for regulation of social life and only later is appropriated (hijacked 
may be too strong a word) to the purposes of describing material reality 
(labour activity).


Does that help?

Utter nonsense!  You started out with something original to say and now 
you're sabotaging your own efforts with this gibberish.


At 10:46 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:


- Original Message - From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 10:17
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



What in bloody hell does this mean?

At 09:32 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Science is founded as ideas, but

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

Comments to selected extracts below

At 01:43 PM 6/19/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Ideality like spoken language is not one thing or another, but two things, 
the objectified notion in consciousness and its material representation by 
some form of language, united as a more concrete concept, the ideal. The 
ideal cannot just be a manifestation of consciousness (Dubrovsky's 
argument) in which case it would be a purely subjective product, at best 
the internal expression of the individuality of the thinker (whatever that 
might be). Nor can it be just the symbolic representation since this after 
all is ultimately just a thing, a material object.  It is only when 
consciousness is given material form by symbolic representation and the 
material artefact is made significant by its embodiment of conscious 
reflective thought that the ideal can be said to exist.


Fascinating.

.In short, ideality is expressed in a cultural artefact through 
human labour informed by the image of the object of his labour 
activity.  For an idealist such as Hegel who regards human activity as 
beginning and ending with the ideal, the outcome of human labour is a 
simple materialization of the ideal.


I can see the Hegelian view that the empirical world is a materialization 
of Geist, but does Hegel make this specific claim about human labor?


For a Marxist materialist, labour practice involves far more than just the 
expression of the ideal in material form.  Labour activity involves the 
interaction between men as creatures of nature (you know; arms, legs, 
hands, eyes and things like that.) and nature and therefore the 
"intervention" of natural laws and principles that are external to the 
ideal and are entirely indifferent to the social conventions of 
mankind.  Thus the outcome of labour is a considerably more complex 
product than the idealists would have us believe it is.


OK, but is Hegel's view really contravene your characterization of labor?


"I would also add here that not only is production a unity of 
consciousness (ideality) and physical/sensual activity, but so too is the 
acquisition of labour skills.
A person cannot pass the ideal as such to another person, as the pure form 
of activity. One can observe the activity of a painter or an engineer as 
long as one likes, striving to catch their mode of action, the form of 
their activity, but one can thus only copy the external techniques and 
methods of their work but never the ideal image itself, the active faculty 
itself. The ideal, as the form of subjective activity, is only masterable 
through active operation with the object and product of this activity, 
i.e. through the form of its product, through the objective form of the 
thing, through its active disobjectification. The ideal image of objective 
reality therefore also only exists as the form (mode, image) of living 
activity, coordinated with the form of its object, but not as a thing, not 
as a materially fixed state or structure." (Ilyenkov Dialectical Logic 
Chapter 8 paragraph 50)


Fascinating.


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

I am confused by this beyond the reasonably clear first and third sentences 
of the first paragraph and the first sentence of the second paragraph.


At 07:51 PM 6/20/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
I regard Ilyenkov's contribution rather as the Logic (method or met) for a 
practical (materialist or natural science) of ethics (ethos).


There is a restriction as to what degree social relations are actually 
embodied in all cultural objects, this restriction being those imposed by 
the universal natural laws and principles as they apply to the interaction 
of labour, instruments and the subjects of production (materia, parts 
etc.) involved in the productive process.  It is the irreducible fact that 
production involves relations that are entirely indifferent to human 
social activity and to human consciousness collective or otherwise that 
compromises any hypothesis that artefacts may be the representations of 
ideals or of social life.  I would go further than this and argue that it 
is the very irreducibility of human labour to a simple replication of 
idealized objects that forms the material basis for the dynamics of human 
development and the indeterminism intrinsic to all human endeavor.


Ilyenkov by presenting a materialist theory of the ideal, the ideal as a 
product of men's "socialization" of productive experience be of his own 
labour or of mobilizing and controlling the labour of others, provides us 
with a model for explaining how practical activity becomes ethical 
activity. This is extremely important not only to Marxist theory but to 
the general model of historical development, since the ideal as the means 
whereby men coordinate their activity with others is not the creative 
activity that enables human adaptation to world conditions. It more than 
any other theory of social life explains the contradiction implicit in 
adaptively; conservation of historical developments together with creative 
modification of labour and means of production in response to changing 
natural conditions.

Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

As I see it, your clarifications are even more nonsensical than your 
original statements.


 "Science is the representation of reflections on practical labour 
activity rather than on social activity."


 "Comment: it is the identity of the means of representation of ethics and 
of science both in conscious thought and in material symbolical form that 
is the source of confusion regarding the distinction between the ideal and 
the real."


 "the representation of scientific knowledge involves "hijacking" the mode 
of representation of ethos and using it to represent theories regarding the 
universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization of ideas through 
labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the work at hand."


Utter nonsense!  You started out with something original to say and now 
you're sabotaging your own efforts with this gibberish.


At 10:46 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:


- Original Message - From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 10:17
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



What in bloody hell does this mean?

At 09:32 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Science is founded as ideas, but unlike Hegel's ideal (which as Marx put 
it is "as nothing else but the form of social activity represented in 
the thing or conversely the form of human creativity represented as a 
thing as an object") Science is the idea as a reflection on practical 
labour activity rather than on social activity.

-
Sorry, wrote this in a hurry.  It should read:
Scientific knowledge is represented in the form of ideas, but unlike the 
ideal (which as Marx put it is "as nothing else but the form of social 
activity represented in the thing or conversely the form of human 
creativity represented as a thing as an object") Science is the 
representation of reflections on practical labour activity rather than on 
social activity.


Comment: it is the identity of the means of representation of ethics and 
of science both in conscious thought and in material symbolical form that 
is the source of confusion regarding the distinction between the ideal and 
the real.


That is to say, in Science the idea is "hijacked" to formulate theories 
regarding the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization 
of ideas through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the 
work at hand.

--
This should be rewritten to read:
That is, the representation of scientific knowledge involves "hijacking" 
the mode of representation of ethos and using it to represent theories 
regarding the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization of 
ideas through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the work 
at hand.

Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 10:17
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



What in bloody hell does this mean?

At 09:32 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Science is founded as ideas, but unlike Hegel's ideal (which as Marx put 
it is "as nothing else but the form of social activity represented in the 
thing or conversely the form of human creativity represented as a thing as 
an object") Science is the idea as a reflection on practical labour 
activity rather than on social activity.

-
Sorry, wrote this in a hurry.  It should read:
Scientific knowledge is represented in the form of ideas, but unlike the 
ideal (which as Marx put it is "as nothing else but the form of social 
activity represented in the thing or conversely the form of human creativity 
represented as a thing as an object") Science is the representation of 
reflections on practical labour activity rather than on social activity.


Comment: it is the identity of the means of representation of ethics and of 
science both in conscious thought and in material symbolical form that is 
the source of confusion regarding the distinction between the ideal and the 
real.


That is to say, in Science the idea is "hijacked" to formulate theories 
regarding the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization of 
ideas through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the work 
at hand.

--
This should be rewritten to read:
That is, the representation of scientific knowledge involves "hijacking" the 
mode of representation of ethos and using it to represent theories regarding 
the universal laws etc. involved in the practical realization of ideas 
through labour and regarding the relevance of these laws to the work at 
hand.

Oudeyis

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

What in bloody hell does this mean?

At 09:32 AM 6/21/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Science is founded as ideas, but unlike Hegel's ideal (which as Marx put 
it is "as nothing else but the form of social activity represented in the 
thing or conversely the form of human creativity represented as a thing as 
an object") Science is the idea as a reflection on practical labour 
activity rather than on social activity.  That is to say, in Science the 
idea is "hijacked" to formulate theories regarding the universal laws etc. 
involved in the practical realization of ideas through labour and 
regarding the relevance of these laws to the work at hand.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

CB,
See below:
- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 21:06
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst




Victor victor

I regard Ilyenkov's contribution rather as the Logic (method or met) for a
practical (materialist or natural science) of ethics (ethos).

There is a restriction as to what degree social relations are actually
embodied in all cultural objects, this restriction being those imposed by
the universal natural laws and principles as they apply to the interaction
of labour, instruments and the subjects of production (materia, parts 
etc.)

involved in the productive process.  It is the irreducible fact that
production involves relations that are entirely indifferent to human 
social
activity and to human consciousness collective or otherwise that 
compromises

any hypothesis that artefacts may be the representations of ideals or of
social life.

^^^

A correction or, better, an elaboration of the last sentence.

For Hegel the representation of spirit (activity) in the object (not by the 
simple material object but by the object of activity which is the idea that 
serves as the goal of labour activity as described by Marx in his 
description of Labour activity in Capital) is spirit alienated by its 
embodiment in a thing (remember, this is not a material thing but a thing an 
object imaged in conscious thought).


Marx in his 1844 critique of Hegelian philosophy argued that Hegel's theory 
of alienation of spirit in thingness was a topsy turvey representation of 
the true state of the relation of thought to experience.  For Marx it is the 
abstraction of thought that alienates human perception of the world from the 
physical/sensual concreteness of nature as it confronts men as whole beings 
having a few more avenues for percieving reality than the operations of 
mind.  The artefact as a product of human labour certainly does represent 
the impact of the ideal on the labour process, but this is hardly the same 
as saying that the ideal is what is produced by human labour or that it is 
only the impact of the ideal that determines the outcome of labour.  The 
outcome of labour like the ideal itself is a dialectical product that 
sublates the ideal in physical material processes that result in a material 
artefact.  The artefact itself is no more ideal or a social product than it 
is a manifestation of the natural laws etc. that were involved in its 
production. The product of absolute men in an absolute nature.

^^^

I would go further than this and argue that it is the very
irreducibility of human labour to a simple replication of idealized 
objects
that forms the material basis for the dynamics of human development and 
the

indeterminism intrinsic to all human endeavor.

^^^
CB: When an idea grips masses, it becomes _a_ material force, not all the
material force involved in human affairs.

^
Yes it does, but as a material force it is no longer just an ideal it is the 
concrete and very complex social process of a revolution!

^

Science is ideas which allow a certain finite and sufficient mastery of
nature , and consequent freedom, as pointed out by Hegel and Engels.

^
Science is founded as ideas, but unlike Hegel's ideal (which as Marx put it 
is "as nothing else but the form of social activity represented in the thing 
or conversely the form of human creativity represented as a thing as an 
object") Science is the idea as a reflection on practical labour activity 
rather than on social activity.  That is to say, in Science the idea is 
"hijacked" to formulate theories regarding the universal laws etc. involved 
in the practical realization of ideas through labour and regarding the 
relevance of these laws to the work at hand.

^
Leaving the realm of necessity and entering the "realm of freedom" is
historical materialism, the theory of class society and its history,
rendering itself obsolete. Production can proceed by planning rather than 
by

a process that goes on behind the backs of the producers , etc.

^
I'm less sure of this than I used to be.  Historical materialism as a 
practical science is not necessarily identical with Marx's own view of 
socialism, and certainly not with the historical experiments with socialism 
we've witnessed to date. The history of dialectical materialism is complex 
but the fact that the transformation of Capital from an analysis of the 
capitalist mode of production to a doctrine had the adverse effect on its 
development as a practical science is undebatable.


Take for example the issue of planning production.  Several years back the 
BBC put out an interesting documentary on the decline and fall of the Soviet 
system in which it was argued that it was the failure of Gosplan to plan and 
manage the developing complexities of the Russian economy that w

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

I regard Ilyenkov's contribution rather as the Logic (method or met) for a 
practical (materialist or natural science) of ethics (ethos).


There is a restriction as to what degree social relations are actually 
embodied in all cultural objects, this restriction being those imposed by 
the universal natural laws and principles as they apply to the interaction 
of labour, instruments and the subjects of production (materia, parts etc.) 
involved in the productive process.  It is the irreducible fact that 
production involves relations that are entirely indifferent to human social 
activity and to human consciousness collective or otherwise that compromises 
any hypothesis that artefacts may be the representations of ideals or of 
social life.  I would go further than this and argue that it is the very 
irreducibility of human labour to a simple replication of idealized objects 
that forms the material basis for the dynamics of human development and the 
indeterminism intrinsic to all human endeavor.


Ilyenkov by presenting a materialist theory of the ideal, the ideal as a 
product of men's "socialization" of productive experience be of his own 
labour or of mobilizing and controlling the labour of others, provides us 
with a model for explaining how practical activity becomes ethical activity. 
This is extremely important not only to Marxist theory but to the general 
model of historical development, since the ideal as the means whereby men 
coordinate their activity with others is not the creative activity that 
enables human adaptation to world conditions. It more than any other theory 
of social life explains the contradiction implicit in adaptively; 
conservation of historical developments together with creative modification 
of labour and means of production in response to changing natural 
conditions.

Oudeyis


- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 15:24
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst




Victor


As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that

just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into things
in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of abstract labor
into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that social relations 
are

embodied in all cultural objects - through the incorporation of meaningful
cultural activity into the ideal form.


CB: When an idea grips masses ( is social), it becomes a material force.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Right
and I'd like to see someone wear "The coat".  Must be a truly mystical 
experience.

Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 15:43
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst





Victor


The social relations are not embodied in a particular coat or in a
particular bale of linen.  These are material objects whose concreteness 
are

beyond the capacity of human conceptualisation.  After all a particular
linen coat may have been made by an apprentice and taken twice as long to
produce than a similar coat made by a master tailor. The linen coats and
bales of linen cloth referred to by Marx are not actual material coats and
cloths but an abstract representation of them.  And that's not all. 
Labour

value itself is not a description of physical and sensual labour activity
but of abstract labour.  Labour from which all concrete relations have
beenabstracted out but for labour time or the average time necessary to
produce a particular object.  It does not take into account whether the
labourer was weakened by starvation, was preoccupied with whether he could
pay next months rent, or couldn't find whetstone to sharpen his scissors.


CB: Sounds like the difference between " the coat" and "a coat".




The 'thing' Marx is referring to is not the physical sensual thing as it
comes off the production line, but the abstract idea of the thing as it is
manifested in the consciousness of the labourer, his boss, the salesman 
who

sells it and the purchaser who buys it. A commodity is not a physical
sensual object but a concept of objects, objects abstracted into things to
be bought and sold and that's it.


CB: "The thing" , for Marx , is to _change_ the world. "Things" are
importantly activity, world changing activity, not just the objects that
result. The thing is practical-critical _activity_.  Goods and _services_
constitute things.

^


Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the

error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual 
human

head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical materialism,
ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of the composition
of each
object

^

CB: Object and activity. Objective reality _is_ human activity, practice,
especially, for Marxists.

^^^

- both the composition of the physical

attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the

composition of its social origins and social context, which are the

sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the

commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, OBJECTS  within the human
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor,
possess both use-value and exchange-value.


CB: Objects _and_ activity; an "object" is the human activity in relation 
to
it. Objects: "the ball", "the rock", "the tree", "the star". These _are_ 
the
human activity in relaion to them. "A ball" is an human activity in 
relation

to it.

Labor is activity. The resulting commodity is the labor in it or in 
relation

to it.

^^

This is not, by the way, Ilyenkov's invention, but the essence of Marx's
critique of Feuerbach in Ad Feuerbach and of Lenin's critique of Plekhanov
in the Conspectus.  The boundary between ideal and real is objective,
external to the subjective consciousness of the individual.

^^
CB: Yes, the boundary between the  ideal and real is itself objective to 
the
individual, and both the ideal and real are taken into the consciousness 
of
the individual consciousness, as well. So , the boundary is both inside 
and

outside of the individual.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Indeed.
It was Hegel that first made the critique of metaphysical synthesis as 
presented by Kant.  For Kant an antinomy could only be resolved by a choice; 
e.g. in the antinomy presented by the concept of the idea as materialized 
consciousness Kant would insist that we either choose to regard the idea as 
in the head as purely subjective thought or as outside the head in the 
material representations of ideas in language, logic, etc.  Marx following 
Hegel and Lenin and Ilyenkov following Marx entirely rejected Kant's 
metaphysical synthetics and the formal logic that underwrites it.  They 
regarded the antinomy, i.e. the contradiction, as the kernel of the process 
of what Ilyenkov calls ascension from the abstract to the concrete.


By determining the formulation that unites the contradictory elements of an 
antinomy into a single notion (inevitably a more complex or more concrete 
notion of the abstractions of the contradictory notions that comprise it). 
For example, direct commodity exchange involves the unity of two kinds of 
valuation of goods, that of the consumer who is buying the good's use value 
and that of the seller/producer who is selling the investment of labour time 
in production of the good, its exchange value or value. The resolution of 
these two bases in valuation of the good is a concept of universal value 
measured in abstract labour and represented by a single commodity (usually 
precious metals) that represents universal value and describes the value of 
specific goods in accordance to their equivalent value in gold or silver, 
i.e. their price.


Incidentally, a dialectical synthesis does not "eliminate" the antinomy, 
rather it "kicks it upstairs" where it usually reappears in a more complex 
and concrete form.  Thus the establishment of universal value only resolves 
the contradiction between the purchaser's and the seller's evaluation of 
goods on the abstract level of immediate exchange.  The contradiction 
reappears on more concrete levels in the periodic maladjustments between 
capitalist systems of industrial production and the marketability of goods 
(depressions, business cycles etc.).

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 15:18
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst




And to be more precise, Oudeyis, I think the point below is that the 
matter

of deriving the materiality discussed here based on what is "outside" of a
concrete individual's head, and a concrete individual's interaction with 
her

non-human "outside" is a main error of positivism and much bourgeois
thought.


"...the error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal 
as
being the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each 
individual

human head "

This is a materiality that each individual must take account of, but on 
the

other hand each individual must become aware that this is not the main
boundary between materiality and ideality for that person _as an 
individual_

, either. The individual's world is very social as well, though there is
physiology.


Charles



CB
I recall a lecturer on S. Freud that asserted and successfully 
demonstrated

that psychoanalysis is a social psychology.
Oudeyis





Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as 
being

the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual
human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the
sources of its ideality -



^
CB: This distinction between inside and outside of the individual's head
is
what I was getting at in saying all psychology is social psychology.

^





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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Steve,
All but these directions is included in the body of your text.
- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2005 10:11
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Victor,
I have read your response carefully.  I think I am getting a handle on our 
differing approaches.  They seem to emerge in the way we understand issues 
such as:


a) where is ideality "located"?
b) where is value is "located"?
c) what is the "essence" of ideality?
d) what is the "essence" of value?
e) what is "represented" in a commodity?
f) what does the "stamping" of human activity on a cultural artifact?

Please correct me if I am getting your views wrong in any way.  On several 
questions, I am not yet clear on what your answer would be.
I am speaking roughly for each of us, hoping to drive out any essential 
paradigm differences.


a) where is ideality "located"?
I would answer a) "in cultural artifacts," using the term in its broadest 
possible sense (tools, signs, all human creations and observations, etc.) 
I think you would answer a) "in representations."


Ideality like spoken language is not one thing or another, but two things, 
the objectified notion in consciousness and its material representation by 
some form of language, united as a more concrete concept, the ideal. The 
ideal cannot just be a manifestation of consciousness (Dubrovsky's argument) 
in which case it would be a purely subjective product, at best the internal 
expression of the individuality of the thinker (whatever that might be). 
Nor can it be just the symbolic representation since this after all is 
ultimately just a thing, a material object.  It is only when consciousness 
is given material form by symbolic representation and the material artefact 
is made significant by its embodiment of conscious reflective thought that 
the ideal can be said to exist.



b) where is value "located"?
I would answer b) with "each particular commodity."  It appears that you 
would answer b) in concepts of commodities, but definitely not specific 
commodities.


Abstract value is indeed a concept and can only be represented in material 
form by symbolic forms such as speech and text.  The specific value of 
concrete goods is price, but this too is only expressible in symbolic forms 
such as dollars and cents and pounds and pence be it in speech, in the 
little labels they attach to marketed goods, or in the exchange of coinage 
for the desired good.


c) what is the "essence" of ideality?
I would answer c) with "human activity."  You answer c) with 
"representation."


The essence of ideality is representation, the subject of ideality is human 
activity represented as the object of that activity.




d) what is the "essence of value"?
I would answer d) with abstract labor, or socially determined necessary 
labor time.  I am not sure how you would answer this one.


Value represents labour activity.  The essence of value is commodity 
production, that is the production of goods for trade.


e) what is "represented" in a commodity?
I would answer e) in terms of particular commodities being a combination 
of concrete and abstract labor.  I am not yet clear on how you would 
answer this one.


A commodity is an article produced for the express purpose of exchanging it 
for other articles. See MIA's encyclopedia of Marxism:
"A commodity is something that is produced for the purpose of exchanging for 
something else, and as such, is the material form given to a fundamental 
social relation - the exchange of labour."




f) what does the "stamping" of ideality on a cultural artifact?
I would answer f) direct human activity.  You answer f) the interpretation 
of the ideal through human activity, but I am not yet clear on what this 
precisely means.


Here Marx's description of labour activity is relevant:
"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A 
spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts 
to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what 
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the 
architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in 
reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already 
existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only 
effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also 
realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and 
to which he must subordinate his will [emphasis is mine VTFR]. And this 
subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides th

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

Victor,
I have read your response carefully.  I think I am getting a handle on our 
differing approaches.  They seem to emerge in the way we understand issues 
such as:


a) where is ideality "located"?
b) where is value is "located"?
c) what is the "essence" of ideality?
d) what is the "essence" of value?
e) what is "represented" in a commodity?
f) what does the "stamping" of human activity on a cultural artifact?

Please correct me if I am getting your views wrong in any way.  On several 
questions, I am not yet clear on what your answer would be.
I am speaking roughly for each of us, hoping to drive out any essential 
paradigm differences.


a) where is ideality "located"?
I would answer a) "in cultural artifacts," using the term in its broadest 
possible sense (tools, signs, all human creations and observations, 
etc.)  I think you would answer a) "in representations."


b) where is value "located"?
I would answer b) with "each particular commodity."  It appears that you 
would answer b) in concepts of commodities, but definitely not specific 
commodities.


c) what is the "essence" of ideality?
I would answer c) with "human activity."  You answer c) with "representation."

d) what is the "essence of value"?
I would answer d) with abstract labor, or socially determined necessary 
labor time.  I am not sure how you would answer this one.


e) what is "represented" in a commodity?
I would answer e) in terms of particular commodities being a combination of 
concrete and abstract labor.  I am not yet clear on how you would answer 
this one.


f) what does the "stamping" of ideality on a cultural artifact?
I would answer f) direct human activity.  You answer f) the interpretation 
of the ideal through human activity, but I am not yet clear on what this 
precisely means.


There are several areas to clarify, but the pattern that seems to be 
emerging is that on several important issues I tend to think in terms of 
direct human activity where you tend to think in terms of concepts and 
representations.


Thoughts?

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Yeah I'm writing it up now.
Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 18:55
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst


This is refreshing after wasting my time reading Rorty's worthless crap. 
Have you published anything on these subjects?


Also, it seems a thoroughgoing analysis of Popper's 3-worlds schema is in 
order.  The Soviets criticized Popper, but not in sufficient detail, it 
seems.


At 01:41 PM 6/17/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Steve,
Commentary interleaved with your commentary and citations. [note I do not
comment on every citation, some responses cover more than one citation].

Sorry, I've included very few citations here. I'm in the middle of writing
and somewhat pressed for time. Still the opportunity to try out the ideas 
in

the paper in this response is much appreciated.

...


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

CB
I recall a lecturer on S. Freud that asserted and successfully demonstrated 
that psychoanalysis is a social psychology.

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 21:58
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the

error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual
human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the
sources of its ideality -



^
CB: This distinction between inside and outside of the individual's head 
is

what I was getting at in saying all psychology is social psychology.

^




just as Marx analyzed the composition of the

commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor,
possess both use-value and exchange-value.


This is not, by the way, Ilyenkov's invention, but the essence of Marx's
critique of Feuerbach in Ad Feuerbach and of Lenin's critique of Plekhanov
in the Conspectus.  The boundary between ideal and real is objective,
external to the subjective consciousness of the individual.



CB: Perhaps from Marx's practical-critical activity, the "practical"
corresponds to Ilyenkov's "material" and the "critical" corresponds to
Ilyenkov's "ideal"



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

This is refreshing after wasting my time reading Rorty's worthless 
crap.  Have you published anything on these subjects?


Also, it seems a thoroughgoing analysis of Popper's 3-worlds schema is in 
order.  The Soviets criticized Popper, but not in sufficient detail, it seems.


At 01:41 PM 6/17/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Steve,
Commentary interleaved with your commentary and citations. [note I do not
comment on every citation, some responses cover more than one citation].

Sorry, I've included very few citations here. I'm in the middle of writing
and somewhat pressed for time. Still the opportunity to try out the ideas in
the paper in this response is much appreciated.

...


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Steve,
Commentary interleaved with your commentary and citations. [note I do not
comment on every citation, some responses cover more than one citation].

Sorry, I've included very few citations here. I'm in the middle of writing
and somewhat pressed for time. Still the opportunity to try out the ideas in
the paper in this response is much appreciated.

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
thethinkers he inspired" 
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 4:16
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Victor,

I spent a little time reviewing Ilyenkov's article "The Concept of the
Ideal" (available on MIA ), and the notes I published on xmca about it
last year.  Below, I have copied paragraphs 66 - 90 from EVI's
142-paragraph essay.  I don't find your comments today about ideality and
materiality consistent with Ilyenkov's theory as I interpret it.

Even were I to somehow convince you of that, it still would not
necessarily make Bakhurst right, of course.  I notice that one big problem
with Bakhurst's presentation in his chapter on the concept of the ideal is
he does not focus on or even mention how Ilyenkov's concept of the ideal
is a generalization of the labor theory of value to all human activity.
In fact, he does not mention the labor theory of value at all.  As I think
about it, this avoidance of the most important argument by Ilyenkov
considerably weakens his presentation.  But as I say, I don't think the
real issue is Bakhurst's comprehension of Ilyenkov's theory of the ideal.
I think the real issue is Ilyenkov's theory itself, whether it can flow
from the labor theory of value, and how does it apply.

As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that
just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into things
in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of abstract labor
into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that social relations
are embodied in all cultural objects - through the incorporation of
meaningful cultural activity into the ideal form.


The social relations are not embodied in a particular coat or in a
particular bale of linen.  These are material objects whose concreteness are
beyond the capacity of human conceptualisation.  After all a particular
linen coat may have been made by an apprentice and taken twice as long to
produce than a similar coat made by a master tailor. The linen coats and
bales of linen cloth referred to by Marx are not actual material coats and
cloths but an abstract representation of them.  And that's not all.  Labour
value itself is not a description of physical and sensual labour activity
but of abstract labour.  Labour from which all concrete relations have been
abstracted out but for labour time or the average time necessary to produce
a particular object.  It does not take into account whether the labourer was
weakened by starvation, was preoccupied with whether he could pay next
months rent, or couldn't find whetstone to sharpen his scissors.

The 'thing' Marx is referring to is not the physical sensual thing as it
comes off the production line, but the abstract idea of the thing as it is
manifested in the consciousness of the labourer, his boss, the salesman who
sells it and the purchaser who buys it. A commodity is not a physical
sensual object but a concept of objects, objects abstracted into things to
be bought and sold and that's it.


Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual
human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the
sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the
commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor,
possess both use-value and exchange-value.


This is not, by the way, Ilyenkov's invention, but the essence of Marx's
critique of Feuerbach in Ad Feuerbach and of Lenin's critique of Plekhanov
in the Conspectus.  The boundary between ideal and real is objective,
external to the subjective consciousness of the individual.

So how do we account for the objectivity of the ideal if it is as an object
manifested only in subjective consciousness?  That's the whole 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

Thanks.  Popper has an idea of how the 3 worlds interact (which has direct 
causal impact on which), but I don't remember exactly how.  I'm not happy 
with the terminology, which seems to me misleading, and I'm not certain how 
in his scheme something belongs to more than one world at one time.  But a 
comparison is in order.


I should also remember Sohn-Rethel better.  His key idea is real 
abstraction, which presumably roughly corresponds to ideality (though 
covering a restricted range of phenomena I believe--scientific & 
philosophical abstraction, value form).  Some extracts:


http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/sohn-rethel-x.html

I also vaguely recall Dubrovsky restricted ideality to subjectivity.  I put 
some extracts online some time ago:


http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dubrov1.html

At 09:19 PM 6/16/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
I am not at all up to speed on the German Marxist Sohn-Rethel (please 
help), but a thought immediately comes to mind on Popper's "Three Worlds" 
cosmology.


If one ignores the positivist framework of these three worlds invented by 
Popper and attempts to make them as dynamic and "dialectical" as possible, 
one might have some success drawing some rough correspondence between a) 
Popper's world 1, the world of physical objects and organisms, and 
Ilyenkov's material world; b) Popper's world 2, of mental activity, and 
Ilyenkov's will and consciousness; and c) Popper's world 3, the products 
of the human mind, and Ilyenkov's realm of ideality.


But there is still a fundamental difference that makes the two world views 
completely different.  If we are to make Popper's three worlds dynamic and 
historical, and assign any meaning to his numbering system, then world 1, 
objects and organisms, must generate an emerging world 2, mental 
activities, which in turn (in conjunction with each other) generate world 
3, the world of products of the human mind.


Ilyenkov, however, makes it crystal clear that he sees just the opposite 
genetic-historic relationship between world "2" and world "3".  He argues 
that it is ideality that generates will and consciousness, not the other 
way around.  See paragraph 76.  Also note Ilyenkov's brief mention of 
Popper in paragraph 77.


To expand on Ilyenkov's discussion of the "secret twist of idealism," 
(discussed earlier in the essay "the Concept of the Ideal), it is this 
"inversion" of ideality, on one hand, and will and consciousness, on the 
other, that creates a major stumbling block in philosophy and 
science.  When plain materialists and empiricists do this, they are 
committing an essential idealist error.  It is one of the most common 
errors in bourgeois social science.


- Steve



At 01:02 PM 6/16/2005 -0400, Ralph wrote:
This is the key.  How would you compare Ilyenkov's view to that of 
Sohn-Rethel, or to Popper's 3-worlds theory?


At 07:16 PM 6/15/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

..

As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that 
just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into 
things in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of 
abstract labor into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that 
social relations are embodied in all cultural objects - through the 
incorporation of meaningful cultural activity into the ideal form.


Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the 
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as 
being the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each 
individual human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to 
dialectical materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished 
in terms of the composition of each object - both the composition of the 
physical attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, 
and the composition of its social origins and social context, which are 
the sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of 
the commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human 
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just 
as commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract 
labor, possess both use-value and exchange-value.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

I am not at all up to speed on the German Marxist Sohn-Rethel (please 
help), but a thought immediately comes to mind on Popper's "Three Worlds" 
cosmology.


If one ignores the positivist framework of these three worlds invented by 
Popper and attempts to make them as dynamic and "dialectical" as possible, 
one might have some success drawing some rough correspondence between a) 
Popper's world 1, the world of physical objects and organisms, and 
Ilyenkov's material world; b) Popper's world 2, of mental activity, and 
Ilyenkov's will and consciousness; and c) Popper's world 3, the products of 
the human mind, and Ilyenkov's realm of ideality.


But there is still a fundamental difference that makes the two world views 
completely different.  If we are to make Popper's three worlds dynamic and 
historical, and assign any meaning to his numbering system, then world 1, 
objects and organisms, must generate an emerging world 2, mental 
activities, which in turn (in conjunction with each other) generate world 
3, the world of products of the human mind.


Ilyenkov, however, makes it crystal clear that he sees just the opposite 
genetic-historic relationship between world "2" and world "3".  He argues 
that it is ideality that generates will and consciousness, not the other 
way around.  See paragraph 76.  Also note Ilyenkov's brief mention of 
Popper in paragraph 77.


To expand on Ilyenkov's discussion of the "secret twist of idealism," 
(discussed earlier in the essay "the Concept of the Ideal), it is this 
"inversion" of ideality, on one hand, and will and consciousness, on the 
other, that creates a major stumbling block in philosophy and 
science.  When plain materialists and empiricists do this, they are 
committing an essential idealist error.  It is one of the most common 
errors in bourgeois social science.


- Steve



At 01:02 PM 6/16/2005 -0400, Ralph wrote:
This is the key.  How would you compare Ilyenkov's view to that of 
Sohn-Rethel, or to Popper's 3-worlds theory?


At 07:16 PM 6/15/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

..

As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that 
just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into 
things in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of abstract 
labor into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that social 
relations are embodied in all cultural objects - through the 
incorporation of meaningful cultural activity into the ideal form.


Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the 
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being 
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual 
human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical 
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of 
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical 
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the 
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the 
sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the 
commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human 
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as 
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor, 
possess both use-value and exchange-value.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Ralph Dumain]

This is the key.  How would you compare Ilyenkov's view to that of 
Sohn-Rethel, or to Popper's 3-worlds theory?


At 07:16 PM 6/15/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

..

As I see it, the key concept in this regard that Ilyenkov offers is that 
just as Marx discovered how social relations can be "embodied" into things 
in the form of commodities - through the incorporation of abstract labor 
into the value-form - so too, Marxists can explain that social relations 
are embodied in all cultural objects - through the incorporation of 
meaningful cultural activity into the ideal form.


Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the 
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being 
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual 
human head.  In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical 
materialism, ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of 
the composition of each object - both the composition of the physical 
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the 
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the 
sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the 
commodity.  According to Ilyenkov's theory, objects within the human 
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as 
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor, 
possess both use-value and exchange-value.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

 with the material artefact it images. In truth, he also 
managed to confuse me as well.


Anyway the ideal as objectification of practice is just that imaged or 
imagined object that Marx describes as the conscious objective of physical 
sensual labour activity.  Marx and certainly Hegel do not describe this 
objectified practice as a material object, it is the socially originated 
and endorsed, authorized, sanctioned etc. etc. object of labour as it is 
manifest in consciousness.  The material representation of the ideal is in 
conventional symbolic forms that have no material resemblance either to 
the objectified practice, the practice objectified, or to the material 
products of that practice.


It is not the artifacts that represent the activity to which they owe 
their existence as artifacts but the it is the ideal artefact (in 
consciousness) that provides the "paragon" by which the labourer measures 
the effectiveness of his work.  The material artefact certainly has 
significance to those who recognize its correspondence in form and 
substance to the imagined ideal, but it cannot ever approach the abstract 
"perfection" of the imagined ideal. Remember Pygmalion either Shaw's or 
the "Rain in Spain" version. The environment of significance that educates 
is not that of the material artefacts themselves, but that of the 
discourse (regarded here broadly) between people.  It is through this 
discourse mediated of course by language that the ideal becomes 
a  consciousness common to the community.


Bakhurst's peculiar rendering of the ideal as the material artefact is 
certainly an original idea.  It's reification with a 
vengeance.  Reification that not even the most committed objective 
idealist dares do.  The Hegelians and Neopositivists are quite content to 
argue that human consciousness is determined by ideality and that human 
knowledge begins and ends with the customs (understood by them as 
concepts) of the tribe.  Bakhurst has declared that material reality is 
ideality or, in other words that custom and only custom determines 
objective reality.  What I don't fully understand yet is why Bakhurst 
agonizes over Ilyenkov's materialism.  After all, if ideality is material 
reality, then being an idealist is being a materialist! I suspect that 
he's not fully convinced by his own arguments, but maybe you have a better 
insight.


   By the way, I'm rewriting the paper I sent you.  I've restricted to 
interpreting how Ilyenkov integrates the ideal into Historical 
Materialist theory and I think you'll recognize his work in this paper. 
Thanks for the help.


Oudeyis

- Original Message - From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
and thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 4:30
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Hi Victor,

Interestingly, footnote one in a paper by Lantolf and Thorne that is 
getting discussed on the xmca list - the paper is at
<http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/JuneJuly05/LantolfThorne2005.pdf>Introduction, 
in Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development - 
has a relevant quote from Bakhurst on the very topic you raise and we are 
discussing, the relationship of material (natural) objects and ideality. 
It is from page 183 in Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy 
(1991).


from Lantolf and Thorne:
footnote 1 "David Bakhurst characterizes the production of objective 
culture this way: [BTW, the quoted Bakhurst sentence begins: "To sum up, 
Ilyenkov holds that ..." -sg] '. by acting on natural objects, human 
beings invest them with a significance or "ideal form" that elevates them 
to a new "plane of existence."  Objects owe their ideality to their 
incorporation into the aim-oriented life activity of a human community, 
to their *use*. The notion of significance is glossed in terms of the 
concept of representation: Artifacts represent the activity to which they 
owe their existence as artifacts.' (1991: 183)."


- Steve

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

Nice work!
That's just it. Bakhurst confuses the ideal as objectification of practice 
in consciousness with the material artefact it images. In truth, he also 
managed to confuse me as well.


Anyway the ideal as objectification of practice is just that imaged or 
imagined object that Marx describes as the conscious objective of physical 
sensual labour activity.  Marx and certainly Hegel do not describe this 
objectified practice as a material object, it is the socially originated and 
endorsed, authorized, sanctioned etc. etc. object of labour as it is 
manifest in consciousness.  The material representation of the ideal is in 
conventional symbolic forms that have no material resemblance either to the 
objectified practice, the practice objectified, or to the material products 
of that practice.


It is not the artifacts that represent the activity to which they owe their 
existence as artifacts but the it is the ideal artefact (in consciousness) 
that provides the "paragon" by which the labourer measures the effectiveness 
of his work.  The material artefact certainly has significance to those who 
recognize its correspondence in form and substance to the imagined ideal, 
but it cannot ever approach the abstract "perfection" of the imagined ideal. 
Remember Pygmalion either Shaw's or the "Rain in Spain" version. The 
environment of significance that educates is not that of the material 
artefacts themselves, but that of the discourse (regarded here broadly) 
between people.  It is through this discourse mediated of course by language 
that the ideal becomes a  consciousness common to the community.


Bakhurst's peculiar rendering of the ideal as the material artefact is 
certainly an original idea.  It's reification with a vengeance.  Reification 
that not even the most committed objective idealist dares do.  The Hegelians 
and Neopositivists are quite content to argue that human consciousness is 
determined by ideality and that human knowledge begins and ends with the 
customs (understood by them as concepts) of the tribe.  Bakhurst has 
declared that material reality is ideality or, in other words that custom 
and only custom determines objective reality.  What I don't fully understand 
yet is why Bakhurst agonizes over Ilyenkov's materialism.  After all, if 
ideality is material reality, then being an idealist is being a materialist! 
I suspect that he's not fully convinced by his own arguments, but maybe you 
have a better insight.


   By the way, I'm rewriting the paper I sent you.  I've restricted to 
interpreting how Ilyenkov integrates the ideal into Historical Materialist 
theory and I think you'll recognize his work in this paper. Thanks for the 
help.


Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 4:30
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Hi Victor,

Interestingly, footnote one in a paper by Lantolf and Thorne that is 
getting discussed on the xmca list - the paper is at
<http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/JuneJuly05/LantolfThorne2005.pdf>Introduction, 
in Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development - 
has a relevant quote from Bakhurst on the very topic you raise and we are 
discussing, the relationship of material (natural) objects and ideality. 
It is from page 183 in Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy 
(1991).


from Lantolf and Thorne:
footnote 1 "David Bakhurst characterizes the production of objective 
culture this way: [BTW, the quoted Bakhurst sentence begins: "To sum up, 
Ilyenkov holds that ..." -sg] '. by acting on natural objects, human 
beings invest them with a significance or "ideal form" that elevates them 
to a new "plane of existence."  Objects owe their ideality to their 
incorporation into the aim-oriented life activity of a human community, to 
their *use*. The notion of significance is glossed in terms of the concept 
of representation: Artifacts represent the activity to which they owe 
their existence as artifacts.' (1991: 183)."


- Steve
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

Hi Victor,

Interestingly, footnote one in a paper by Lantolf and Thorne that is 
getting discussed on the xmca list - the paper is at
Introduction, 
in Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development - 
has a relevant quote from Bakhurst on the very topic you raise and we are 
discussing, the relationship of material (natural) objects and 
ideality.  It is from page 183 in Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet 
Philosophy (1991).


from Lantolf and Thorne:
footnote 1 "David Bakhurst characterizes the production of objective 
culture this way: [BTW, the quoted Bakhurst sentence begins: "To sum up, 
Ilyenkov holds that ..." -sg] ‘… by acting on natural objects, human beings 
invest them with a significance or “ideal form” that elevates them to a new 
"plane of existence.”  Objects owe their ideality to their incorporation 
into the aim-oriented life activity of a human community, to their *use*. 
The notion of significance is glossed in terms of the concept of 
representation: Artifacts represent the activity to which they owe their 
existence as artifacts.’ (1991: 183)."


- Steve
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

Victor,

Thanks for the refresher course on Rosenburg, which becomes a history of 
the Nazi party from 1921.  It is always good to be reminded of what 
happened in Germany.


Your comments on Dubrovsky are very interesting, as is your analysis of 
Bakhurst.  I also read your descriptions of ideality with great interest.


It would help me if, to start out, (when you have a chance), you would 
locate some specific quotes from David Bakhurst that illustrate these 
observations that you make:


"Bakhurst argues that the material objects themselves are ideal."

"Bakhurst's identification of the ideal with the material goes beyond 
idealist hypostasy and takes idealist reification to ridiculous extremes ..."


Thanks,
- Steve



At 07:08 PM 6/14/2005 +0200, you wrote:

Steve
On Alfred Rosenberg: (Born January 12, 1893- Executed October 16, 1946)
Alfred Rosenberg was a Nazi ideologist and politician.
 Rosenberg was one of the earliest members of the German Workers Party
(later better known as the NSDAP or the Nazi Party), joining in January
1919; Hitler did not join until October 1919
Rosenberg became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (National
Observer),
the Nazi party newspaper, in 1921. In 1923 after the failed Beer Hall
Putsch, Hitler appointed Rosenberg leader of the Nazi Party, a position the
latter occupied until Hitler was released from prison.
In 1929, Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He
became
a Reichstag deputy in 1930 and published his book on racial theory The Myth
of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts). He was named
leader of the foreign political office of the NSDAP in 1933 but played
little actual part in office. In January 1934 he was deputized by Hitler
with responsibility for the spiritual and philosophical education of the
NSDAP and all related organizations.
   In 1940 he was made head of the Hohe Schule (literally "high school"),
the
Centre of National Socialistic Ideological and Educational Research.
Following the invasion of the USSR Rosenberg was appointed head of the Reich
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Alfred Meyer was his deputy
and represented him at the Wannsee conference.
Rosenberg was captured by Allied troops at the end of the war. He was
tried
at Nuremberg and found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace;
planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes
against humanity. He was sentenced to death and executed with other guilty
co-defendants at Nuremberg on the morning of October 16, 1946.  He is
considered the main author of key Nazi ideological screeds, including its
racial theory, Lebensraum, abolition of the Versailles Treaty, and
persecution of the Jews and of Christian churches. This article is about
race as an intraspecies classification.

Just another intellectual grotesque become monster.
To separate the 
beasts from the confused.

About Bakhurst:
   Bakhurst is not only a liberal social-democrat, he's also is a
representative of exactly the kind of Logical Positivism, Neo-Kantianism,
Neo-positivism, Machism, Empirio-criticism or what have you (the precise
name of the movement is more a function of the provenience of the theorist
than of his ideas) that motivated Lenin to write Materialism and
Emperio-criticism (1908).  The irony of Bakhurst's current stature as the
interpreter of Ilyenkov is that his kind of thinking is receives more
criticism from Ilyenkov than even the objective idealism of Plato and Hegel.

Bakhurst, like D. Dubrovsky who Bakhurst wrongly calls a mechanist, just
cannot comprehend the essence of dialectical synthesis.  Where Ilyenkov
describes the essence of ideality as the unity of consciousness (the
subjectively imaged object of labour) and material formations (the material
symbolic representations that embody and thereby enable transmission of
ideal objects), Bakhurst argues that the material objects themselves are
ideal.  Material objects certainly acquire significance from their
resemblance (perhaps correspondence is a better word) to the ideal, but
material objects, i.e. physically and sensually perceived objects, as
concrete objects are far to diversified to be regarded as ideal forms.
After all, diversity is a basic property of being for both Hegelian and
Marxist theories of knowledge [check out Hegel's criticism of the identity
of A = A for this].

Dubrovsky, like Bakhurst, does not know how to handle dialectical synthesis,
and his solution of the ideal/material antinomy is to identify the ideal as
pure subjective consciousness. While Bakhurst's identification of the ideal
with the material goes beyond idealist hypostasy and takes idealist
reification to ridiculous extremes, Dubrovsky's restriction of the ideal to
pure subjectivity compels him to regard all conceptualisation as a product
of some internal transcendental features common to all human thought
processes, i.e.

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!: domains

[Steve Gabosch]

CB said:

However, analogizing to chemistry and biology, biology does not reduce to
chemistry.  Human psychology does not reduce to individual physiological
psychology.



Absolutely.  On the first point, yes, biology cannot be reduced to 
chemistry.  On the second point, I also completely agree:  in the same way 
that biology does not reduce to chemistry, psychology does not reduce to 
physiology.


These points, common among anti-reductionist thinkers such as Marxists, 
fits into a larger framework, in my opinion.  I believe that comprehending 
and explaining the relations between, the structures of, and the functions 
of domains - and doing so in terms of their real genetic-historical 
development - are among the great challenges of modern science that I 
believe dialectical materialism can play a leading role in moving 
forward.  In fact, differences in theoretical outlooks may be explainable 
by seeing conflicting views as conceptualizing domains differently - seeing 
the relations, structures, and functions of various "domains" in different, 
often opposite, ways.  Hence, ontology remains a hot area of dispute and 
always will as long as different class outlooks remain in mortal struggle 
and conceptualize the domains of reality in incompatible ways.


This argument of course begs for a clear explanation of what a "domain" 
is.  Very good question!


- Steve








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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Victor]

fuscated representation of one of the  most profound and 
brilliant of Historical Materialist theoreticians.  Too bad.

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 2:10
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst



Hi Victor,

If I am getting your first point, that Bakhurst incorrectly takes "Diamat"
as serious theory, then you are speaking to what I referred to (perhaps
too softly) as Bakhurst's "tendency to see Stalinism as a form of
Bolshevism."   I see this as a grave error.  It sounds like we may have
agreement on this. Trotsky's discussion of Stalinism's tendency to play
fast and free with theory, using it for its narrow bureaucratic and
political needs of the moment, zig-zagging here, there, everywhere,
transforming Marxism into an obscurantist dogma, and using the consequent
... manufactured crap ... to justify the work of its massive murder
machine and other crimes against the world working classes and toiling
masses - seems very relevant here.  When it comes to either Lenin or
Stalin, Bakhurst is no revolutionary Marxist, and his philosophical
analysis indeed suffers.  As I think you are pointing out, he does attempt
to treat some of the production of the Stalinist apparatus in the
ideological department as "serious" intellectual  work.  It is not.

I have not read Bakhurst's thoughts on the reactionary writings you
obviously speak of facetiously.  If your point is to compare Mein Kampf
etc. with the  "theoretical" work of the Stalinist school of "crap" -
falsification, dogma and tripe -  I agree with the comparison, and accept
your point.  This whole category of reactionary writing - fascist,
Stalinist, etc. - can be considered the product of reactionary Bonapartist
regimes.  It is the opposite of scientific work.

(BTW I am not offhand remembering Rosenburg, please refresh).

But back to Ilyenkov, I do think Bakhurst, up to a point, grasps and
explains Ilyenkov's concept of the ideal, as well as certain central ideas
in Vygotsky's program, in a valuable way.  Debates we have had on Ilyenkov
seem to center on our interpretation of the concept of the ideal, and what
ideality actually is (I identify ideality with the general notion of
meaning).

But I am open to a serious critique of Bakhurst's shortcomings.  His
liberal/social-democratic view of the relationship of Leninism and
Stalinism does give me pause.  Perhaps I am being entirely too soft on
him.  If you like, fire away!

- Steve

PS  Tell us more about your old man!



*
6/8/2005  Victor wrote:

Steve,
Doesn't it make you wonder? A philosopher who regards the Diamat and
all that utter rubbish as theory to be comparable to the works of Marx,
Lenin, Deborin and Ilyenkov?  It's Propaganda, certainly, theory, never!

I'll never forget my old man's colourful reaction to Stalin's perceptive
contribution to linguistics, and he didn't even finish High School!

Do you think D Bakhurst classifies the classic philosophic work, Mein
Kampf, Rosenburg's brilliant meanderings about race and destiny, and
Mussolini's masterful contributions to human thought as serious theory?

Oudeyis

- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
and thethinkers he inspired" 
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 0:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



I continue to enjoy this thread, but will be gone for some days and it
will probably be a little while after that before I can reengage.  I will
think about the position Charles and Ralph have taken on the relationship
of the brain to the origins of humanity.  I think Engel's argument about
how labor created the human hand applies also to the brain, language
organs, bipedalism, etc. so I will try to make a case for that.  And I
have been enjoying the exchanges between Ralph and Victor, especially on
the issues of the role of practice in science, the nature of scientific
thought, and the big question, just what is nature - and can humans
really "know" what nature is in any fundamental ontological sense.  I
recently read the book by Bakhurst that Victor mentions, and have a
different take on it.  Briefly put, I disagree with Bakhurst's negative
assessment of Leninist politics, his tendency to see Stalinism as a form
of Bolshevism, and his general opinion of dialectics.  But I agree with
many of his insights into Ilyenkov and Vygotsky.

Oops, got to get packing.  See you all again soon.

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

On CB's first comment on SOCIO-history, I certainly completely agree, and 
think Ilyenkov would, too.


On CB's second comment, about the subject matter of Marxist psychology, I 
think it is true that a dialectical materialist psychology must begin with 
sociology and social psychology, and the study of the individual must be 
based on sociology and social psychology - and as CB I think implies, 
cannot be developed without it.  But in response to the phrase "For Marxism 
there is only social psychology, no individual psychology separate from 
social psych" I want to add the thought that the task of comprehending the 
individual cannot be *reduced* to the study of social psychology - that the 
individual constitutes a higher "level" or "domain" of complexity and 
requires a study of the laws of development and so forth associated with 
that realm - generalizations and observations that are not identical with 
those of social psychology, and require their own scientific study, 
etc.  An analogy would be the study of chemistry compared with biology.


- Steve




At 12:23 PM 6/10/2005 -0400, you wrote:



>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/31/05 07:48AM >>>
>
>>from page 283:
>>"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the
>>approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to
>>interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels
>>established above all that [the] external world was not given to the
>>individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation,
>>but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the
>>contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of 
history."




CB: "History" here being critically SOCIO-history, i.e. not just the 
individual doing the logic , but many people.  A key Marxist modification 
of the notion of logic is that it is not the product of an individual 
brain, or the qualities of an individual organ, but the product of many 
people's experiences, including people who are dead at the time the 
particular individual in question is doing the logic. "History" here 
refers to people who "are history", i.e. dead.


Not just practice, but SOCIAL practice. Not just the result of one human's 
interaction and alteration of nature, but of many people's interaction and 
alteration of nature.





>>
>>from page 285:
>>"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in
>>the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic.
>>The individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general
>>(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely
>>independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate
>>the development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it
>>a premise independent of the individual."

CB: "does not" or "does" ?  For Marxism there is only social psychology, 
no individual psychology separate from social psych.





>>
>>from page 286-287:
>>"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another
>>object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and
>>laws of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's
>>action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions
>>on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that
>>are independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically,
>>appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it
>>functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own
>>form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."
>
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! :Bakhurst

[Steve Gabosch]

Hi Victor,

If I am getting your first point, that Bakhurst incorrectly takes "Diamat" 
as serious theory, then you are speaking to what I referred to (perhaps too 
softly) as Bakhurst's "tendency to see Stalinism as a form of 
Bolshevism."   I see this as a grave error.  It sounds like we may have 
agreement on this. Trotsky's discussion of Stalinism's tendency to play 
fast and free with theory, using it for its narrow bureaucratic and 
political needs of the moment, zig-zagging here, there, everywhere, 
transforming Marxism into an obscurantist dogma, and using the consequent 
... manufactured crap ... to justify the work of its massive murder machine 
and other crimes against the world working classes and toiling masses - 
seems very relevant here.  When it comes to either Lenin or Stalin, 
Bakhurst is no revolutionary Marxist, and his philosophical analysis indeed 
suffers.  As I think you are pointing out, he does attempt to treat some of 
the production of the Stalinist apparatus in the ideological department as 
"serious" intellectual  work.  It is not.


I have not read Bakhurst's thoughts on the reactionary writings you 
obviously speak of facetiously.  If your point is to compare Mein Kampf 
etc. with the  "theoretical" work of the Stalinist school of "crap" - 
falsification, dogma and tripe -  I agree with the comparison, and accept 
your point.  This whole category of reactionary writing - fascist, 
Stalinist, etc. - can be considered the product of reactionary Bonapartist 
regimes.  It is the opposite of scientific work.


(BTW I am not offhand remembering Rosenburg, please refresh).

But back to Ilyenkov, I do think Bakhurst, up to a point, grasps and 
explains Ilyenkov's concept of the ideal, as well as certain central ideas 
in Vygotsky's program, in a valuable way.  Debates we have had on Ilyenkov 
seem to center on our interpretation of the concept of the ideal, and what 
ideality actually is (I identify ideality with the general notion of 
meaning).


But I am open to a serious critique of Bakhurst's shortcomings.  His 
liberal/social-democratic view of the relationship of Leninism and 
Stalinism does give me pause.  Perhaps I am being entirely too soft on 
him.  If you like, fire away!


- Steve

PS  Tell us more about your old man!



*
6/8/2005  Victor wrote:

Steve,
Doesn't it make you wonder? A philosopher who regards the Diamat and 
all that utter rubbish as theory to be comparable to the works of Marx, 
Lenin, Deborin and Ilyenkov?  It's Propaganda, certainly, theory, never!


I'll never forget my old man's colourful reaction to Stalin's perceptive 
contribution to linguistics, and he didn't even finish High School!


Do you think D Bakhurst classifies the classic philosophic work, Mein 
Kampf, Rosenburg's brilliant meanderings about race and destiny, and 
Mussolini's masterful contributions to human thought as serious theory?


Oudeyis

- Original Message - From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
and thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 0:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


I continue to enjoy this thread, but will be gone for some days and it 
will probably be a little while after that before I can reengage.  I will 
think about the position Charles and Ralph have taken on the relationship 
of the brain to the origins of humanity.  I think Engels' argument about 
how labor created the human hand applies also to the brain, language 
organs, bipedalism, etc. so I will try to make a case for that.  And I 
have been enjoying the exchanges between Ralph and Victor, especially on 
the issues of the role of practice in science, the nature of scientific 
thought, and the big question, just what is nature - and can humans 
really "know" what nature is in any fundamental ontological sense.  I 
recently read the book by Bakhurst that Victor mentions, and have a 
different take on it.  Briefly put, I disagree with Bakhurst's negative 
assessment of Leninist politics, his tendency to see Stalinism as a form 
of Bolshevism, and his general opinion of dialectics.  But I agree with 
many of his insights into Ilyenkov and Vygotsky.


Oops, got to get packing.  See you all again soon.

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Charles Brown]

>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/31/05 07:48AM >>>
>
>>from page 283:
>>"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
>>approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
>>interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
>>established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
>>individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
>>but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
>>contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of 
>>history."



CB: "History" here being critically SOCIO-history, i.e. not just the individual 
doing the logic , but many people.  A key Marxist modification of the notion of 
logic is that it is not the product of an individual brain, or the qualities of 
an individual organ, but the product of many people's experiences, including 
people who are dead at the time the particular individual in question is doing 
the logic. "History" here refers to people who "are history", i.e. dead.

Not just practice, but SOCIAL practice. Not just the result of one human's 
interaction and alteration of nature, but of many people's interaction and 
alteration of nature.




>>
>>from page 285:
>>"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
>>the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. 
>>The individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
>>(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
>>independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate 
>>the development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it 
>>a premise independent of the individual."

CB: "does not" or "does" ?  For Marxism there is only social psychology, no 
individual psychology separate from social psych.




>>
>>from page 286-287:
>>"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
>>object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and 
>>laws of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
>>action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions 
>>on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that 
>>are independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
>>appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
>>functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
>>form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."
>
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Charles Brown]

>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/31/05 07:48AM >>>
>
>>from page 283:
>>"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
>>approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
>>interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
>>established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
>>individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
>>but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
>>contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of 
>>history."



CB: "History" here being critically SOCIO-history, i.e. not just the individual 
doing the logic , but many people.  A key Marxist modification of the notion of 
logic is that it is not the product of an individual brain, or the qualities of 
an individual organ, but the product of many people's experiences, including 
people who are dead at the time the particular individual in question is doing 
the logic. "History" here refers to people who "are history", i.e. dead.

Not just practice, but SOCIAL practice. Not just the result of one human's 
interaction and alteration of nature, but of many people's interaction and 
alteration of nature.




>>
>>from page 285:
>>"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
>>the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. 
>>The individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
>>(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
>>independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate 
>>the development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it 
>>a premise independent of the individual."

CB: "does not" or "does" ?  For Marxism there is only social psychology, no 
individual psychology separate from social psych.




>>
>>from page 286-287:
>>"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
>>object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and 
>>laws of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
>>action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions 
>>on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that 
>>are independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
>>appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
>>functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
>>form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."
>
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Again, my stuff is shelved just below your commentary:
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 3:51
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Note my interleaved comments on a fragment of a key post of yours

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
> I don't see this.  I see the problem this way: that stage of the
> development of materialism is inadequate to grasp the nature of human
> activity, both practical and cognitive.  Labels such as 'nature as 
> such'

or
> 'contemplative' don't work for me without such clarification, though it
> does seem that your characterization here is consistent with me though
> apparently not synonymous.  The old materialism, as well as the course 
> of

> development of modern natural science, is such that it begins with the
> study of the lowest levels of the organization of matter and works its 
> way
> up.  But once it works its way up to the human species itself as an 
> object
> of study, its intellectual limitations become manifest.  And I think 
> this

> is where Marx intervenes.

 If I understand you correctly, you argue that so long as the natural
sciences dealt with phenomena that was simple enough to contemplate 
without
our needing to be aware o the activity of the contemplating subject, the 
old

materialism served as a sufficient paradigm for explanations of the
observed.  It is only when we deal with men, i.e. ourselves that we must
take into account our own subjectivity to understand what's going on.

 I prefer to stand your argument on its head.  As long as human needs 
could

(and given the available technology, only could) be satisfied by
manipulation of his world on a purely mechanical level, the contemplative
and mechanical paradigms of classical materialism was a viable system for
explaining the effectiveness of human practice.


In turn, I could stand your argument on its head.  What is the vantage 
point: objective reality with the relation of human practice as a 
reflection of it, or the justification of practice by its ability to 
fulfill needs?  Either vantage point could be considered a question of 
perspective from one angle or the other.  They could be equivalent.  Yet I 
see my argument as basic as yours as derivative, though that perspective 
is also valid, i.e. explaining the effectiveness of human practice under 
defined conditions.


It appears that my argument is not clear enough here.  The point is that the 
determination any objective reality is always a function of some sort of 
practical activity.


To try first to describe object reality in all its concreteness and then to 
try to determine which part of that reality is relevant to practical 
activity is an impossible task.  To carry out an aimless effort to produce a 
comprehensive (concrete) representation of objective reality is one with the 
kinds of hopeless sisyphusian tasks that Borges likes to write about.  The 
determination of objective reality can only be seriously countenanced when 
we've decided what we want to do with that reality.  Once we've determined 
the aims of our theorizing activity we can determine the essence of the 
problem (which is a description of the universal property or properties of 
the object of our theory) and then proceed to a rational determination of 
the concrete (particular) conditions of the world and of our activities 
relevant to the object of our theorizing.



With the development of new
technologies and new needs, (like the development of machinery and
instruments powered by electricity). One of the earliest examples of this
development in Physics was the birth (emergence?) Heisenberg principle in
Quantum physics.  Newtonian physics dealt with big things that could be
measured with instruments that  had no apparent effect whatsoever on the
measure itself, thus the measurement itself could be factored out of the
explanation of the activities of the things measured.  Small particle, 
high

energy physics deals with things so small and so sensitive to the effects
even of light that physicists must at very least take into account the
effect of their measuring activities on the subjects of their research.

As I suggest below the big revolution in modern natural science, the
revolution that is giving birth to concepts such as autopoiesis, emergence
and non-linear causality (attractors and Feigenbaum trees) is mostly, (if
not mistaken the attractor was first formally described by Lorenz in 1963 
a

weatherman and the term "strange attractor was first used in 1971 by
Ruelle and Takens to describe fluid dynamics) connected to the 
investigation
of systems that are ever more sensitive to our handling of their 
components;

such as weather, the behaviour of ecosystems, animal ethology and so o

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Steve,
Doesn't it make you wonder? A philosopher who regards the Diamat and 
all that utter rubbish as theory to be comparable to the works of Marx, 
Lenin, Deborin and Ilyenkov?  It's Propaganda, certainly, theory, never!


I'll never forget my old man's colourful reaction to Stalin's perceptive 
contribution to linguistics, and he didn't even finish High School!


Do you think D Bakhurst classifies the classic philosophic work, Mein Kampf, 
Rosenburg's brilliant meanderings about race and destiny, and Mussolini's 
masterful contributions to human thought as serious theory?


Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
thethinkers he inspired" 

Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 0:36
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


I continue to enjoy this thread, but will be gone for some days and it will 
probably be a little while after that before I can reengage.  I will think 
about the position Charles and Ralph have taken on the relationship of the 
brain to the origins of humanity.  I think Engels' argument about how labor 
created the human hand applies also to the brain, language organs, 
bipedalism, etc. so I will try to make a case for that.  And I have been 
enjoying the exchanges between Ralph and Victor, especially on the issues 
of the role of practice in science, the nature of scientific thought, and 
the big question, just what is nature - and can humans really "know" what 
nature is in any fundamental ontological sense.  I recently read the book 
by Bakhurst that Victor mentions, and have a different take on it.  Briefly 
put, I disagree with Bakhurst's negative assessment of Leninist politics, 
his tendency to see Stalinism as a form of Bolshevism, and his general 
opinion of dialectics.  But I agree with many of his insights into Ilyenkov 
and Vygotsky.


Oops, got to get packing.  See you all again soon.

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

I'm writing up an alternative interpretation to Ilyenkov's writings on 
ideality as the integration of the concept of ideality into Marxist-Leninist 
Theory.  When I finish that...

Thanks for the offer.
Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 16:22
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


Yes, I have this book somewhere.  So are you going to forward your review 
to this list?


At 03:31 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Unfortunately, the mainstay of Western interpretations of

Ilyenkov's works is the absolutely wierd product of a Brit academic who
represents them as a sort of sociologically oriented form of 
Neo-positivism

(itself a contradiction!).  I wrote a first draft on his work that was
totally unsatisfactory (too lacking in focus), and am now finishing up 
the
outline of a revision which hopefully will be the basis of a more 
accurate

presentation than was my first effort.


I don't quite get this.  But my first question is: who is this Brit 
neo-positivist academic?


Dave Bakhurst of Queens College Ontario and author of Consciousness and 
Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. 
1991



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Commentary inserted below:

- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 16:35
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Very interesting post.  Just a few isolated comments to begin . . .

At 03:10 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

..

The fact that life forms activities are directed to concrete future 
states, they are, no matter how simple or mechanical, exercises in reason. 
This why, if you will permit a reference to an earlier thread, I regard 
the investigation into biosemiology to be a vitally important exploration 
of the roots of reason.  The most primitive forms of self reproduction are 
a totally mechanical process yet

they are at the very root of the rational process.

We are not here proposing that nature has a rational aspect, a la Spinoza.
As I wrote earlier I really have no idea what nature or Nature is. What I 
am

proposing is that the roots of rationality are in the mechanical purposive
activity of life forms and that whatever life forms "know" [including
ourselves of course] is a function of our practical activities in nature
FROM THE VERY ORIGINS OF THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE in whatever form it
may be acquired, stored, recovered etc.




But biosemiology itself seems to be rather obscurantist, more akin to 
Whitehead's philosophy of organism than to Marx.


I'm more interested in Sharov's work (despite indications that his general 
methodological approach is Dubrovskian*) than in Hoffmeyer and the Western 
Biosemiologists.


2.  Objectivity:  In its essence objectivity refers to conscious 
reflection
on something rather than the reflection of something in consciousness. 
That

is to say that objectivity is the function of a activity and not something
we passively assimilate as we confront the daily world.  Some of the 
things

or, better, activities we objectify (very few in my opinion) are those of
our own subjective consciousness.  Most are not.  Most of our objectifying
involves activities that are the preconditions for our own subjectivities,
either the activities that emerge out of the collective subjective 
activities
of men learned or developed in the course of collaborative activities 
while

others involve activities that are preconditions for consciousness in all
its aspects.  Hegel, for example, divides his system of logic into two
parts, objective logic and subjective logic or notional logic where the
former is that logic which we enact without subjective reflection. 
Objective

logic is objective because the only way we can deal with it intellectually
in any other fashion than just doing it is as an object of reflection [I
expect AB to come down on me like a ton of bricks on this one].

In its many concrete manifestations in human activity, intellectual and
material, the principle of self-perpetuation, at least for men, is as
subjective an issue as is the concept of self; the idea of property, of
individual interests and even of "family values" are directly related to 
the

activity of  primitive self-perpetuation, though highly charged with many
concrete connections to the complexities of human social existence.  These
slogans of  superficial individualism  of  Social Darwinism and its
inheritors, the bio-sociologists and others like them, only scratch the
surface of things.  Regarded objectively, the self-perpetuating activity 
of
life forms is sublated in virtually all forms of human activity from 
eating

and intercourse to social labour, wage slavery, and social revolution.


Sounds like some version of Lenin's (or the Soviets' in general) theory of 
reflection.  Life activity is a form of reflection.  However, the 'roots 
of reason' strike me as no more than roots, not reason.


No, not at all.  As you must of read further on in this message I reject 
Lenin's passivist, "reflection in consciousness", for the activist, 
"conscious reflection on...".

See point 2 in the original message:
"2.  Objectivity:  In its essence objectivity refers to conscious reflection
on something rather than the reflection of something in consciousness.  That
is to say that objectivity is the function of a activity and not something
we passively assimilate as we confront the daily world. "


...
The natural sciences reflect exactly this relation between intellect and
practice.  There are no real ontological truths in science.  Nothing is 
holy

or beyond question and the only real proof is a sort of abstracted form of
practice, experimentation.  Whatever ontologising scientists do, and some
do, is tolerated by the scientific community only insofar as it remains
speculation and does not interfere with the scientific process.  Great
scientists have had "ideas";  Newton philosophized that the world was a
clock wound up by the creator and then left t

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

I continue to enjoy this thread, but will be gone for some days and it will 
probably be a little while after that before I can reengage.  I will think 
about the position Charles and Ralph have taken on the relationship of the 
brain to the origins of humanity.  I think Engels' argument about how labor 
created the human hand applies also to the brain, language organs, 
bipedalism, etc. so I will try to make a case for that.  And I have been 
enjoying the exchanges between Ralph and Victor, especially on the issues 
of the role of practice in science, the nature of scientific thought, and 
the big question, just what is nature - and can humans really "know" what 
nature is in any fundamental ontological sense.  I recently read the book 
by Bakhurst that Victor mentions, and have a different take on it.  Briefly 
put, I disagree with Bakhurst's negative assessment of Leninist politics, 
his tendency to see Stalinism as a form of Bolshevism, and his general 
opinion of dialectics.  But I agree with many of his insights into Ilyenkov 
and Vygotsky.


Oops, got to get packing.  See you all again soon.

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Very interesting post.  Just a few isolated comments to begin . . .

At 03:10 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

..

The fact that life forms activities are directed to concrete future 
states, they are, no matter how simple or mechanical, exercises in 
reason.  This why, if you will permit a reference to an earlier thread, I 
regard the investigation into biosemiology to be a vitally important 
exploration of the roots of reason.  The most primitive forms of self 
reproduction are a totally mechanical process yet

they are at the very root of the rational process.

We are not here proposing that nature has a rational aspect, a la Spinoza.
As I wrote earlier I really have no idea what nature or Nature is. What I am
proposing is that the roots of rationality are in the mechanical purposive
activity of life forms and that whatever life forms "know" [including
ourselves of course] is a function of our practical activities in nature
FROM THE VERY ORIGINS OF THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE in whatever form it
may be acquired, stored, recovered etc.




But biosemiology itself seems to be rather obscurantist, more akin to 
Whitehead's philosophy of organism than to Marx.




2.  Objectivity:  In its essence objectivity refers to conscious reflection
on something rather than the reflection of something in consciousness.  That
is to say that objectivity is the function of a activity and not something
we passively assimilate as we confront the daily world.  Some of the things
or, better, activities we objectify (very few in my opinion) are those of
our own subjective consciousness.  Most are not.  Most of our objectifying
involves activities that are the preconditions for our own subjectivities,
either the activities that emerge out of the collective subjective activities
of men learned or developed in the course of collaborative activities while
others involve activities that are preconditions for consciousness in all
its aspects.  Hegel, for example, divides his system of logic into two
parts, objective logic and subjective logic or notional logic where the
former is that logic which we enact without subjective reflection. Objective
logic is objective because the only way we can deal with it intellectually
in any other fashion than just doing it is as an object of reflection [I
expect AB to come down on me like a ton of bricks on this one].

In its many concrete manifestations in human activity, intellectual and
material, the principle of self-perpetuation, at least for men, is as
subjective an issue as is the concept of self; the idea of property, of
individual interests and even of "family values" are directly related to the
activity of  primitive self-perpetuation, though highly charged with many
concrete connections to the complexities of human social existence.  These
slogans of  superficial individualism  of  Social Darwinism and its
inheritors, the bio-sociologists and others like them, only scratch the
surface of things.  Regarded objectively, the self-perpetuating activity of
life forms is sublated in virtually all forms of human activity from eating
and intercourse to social labour, wage slavery, and social revolution.


Sounds like some version of Lenin's (or the Soviets' in general) theory of 
reflection.  Life activity is a form of reflection.  However, the 'roots of 
reason' strike me as no more than roots, not reason.



...
The natural sciences reflect exactly this relation between intellect and
practice.  There are no real ontological truths in science.  Nothing is holy
or beyond question and the only real proof is a sort of abstracted form of
practice, experimentation.  Whatever ontologising scientists do, and some
do, is tolerated by the scientific community only insofar as it remains
speculation and does not interfere with the scientific process.  Great
scientists have had "ideas";  Newton philosophized that the world was a
clock wound up by the creator and then left to its own devices,  Einstein
was sure that "God does not play dice", and Hawkins was until a few years
ago sure that unified field theory would answer all the questions of
physics.  Most of these and many more are, fortunately, either forgotten or
on the way to being forgotten, though the scientific contributions of their
makers remain important, even vital, components of the giant artefactual
system men have built to enable their persistence in the world.


The Royal Society started this practice, to keep metaphysics and theology 
out of empirical science.



Finally, the natural science of human activity and history, and this is what
Historical Materialism, should be and sometimes is, can least afford the
ontologising  forays that occasionally crop up in fields such as physics,
chemistry and organic sciences.  The very abstractness of the subjects of
these sciences renders the prononciamentos of important scientists fairly
harmless in the long run.  The natural science of human a

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Yes, I have this book somewhere.  So are you going to forward your review 
to this list?


At 03:31 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Unfortunately, the mainstay of Western interpretations of

Ilyenkov's works is the absolutely wierd product of a Brit academic who
represents them as a sort of sociologically oriented form of Neo-positivism
(itself a contradiction!).  I wrote a first draft on his work that was
totally unsatisfactory (too lacking in focus), and am now finishing up the
outline of a revision which hopefully will be the basis of a more accurate
presentation than was my first effort.


I don't quite get this.  But my first question is: who is this Brit 
neo-positivist academic?


Dave Bakhurst of Queens College Ontario and author of Consciousness and 
Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. 1991



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

I've inteleaved my comments in the foliage of your commentary.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 3:51
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Interleaved comments on further fragments of your post:

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
I see your not going to let me deal with the dogmatics of classical
materialism briefly.

The kernel of my argument is that in general, discourse segregated from
practice can only be theological, i.e. concerning articles of faith rather
than descriptions of demonstrable practice. I say in general, since
scientists usually discuss their findings with only minimal reference to 
the
practicalities that are the origins and ultimate objects of their work. 
This

is mostly a manifestation of the extreme division of labour that isolates
professional researchers from all but the immediate subjects of their 
work.

In any case, I've yet to see a monograph or article of a natural scientist
that presents his work as having universal significance. There are
exceptions to this rule such as Hawkins in physics and Dawkins in 
population
genetics, and the result is invariably utter nonsense. I'm referring here 
to
Hawkins conviction that unified field theory will provide an ultimate 
theory

of the physical world and to Dawkin's projection of the mechanics of
population genetics to the science of culture (memics and all that).

Science as the theory of practice is implicitly restricted in relevance to
the conditions of the moment (even when the problems it is designed to 
treat
are projected into the near or far future). The discoveries of this kind 
of

science are inevitably relevant only to the particular circumstances of
their production, and to the specific subjects of their focus and have no
claim as eternal truths.  Einstein, Newton and Galileo will never acquire
the sainthood of the revealers of final truths.  On the contrary, their
ideas will only remain significant so long as they are relevant to the
practices and technologies that we men need to perpetuate ourselves,
"ourselves" here meaning the entire complex of organic and inorganic
components of our individual and collective life activities.  Thus, 
science

as the theory of practice is an inherently revolutionary activity.


This is interesting as a vantage point, i.e. beginning from the scope of 
praxis and explaining why scientists can be blockheads when they venture 
beyond the specific praxis that enabled them to achieve what they did. 
But I find this approach more credible when it is re-routed back to 
objectivity.


Come again?

Discussion on the nature of being, on the substance of nature, and so on 
is

from the point of view of historical materialism no less restricted to the
conditions of its production than is practical science.  However, the
inherent object of such discussions is the determination of the absolute 
and

final nature of things at all places and in all times.  The ostensible
object of the advocates of such metaphysical finalities is the expression 
of

ultimate truths regarding the universe and its parts, the absolute
contradiction to the objects of practice and the science of practice.

Anyway, it is one thing to develop theories concerning particularities of
that grand everything we call nature, it's quite another to present
particular results as universals about the universe.  The former can be
demonstrated, proved if you will, the latter extends beyond all
possibilities of human experience, hence it can only be a product either 
of

divine revelation or of normative practice, i.e. ethos. I prefer ethos to
divine revelation.


I'm afraid I don't quite grasp this.  You are suggesting, I think, that 
general ontological pronouncements not tied to some current concerns of 
praxis become fruitless or even retrograde metaphysics.  I don't quite 
agree with this, but I do agree that these traditional philosophical 
concerns become more dynamic and fruitful when connected to specific 
problems of the present.


The utility of general ontological pronouncements is not in question. 
Undoubtedly they are useful otherwise they would never be made.  I'm arguing 
that ontological pronouncements are retrograde metaphysics and bad science.

..
> I think you're right.  The question then is--how to put this?--the line 
> of

> demarcation between nature in itself and . . . nature for us . . . and
> science.  I've been cautious about making claims about the 'dialectics 
> of
> nature' in se, i.e. apart from our methods of analysis (which I guess 
> you

> might call 'contemplative'.  This is the old problem, as traditional
> terminology puts it, of the relation between (or very existence of)
> subjective (dialectical logic as subject of debate

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

The problem here is simply that I'm not sure of the ground of our 
discussion. If this is tautological to you, then we share at very least the 
point of view that science is at root a product of men's response to their 
needs and not simply a reflection of the universe in consciousness.

Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:15
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


Well, my reaction here re-invokes my sense of the tautology of all such 
arguments.  That is, there can be no meaningful claims about the universe 
apart from our interaction with the universe since we can't make any 
claims about anything without interacting with the phenomena about which 
we are making claims.  Your claim that all our knowledge claims about the 
universe from the Big Bang on, are expressions of human need, is 
tautologically true, and hence not very interesting or revealing.


At 11:51 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:


- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


>
> but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
adjust
> itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or 
> less

> conscioulsy by labour?
>
> NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION 
> WITH

THE
> WORLD

Whether or not nature has a history is a question for nature, of little
relevance for the practical realization of human needs.

Man, in order to better determine his needs and the means necessary to
realize them investigates through reason and practice (experimentation and
informed search) the development of the relevant (essential) incohoate
features of the natural world, including those of his own activities.  The
result is the objective determinations of past events in the natural world
and of their relevance to the form and substance of our current needs and 
to

the realization of these in practical activity. The laws and principles as
well as the developmental schemas produced by our research into what is
called Natural History are a product of and the means for realization of
strictly human objectives. Is this a history of nature?  Well, we are
ourselves an integral part and force of the natural world and the massive
array of objects we depend on for perpetuation of our life activity have
their ultimate origin in nature, but that's a far cry from arguing that
human beings and their essential equipage is identical with the totality 
of

nature or that our activity in nature involves nature as a whole.
Regards,
Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

My full response is in the prior message. So here I'll just make a couple of 
short responses (see below).
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:24
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Your reasoning is fine up until the braking point I note below.

At 03:10 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Steve,
Well, now I know what comes after the .

First paragraph:
Oudeyis is saying nothing about what nature is, but rather is writing that
whatever understandings man has of nature are a function primarily of his
active interaction (his labour) with the natural conditions of his
existence.  The difference between knowing what nature is (i.e. its
essential being or "nature" if you will) and having a working knowledge of
world conditions is all the difference between the treatment of nature in
Marxist and classical materialist theory.  Now then, the only part of 
nature

humanity can  know is that part of it with which he has some sort of
contact, and at least for Marxism, the only part of nature about which man
can develop theories of practice is that which he can or has changed in 
some

fashion.  When it comes to explaining the practical foundation scientific
cosmology we argue that the theories regarding the behaviour of huge 
masses

of material over barely conceivable periods of time and spatial dimensions
are projections based more often as not on experimentation with some of 
the

very smallest of the universe's components; atoms, quarks, and so on).
Anyway, its hard to imagine how men would know things about which they 
have

absolutely no experience and how they would know how things work without a
working experience with them or with things like them. Divine revelation
perhaps?  Finally, there is no doubt that nature must also include that
which is beyond the observed and acted upon and that its existence is
important for the creation of a materialist ideology. There are three ways
the "unknown" makes itself felt in material human experience:

1.The fact that human practice and the science that represents it in 
thought

is open ended or, better yet, appears to have no outward limits is a clear
indication of the existence of more to nature than that which is treated 
by

our current state of knowledge and practice.

2. The classic observations by Marx in the first chapter of German 
Ideology
(1845) and the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1844) that the physical 
and
sensual interface between man a nature in human labour is far more 
concrete

than can ever be represented by even the most developed dialectics.  The
rational representation of men's activity in the world is then an 
inherently

uncompletable task.

3.  Hegel in his discussion of being makes the point that the logical
formula A = A has no demonstrable correspondence with actual experience;
diversity is an inherent property of identity (Andy B. presents a pretty
thorough discussion on this in his The Meaning of Hegel, Chapter iv 
section,

" Diversity(essential Identity )" ).  The whole basis of all rational
activity, all dialectics, conscious and unconscious, deliberated and
automatic, is the unity between the essential transitoriness of 
experienced
moments and the determination of identities; qualities, quantities, 
measure
and all the other things we have to "know" to develop a working model of 
the

world.  It's the unity of logical categorization and the essential
temporality of immediate experience that fuels the dialectic and makes it 
so

important a tool for exploration of the unknown.

Second paragraph:
The clarification of what exactly is the significance of the *objective*
nature of nature is probably Ilyenkov's most important contributions to
Scientific Marxism. Indeed for orthodox Marxists, including Lenin in his
earlier writings (prior at very least to his readings in Hegel in 1914 and
possibly as early as his article on Emprio-positivism), did indeed inherit
the classical materialist concept of the objectivity of nature in the
metaphysical sense of the essential being of nature; known, unknown,
whatever.   Ilyenkov in the last paragraphs of chapter 8 of Dialectical
Logic summarizes the reasoning that is the basis of the concept of nature 
as

prior to and independently of humankind.


So far so good.


Here he distinguishes between Marx
and Engel's theories of human activity and Hegel's idealism by
recapitulating their description of man as a product and force of nature
that transforms nature into the instruments of his activity in 
appropriating
nature's goods and producing from them the means for the perpetuation of 
his

body organic and inorganic.


Fine, except that with the diversification of human expertise, the 
self-reproduction of society's cognitive and practical interests means 
that some investigati

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

tologising scientists do, and some
do, is tolerated by the scientific community only insofar as it remains
speculation and does not interfere with the scientific process.  Great
scientists have had "ideas";  Newton philosophized that the world was a
clock wound up by the creator and then left to its own devices,  Einstein
was sure that "God does not play dice", and Hawkins was until a few years
ago sure that unified field theory would answer all the questions of
physics.  Most of these and many more are, fortunately, either forgotten or
on the way to being forgotten, though the scientific contributions of their
makers remain important, even vital, components of the giant artefactual
system men have built to enable their persistence in the world.

Finally, the natural science of human activity and history, and this is what
Historical Materialism, should be and sometimes is, can least afford the
ontologising  forays that occasionally crop up in fields such as physics,
chemistry and organic sciences.  The very abstractness of the subjects of
these sciences renders the prononciamentos of important scientists fairly
harmless in the long run.  The natural science of human activity is as
concrete as a science can be.  It deals directly with human activity and
with its consequences, and philosophic dogmatism of the left and of the
right can only cause disaster, to real people and real communities
(as we have witnessed in the past and as we do witness today).  The only way
to avoid these disasters, to the extent they can be avoided at all, is
through adopting a critical and practical approach to theorizing and to
subject every idea to serious debate and testing much as we are doing here.
Oudeyis


- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:28
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



A question on one of your assertions:


 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.


How can dialectics be a property of all life no matter how primitive when
you deny a dialectics of nature apart from praxis, which assumes cognitive
activity?  Is an amoeba a being-for-itself in addition to a
being-in-itself?

At 03:47 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Nicely put.

Several tentative responses:
The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is
> dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings? Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?

Following Hegel's schema of the development of logic, I would argue that
just as there is objective logic (i.e. logical activity that can only be
"known reflectively" as an object of reflection) there is an objective
dialectic.  The basic kernel of both logic and dialectic (they are after
all
the same) is purposive activity.  It matters not that the agents of
purposive activity are fully or even at all conscious of their cognitive
activity, the very prosecution of intentional activity implies
logic/dialectics.

 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.

> Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the natural world
independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?

I think I gave a partial answer to this question in my response to Steve's
last message.  The products of human activity should never be regarded as
the issue of pure logic or of the unfettered human imagination.  Even
Hegel
would not accept this proposal.

Science no less then the material products of human labour represent a
unity
of human activity in an independent external world that has existed prior
to
man's emergence and confronts men's ambitions with conditions to which he
must accommodate his activity if they are to realize their goals.  Labour
is
a cooperative activity in which men work with nature as their partner.

Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there
> is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man,
>

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

A question on one of your assertions:


 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.


How can dialectics be a property of all life no matter how primitive when 
you deny a dialectics of nature apart from praxis, which assumes cognitive 
activity?  Is an amoeba a being-for-itself in addition to a being-in-itself?


At 03:47 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Nicely put.

Several tentative responses:
The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings? Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?

Following Hegel's schema of the development of logic, I would argue that
just as there is objective logic (i.e. logical activity that can only be
"known reflectively" as an object of reflection) there is an objective
dialectic.  The basic kernel of both logic and dialectic (they are after all
the same) is purposive activity.  It matters not that the agents of
purposive activity are fully or even at all conscious of their cognitive
activity, the very prosecution of intentional activity implies
logic/dialectics.

 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.

> Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the natural world
independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?

I think I gave a partial answer to this question in my response to Steve's
last message.  The products of human activity should never be regarded as
the issue of pure logic or of the unfettered human imagination.  Even Hegel
would not accept this proposal.

Science no less then the material products of human labour represent a unity
of human activity in an independent external world that has existed prior to
man's emergence and confronts men's ambitions with conditions to which he
must accommodate his activity if they are to realize their goals.  Labour is
a cooperative activity in which men work with nature as their partner.

Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science
> as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically,
> we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't
> speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical
> possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings?  Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?  Again,
> here's the ambiguity.  Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the
> natural world independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?
>
> More to come.
>
> At 12:14 PM 5/27/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> >can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> >dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
> >adjust
> >itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> >conscioulsy by labour?
> >
> >NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> >IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> >WORLD



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Your reasoning is fine up until the braking point I note below.

At 03:10 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Steve,
Well, now I know what comes after the .

First paragraph:
Oudeyis is saying nothing about what nature is, but rather is writing that
whatever understandings man has of nature are a function primarily of his
active interaction (his labour) with the natural conditions of his
existence.  The difference between knowing what nature is (i.e. its
essential being or "nature" if you will) and having a working knowledge of
world conditions is all the difference between the treatment of nature in
Marxist and classical materialist theory.  Now then, the only part of nature
humanity can  know is that part of it with which he has some sort of
contact, and at least for Marxism, the only part of nature about which man
can develop theories of practice is that which he can or has changed in some
fashion.  When it comes to explaining the practical foundation scientific
cosmology we argue that the theories regarding the behaviour of huge masses
of material over barely conceivable periods of time and spatial dimensions
are projections based more often as not on experimentation with some of the
very smallest of the universe's components; atoms, quarks, and so on).
Anyway, its hard to imagine how men would know things about which they have
absolutely no experience and how they would know how things work without a
working experience with them or with things like them. Divine revelation
perhaps?  Finally, there is no doubt that nature must also include that
which is beyond the observed and acted upon and that its existence is
important for the creation of a materialist ideology. There are three ways
the "unknown" makes itself felt in material human experience:

1.The fact that human practice and the science that represents it in thought
is open ended or, better yet, appears to have no outward limits is a clear
indication of the existence of more to nature than that which is treated by
our current state of knowledge and practice.

2. The classic observations by Marx in the first chapter of German Ideology
(1845) and the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1844) that the physical and
sensual interface between man a nature in human labour is far more concrete
than can ever be represented by even the most developed dialectics.  The
rational representation of men's activity in the world is then an inherently
uncompletable task.

3.  Hegel in his discussion of being makes the point that the logical
formula A = A has no demonstrable correspondence with actual experience;
diversity is an inherent property of identity (Andy B. presents a pretty
thorough discussion on this in his The Meaning of Hegel, Chapter iv section,
" Diversity(essential Identity )" ).  The whole basis of all rational
activity, all dialectics, conscious and unconscious, deliberated and
automatic, is the unity between the essential transitoriness of experienced
moments and the determination of identities; qualities, quantities, measure
and all the other things we have to "know" to develop a working model of the
world.  It's the unity of logical categorization and the essential
temporality of immediate experience that fuels the dialectic and makes it so
important a tool for exploration of the unknown.

Second paragraph:
The clarification of what exactly is the significance of the *objective*
nature of nature is probably Ilyenkov's most important contributions to
Scientific Marxism. Indeed for orthodox Marxists, including Lenin in his
earlier writings (prior at very least to his readings in Hegel in 1914 and
possibly as early as his article on Emprio-positivism), did indeed inherit
the classical materialist concept of the objectivity of nature in the
metaphysical sense of the essential being of nature; known, unknown,
whatever.   Ilyenkov in the last paragraphs of chapter 8 of Dialectical
Logic summarizes the reasoning that is the basis of the concept of nature as
prior to and independently of humankind.


So far so good.


Here he distinguishes between Marx
and Engel's theories of human activity and Hegel's idealism by
recapitulating their description of man as a product and force of nature
that transforms nature into the instruments of his activity in appropriating
nature's goods and producing from them the means for the perpetuation of his
body organic and inorganic.


Fine, except that with the diversification of human expertise, the 
self-reproduction of society's cognitive and practical interests means that 
some investigations by some individuals may not necessarily be directed 
towards the ends of instrumental self-preservation, though of course 
indirectly every human activity--play being the most universal 
example--develops skills that are always instrumentally useful in the end.




Nothing could more clearly describe the
independence of abstract nature from the emergence of human activity in the
world.   After all, if man has his origins in the d

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Well, my reaction here re-invokes my sense of the tautology of all such 
arguments.  That is, there can be no meaningful claims about the universe 
apart from our interaction with the universe since we can't make any claims 
about anything without interacting with the phenomena about which we are 
making claims.  Your claim that all our knowledge claims about the universe 
from the Big Bang on, are expressions of human need, is tautologically 
true, and hence not very interesting or revealing.


At 11:51 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:


- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


>
> but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
adjust
> itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> conscioulsy by labour?
>
> NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> WORLD

Whether or not nature has a history is a question for nature, of little
relevance for the practical realization of human needs.

Man, in order to better determine his needs and the means necessary to
realize them investigates through reason and practice (experimentation and
informed search) the development of the relevant (essential) incohoate
features of the natural world, including those of his own activities.  The
result is the objective determinations of past events in the natural world
and of their relevance to the form and substance of our current needs and to
the realization of these in practical activity. The laws and principles as
well as the developmental schemas produced by our research into what is
called Natural History are a product of and the means for realization of
strictly human objectives. Is this a history of nature?  Well, we are
ourselves an integral part and force of the natural world and the massive
array of objects we depend on for perpetuation of our life activity have
their ultimate origin in nature, but that's a far cry from arguing that
human beings and their essential equipage is identical with the totality of
nature or that our activity in nature involves nature as a whole.
Regards,
Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Interleaved comments on further fragments of your post:

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
I see your not going to let me deal with the dogmatics of classical
materialism briefly.

The kernel of my argument is that in general, discourse segregated from
practice can only be theological, i.e. concerning articles of faith rather
than descriptions of demonstrable practice. I say in general, since
scientists usually discuss their findings with only minimal reference to the
practicalities that are the origins and ultimate objects of their work. This
is mostly a manifestation of the extreme division of labour that isolates
professional researchers from all but the immediate subjects of their work.
In any case, I've yet to see a monograph or article of a natural scientist
that presents his work as having universal significance. There are
exceptions to this rule such as Hawkins in physics and Dawkins in population
genetics, and the result is invariably utter nonsense. I'm referring here to
Hawkins conviction that unified field theory will provide an ultimate theory
of the physical world and to Dawkin's projection of the mechanics of
population genetics to the science of culture (memics and all that).

Science as the theory of practice is implicitly restricted in relevance to
the conditions of the moment (even when the problems it is designed to treat
are projected into the near or far future). The discoveries of this kind of
science are inevitably relevant only to the particular circumstances of
their production, and to the specific subjects of their focus and have no
claim as eternal truths.  Einstein, Newton and Galileo will never acquire
the sainthood of the revealers of final truths.  On the contrary, their
ideas will only remain significant so long as they are relevant to the
practices and technologies that we men need to perpetuate ourselves,
"ourselves" here meaning the entire complex of organic and inorganic
components of our individual and collective life activities.  Thus, science
as the theory of practice is an inherently revolutionary activity.


This is interesting as a vantage point, i.e. beginning from the scope of 
praxis and explaining why scientists can be blockheads when they venture 
beyond the specific praxis that enabled them to achieve what they did.  But 
I find this approach more credible when it is re-routed back to objectivity.




Discussion on the nature of being, on the substance of nature, and so on is
from the point of view of historical materialism no less restricted to the
conditions of its production than is practical science.  However, the
inherent object of such discussions is the determination of the absolute and
final nature of things at all places and in all times.  The ostensible
object of the advocates of such metaphysical finalities is the expression of
ultimate truths regarding the universe and its parts, the absolute
contradiction to the objects of practice and the science of practice.

Anyway, it is one thing to develop theories concerning particularities of
that grand everything we call nature, it's quite another to present
particular results as universals about the universe.  The former can be
demonstrated, proved if you will, the latter extends beyond all
possibilities of human experience, hence it can only be a product either of
divine revelation or of normative practice, i.e. ethos. I prefer ethos to
divine revelation.


I'm afraid I don't quite grasp this.  You are suggesting, I think, that 
general ontological pronouncements not tied to some current concerns of 
praxis become fruitless or even retrograde metaphysics.  I don't quite 
agree with this, but I do agree that these traditional philosophical 
concerns become more dynamic and fruitful when connected to specific 
problems of the present.



..
> I think you're right.  The question then is--how to put this?--the line of
> demarcation between nature in itself and . . . nature for us . . . and
> science.  I've been cautious about making claims about the 'dialectics of
> nature' in se, i.e. apart from our methods of analysis (which I guess you
> might call 'contemplative'.  This is the old problem, as traditional
> terminology puts it, of the relation between (or very existence of)
> subjective (dialectical logic as subject of debate) and objective
> dialectics (which, with respect to nature, is the focus of positive and
> negative engagements with dialectical thought).  It's not clear to me
> whether you would go along with my various analyses of this problematic
> over the past dozen years, or even accept such a conceptual
> distinction.  But I think that the mess we've inherited shows up its
> historical importance.  While I agree we need an overarching conception
> that somehow interrelates "nature, society, and thought", the direct
> identification of all of these components with the same dialectical laws
> is, I think, a logically blurred mistake.  I believe this implicit p

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Note my interleaved comments on a fragment of a key post of yours

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
> I don't see this.  I see the problem this way: that stage of the
> development of materialism is inadequate to grasp the nature of human
> activity, both practical and cognitive.  Labels such as 'nature as such'
or
> 'contemplative' don't work for me without such clarification, though it
> does seem that your characterization here is consistent with me though
> apparently not synonymous.  The old materialism, as well as the course of
> development of modern natural science, is such that it begins with the
> study of the lowest levels of the organization of matter and works its way
> up.  But once it works its way up to the human species itself as an object
> of study, its intellectual limitations become manifest.  And I think this
> is where Marx intervenes.

 If I understand you correctly, you argue that so long as the natural
sciences dealt with phenomena that was simple enough to contemplate without
our needing to be aware o the activity of the contemplating subject, the old
materialism served as a sufficient paradigm for explanations of the
observed.  It is only when we deal with men, i.e. ourselves that we must
take into account our own subjectivity to understand what's going on.

 I prefer to stand your argument on its head.  As long as human needs could
(and given the available technology, only could) be satisfied by
manipulation of his world on a purely mechanical level, the contemplative
and mechanical paradigms of classical materialism was a viable system for
explaining the effectiveness of human practice.


In turn, I could stand your argument on its head.  What is the vantage 
point: objective reality with the relation of human practice as a 
reflection of it, or the justification of practice by its ability to 
fulfill needs?  Either vantage point could be considered a question of 
perspective from one angle or the other.  They could be equivalent.  Yet I 
see my argument as basic as yours as derivative, though that perspective is 
also valid, i.e. explaining the effectiveness of human practice under 
defined conditions.




With the development of new
technologies and new needs, (like the development of machinery and
instruments powered by electricity). One of the earliest examples of this
development in Physics was the birth (emergence?) Heisenberg principle in
Quantum physics.  Newtonian physics dealt with big things that could be
measured with instruments that  had no apparent effect whatsoever on the
measure itself, thus the measurement itself could be factored out of the
explanation of the activities of the things measured.  Small particle, high
energy physics deals with things so small and so sensitive to the effects
even of light that physicists must at very least take into account the
effect of their measuring activities on the subjects of their research.

As I suggest below the big revolution in modern natural science, the
revolution that is giving birth to concepts such as autopoiesis, emergence
and non-linear causality (attractors and Feigenbaum trees) is mostly, (if
not mistaken the attractor was first formally described by Lorenz in 1963 a
weatherman and the term "strange attractor was first used in 1971 by
Ruelle and Takens to describe fluid dynamics) connected to the investigation
of systems that are ever more sensitive to our handling of their components;
such as weather, the behaviour of ecosystems, animal ethology and so on.
This is of course a function of the kinds of needs that our once largely
mechanical handling of the conditions of our existence has produced.  Thus,
for example, the development of air transport has created an urgent demand
for extremely accurate weather prediction, much more accurate than the
simple Newtonian based physics of atmospherics and energetics (the
meteorology we learned in Highschool) can provide. The modern aircraft which
is still, perhaps only barely, a mechanical instrument has compelled the
development of meteorology into a science in which mechanism is entirely
sublated into a system that cannot be regarded as mechanical by any
definition.


But note it's not just our needs, but the objectivity of the realities 
under investigation, for whatever reason we needed to engage them, that 
force methodological and philosophical revisions.  One could easily argue 
for a dialectics of nature on this basis and not just a dialectic of 
science.  Your perspective is interesting because it begins from the 
vantage point of practice.  But do you really prove anything different from 
my perspective?



It is not enough to explain the increasing dominance of processual and
teleological explanations in natural science as a function of the subjects
of scientific investigation.  This is obvious.  The real issue is the effect
of the development of human needs (mostly as a consequence of the
transformations men have ma

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

to CB
Right, I hear the same language.
Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 16:25
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Victor victor
Of course objectivity reality exists, but we have to realize that what 
Marx,


Lenin and other intelligent Marxists like Ilyenkov meant by objective
reality is not  reality contemplated by some totally uninvolved
philosophical being.  Just the reverse is true objective reality is only
known through what Lenin calls "revolutionary practice", the 
transformation
of one object into another through labour.  It is only when we know how 
and

under what conditions (including of course our own activities) an object
becomes something else that we cognize its real character.  This is as 
true
of the child knocking about a gewgaw hanging over his crib as it is for 
the

physicist smashing atoms.

There is virtually no aspect of human knowledge (not human activity) that 
is


truly a priori.
Oudeyis

^^
CB: Yes,in saying that objective reality exists, I did indicate any break
with The Theses on Feuerbach ,esp. 1, 2 and 11 here.  Marx distinguishes 
his

materialism from all those hitherto existing by  by making the subject
active not contemplative, like Feuerbach.  Practice is the test of theory,
otherwise it's scholastic. Philosophers have interpreted the world, the
thing is to change it.

Lenin's _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ is thoroughly infused with
Engels' elaboration of these principles in _Anti-Duhring_.




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O! Dialectics

[Ralph Dumain]

Don't forget the extensive discussion of materialism in THE HOLY FAMILY.

Of course, what distinguishes home sapiens from the other monkeys is not 
"labor" as an abstraction, but the brain difference, which means the 
genetic capacity for language and hence cultural transmission of 
information, plus the other distinguishing features such as upright gait, 
opposable thumbs.  Your point about "imagination" signals Marx's 
recognition of the cognitive difference.


At 10:12 AM 6/6/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

RE Lil Joe joe_radical

Lil Joe: Here, Charles, I think we have a major disagreement as far as
Marxian materialism is concerned. Marx never wrote of 'materialism' and
'idealism' as a discussion outside the context of the materialist conception
of history.

^
CB: He discusses materialism in "The Theses on Feuerbach".  Engels discusses
materialism beyond the materialist conception of history. See especially
_The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ for this
discussion.



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Re: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Ralph,
I see that Steve didn't respond directly to your question concerning these 
quotes from Ilyenkov.  Maybe I can help.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 5:42
Subject: Spam: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



I do not understand the meaning of the three quotes from Ilyenkov.

At 02:03 PM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

...
from my 1977 Progress edition, which I was lucky to get through the 
internet last year.  I corrected a couple scanning errors from the MIA 
version.


Copied from:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

from page 283:
"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of 
history."


I addressed  most of this question in my message to CB (04/06):

"Of course objectivity reality exists, but we have to realize that what 
Marx,

Lenin and other intelligent Marxists like Ilyenkov meant by objective
reality is not  reality contemplated by some totally uninvolved
philosophical being.  Just the reverse is true objective reality is only
known through what Lenin calls "revolutionary practice", the transformation
of one object into another through labour.  It is only when we know how and
under what conditions (including of course our own activities) an object
becomes something else that we cognize its real character.  This is as true
of the child knocking about a gewgaw hanging over his crib as it is for the
physicist smashing atoms".

Note that objective reality is here not a property of pristine nature or 
nature external to human intervention. Reality for Marx, Engels and Lenin a 
product of the activities of man in, on and with nature.


All that needs be added here is the fairly obvious observation that the 
child knocking about the gewgaw and the gewgaw hanging over his crib are 
products of history.



from page 285:
"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. The 
individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate the 
development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it a 
premise independent of the individual."


All this passage means is that logic (the logical categories of thought as 
developed by Hegel and adopted and modified by Marx and Engels) cannot be 
explained as the cogitive activity of the individual writ large.  Men learn 
to be logical from their elders and coworkers and only thinks in those 
logical categories he's succeeded in learning from others (  the results of 
Vygotsky's research on language learning appear to confirm this).  The 
individual does not invent logical method himself, it was invented long 
before he was born and naturally he was unable to participate in its 
formation.  For this reason psychology makes no significant contribution to 
the development of human culture.



from page 286-287:
"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws 
of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions on 
objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that are 
independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."


This is the most important of the three citations.  It makes the point that 
in making one object of nature act upon another object of nature in the 
process of producing some useful object men must design their activities to 
take into account the properties and laws that govern the results of their 
actions on the materials and on the interaction between the materials 
enforced by human action.  Thus if you use a ten kilo sledge to break a 
basalt boulder your focus of strength to lift it, your lifting the hammer 
head to just the right height, your letting it swing at the precise point of 
weakness in the boulder relying on the springiness of the sledge handle and 
the glassy surface of the rock and of cou

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Of course objectivity reality exists, but we have to realize that what Marx, 
Lenin and other intelligent Marxists like Ilyenkov meant by objective 
reality is not  reality contemplated by some totally uninvolved 
philosophical being.  Just the reverse is true objective reality is only 
known through what Lenin calls "revolutionary practice", the transformation 
of one object into another through labour.  It is only when we know how and 
under what conditions (including of course our own activities) an object 
becomes something else that we cognize its real character.  This is as true 
of the child knocking about a gewgaw hanging over his crib as it is for the 
physicist smashing atoms.


There is virtually no aspect of human knowledge (not human activity) that is 
truly a priori.

Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 22:48
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!







How about objective reality exists ( Lenin's definition of materialism in
_Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_) and we only know objective reality
through practice , or our interaction with it beyond contemplation ( First
and Second Theses on Feuerbach). Lenin formulated the idea of objective
reality in contrast with Berkeleyian idealism and solopsism. In other 
words,

we can't shape or make the world through our thoughts.

So far in human history, our interaction with it causes us to make the
generalization that objective reality is dialectical. I call this
generalization an _a posteriori_ ( to distinguish it from _a priori_, or
without experience)presumption ( as in law, a presumption that can be
rebutted by future experience, but for now we hold as true like an axiom 
in

math).

Charles


Oudeyis:

Steve,
Well, now I know what comes after the .

First paragraph:
Oudeyis is saying nothing about what nature is, but rather is writing that
whatever understandings man has of nature are a function primarily of his
active interaction (his labour) with the natural conditions of his
existence.  The difference between knowing what nature is (i.e. its
essential being or "nature" if you will) and having a working knowledge of
world conditions is all the difference between the treatment of nature in
Marxist and classical materialist theory.  Now then, the only part of 
nature

humanity can  know is that part of it with which he has some sort of
contact, and at least for Marxism, the only part of nature about which man
can develop theories of practice is that which he can or has changed in 
some

fashion.  When it comes to explaining the practical foundation scientific
cosmology we argue that the theories regarding the behaviour of huge 
masses

of material over barely conceivable periods of time and spatial dimensions
are projections based more often as not on experimentation with some of 
the

very smallest of the universe's components; atoms, quarks, and so on).
Anyway, its hard to imagine how men would know things about which they 
have

absolutely no experience and how they would know how things work without a
working experience with them or with things like them. Divine revelation
perhaps?  Finally, there is no doubt that nature must also include that
which is beyond the observed and acted upon and that its existence is
important for the creation of a materialist ideology. There are three ways
the "unknown" makes itself felt in material human experience:

1.The fact that human practice and the science that represents it in 
thought

is open ended or, better yet, appears to have no outward limits is a clear
indication of the existence of more to nature than that which is treated 
by

our current state of knowledge and practice.

2. The classic observations by Marx in the first chapter of German 
Ideology
(1845) and the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1844) that the physical 
and
sensual interface between man a nature in human labour is far more 
concrete

than can ever be represented by even the most developed dialectics.  The
rational representation of men's activity in the world is then an 
inherently

uncompletable task.

3.  Hegel in his discussion of being makes the point that the logical
formula A = A has no demonstrable correspondence with actual experience;
diversity is an inherent property of identity (Andy B. presents a pretty
thorough discussion on this in his The Meaning of Hegel, Chapter iv 
section,

" Diversity(essential Identity )" ).  The whole basis of all rational
activity, all dialectics, conscious and unconscious, deliberated and
automatic, is the unity between the essential transitoriness of 
experienced
moments and the determination of identities; qualities, quantities, 
measure
and all the other things we have to "know" to develop a working model of 
the

world.  It's the unity of logical categorization and the essential
temporality of immediate

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

True, hunters and gatherers do not raise their own food, but they do produce 
instruments that enhance if not enable the effectivity of their subsistence 
activity. Developed hunting and gathering practice appears often to be 
accompanied by collecting strategies that encourage the preservation of 
their food sources, such as never killing nursing young or pregnant game and 
taking care to leave some of the preferred plants in the ground to guarantee 
next year's crop.


Most proto or near humans exhibit some instrument enabled activity, some of 
it quite complex.  Try ant fishing with a bit of grass (a narrow fresh green 
leaf is best) as do the Chimpanzees.  Clearly, the earliest forms of tool 
assisted activity precede humanities emergence, men's special relations to 
tool making and use being more a matter of its high significance for his 
life activity rather than in its simple presence in a creature's repertoire 
of activities.


By the way, the key word in hunting and gathering is "gathering".  To gather 
means to collect a quantity of whatever is to be gathered and to take it 
home to enjoy later at the family meal.  Very little can be carried home in 
two closed fists. One may need not make a basket to collect greens, but they 
should be arranged in a bundle so that a few leaves can hold much more than 
a pair of hands.  Stems twisted to make string or even simple knots may well 
have been the first tools, but tools they are.

Oudeyis


- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx 
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 

Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 22:11
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!






Steve Gabosch quotes:



Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, 
a

step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual
material life.

^

CB: Actually this isn't quite true. The first human modes of production 
are

termed "hunting and gathering" because humans do not produce their own
subsistence, but rather gather what nature has produced without human
intervention. , so to speak. That doesn't happen until tens of thousands 
of

years after the origin of the human species with horticulture, farming and
domestication of animals.

I'm not sure what implication this has for our dialectics and nature
discussion

What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and
methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next.


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Did some further checking in MIA and you're quite correct, even when Marx 
discusses ancient astrology it, he treats it as a practical solution to a 
human problem, i.e. as a cosmic calendar, compass and clock.  From the point 
of view of Historical materialism the importance of science, even 
theoretical science is its role in the realization of practical human needs. 
The only other imaginable value of natural science for historical 
materialism is the development of more concrete understandings of those 
physical, chemical and organic processes that can be shown to have important 
consequences for the development of human activity and particularly of human 
social activity.

Oudeyis
- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 11:25
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


Well, if you got my point (2), the rest shouldn't be so mysterious.  M&E 
openly admit they're not going to tackle directly either the natural 
sciences as an intellectual enterprise or their objects of study (laws of 
nature).  At the same time they admit that's part of the picture, though 
they are specifically beginning their studies from the standpoint of 
historical materialism.  That's a pretty damn important point, esp. for 
those who would make claims about Marx's attitude to science.


As I recall, at that stage, Marx only really considers science as 
something that plays a role in industry--man's advanced interchange with 
nature.  Science as an intellectual activity in itself, as theorizing, 
method, or research, is not part of the picture at this time.  Hence, M&E 
do not turn their attention to the philosophy of the natural sciences.


I'll add to that: when Marx makes remarks criticizing prior materialism, 
this belongs to the history of philosophy, not actual modern science. 
Discussing Epicurus and Democritus or the French materialists is not 
engaging with science.  I'll add also, that a philosophy of nature is not 
a philosophy of science, if a perspective on scientific methodology as a 
means of understanding nature is not included in it.


BTW, Marx's early writings (vol. 1) includes some outline of Hegel's 
philosophy of nature.  But I don't really know how Marx may have used 
Hegel's PN.  Does anyone know something I don't?


At 12:06 AM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

Steve responds to a post from Ralph:

Ralph:
on 5/29/2005 at 12:48 PM Ralph explained, referring to the passage from 
M&E copied below:
... Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate historical 
analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this point.  Two 
conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category for Marx 
as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to 
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as 
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of 
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn"t practical interaction include natural 
scientific research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, ...


Steve:
I am with Ralph so far, but I am puzzled by where Ralph goes next:

Ralph:
... but note that Marx is onto the direct, practical transformation of 
nature as it applies to material production and not that aspect of it 
that deals with specialized scientific activity. Note the plural 
references to physical preconditions--nature in general and human 
physiology in particular--that are acknowledged as preconditions and then 
set aside.  Do you see the distinction here?


Steve:
To be honest, I don't get what point Ralph is trying to make yet, so I 
guess I have to answer:  no - I don't yet see the distinction being made 
here - sorry!  Ralph, if you would be so kind as to explain this 
distinction ...


- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Victor]

Sorry,
Had a major technical breakdown.
About the only thing of Marx's early writings that relates to science is his
1844 Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (At the end of the article he devotes
about a page and a half to discussion the movement from Logic to Nature in
Hegel's Encyclopaedia of Logic.  It isn't much but small as it is it's
sharp).
Oudeyis

- Original Message - 
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 11:25
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!



Well, if you got my point (2), the rest shouldn't be so mysterious.  M&E
openly admit they're not going to tackle directly either the natural
sciences as an intellectual enterprise or their objects of study (laws of
nature).  At the same time they admit that's part of the picture, though
they are specifically beginning their studies from the standpoint of
historical materialism.  That's a pretty damn important point, esp. for
those who would make claims about Marx's attitude to science.

As I recall, at that stage, Marx only really considers science as
something that plays a role in industry--man's advanced interchange with
nature.  Science as an intellectual activity in itself, as theorizing,
method, or research, is not part of the picture at this time.  Hence, M&E
do not turn their attention to the philosophy of the natural sciences.

I'll add to that: when Marx makes remarks criticizing prior materialism,
this belongs to the history of philosophy, not actual modern science.
Discussing Epicurus and Democritus or the French materialists is not
engaging with science.  I'll add also, that a philosophy of nature is not
a philosophy of science, if a perspective on scientific methodology as a
means of understanding nature is not included in it.

BTW, Marx's early writings (vol. 1) includes some outline of Hegel's
philosophy of nature.  But I don't really know how Marx may have used
Hegel's PN.  Does anyone know something I don't?

At 12:06 AM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

Steve responds to a post from Ralph:

Ralph:
on 5/29/2005 at 12:48 PM Ralph explained, referring to the passage from
M&E copied below:

... Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate historical
analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this point.  Two
conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category for Marx
as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social
organization.  But doesn"t practical interaction include natural
scientific research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, ...


Steve:
I am with Ralph so far, but I am puzzled by where Ralph goes next:

Ralph:

... but note that Marx is onto the direct, practical transformation of
nature as it applies to material production and not that aspect of it
that deals with specialized scientific activity. Note the plural
references to physical preconditions--nature in general and human
physiology in particular--that are acknowledged as preconditions and then
set aside.  Do you see the distinction here?


Steve:
To be honest, I don't get what point Ralph is trying to make yet, so I
guess I have to answer:  no - I don't yet see the distinction being made
here - sorry!  Ralph, if you would be so kind as to explain this
distinction ...

- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

Charles, your logic below unsuccessfully explains the relationship between 
human biology and human society.  You merely repeat something no one 
disputes.  All animals reproduce, just as they all breathe, and would die 
without doing so.  But only humans produce - and probably would not even 
survive as animals anymore if they did not do so.  The key question in my 
opinion is to address just what humans do that is new and different from 
other species.  What makes humans "human"?  Clearly, the answer begins with 
production and related activities.  What is it about production and related 
activities, such as intergenerational transmission of culture, language, 
etc., that allows human collectives to continually transform both nature 
and themselves (including their methods of reproduction, family systems 
etc.)?  A dialectical analysis of this continual process requires, in my 
opinion, a grasp of the fundamental "logic" of how human social labor and 
production creates an entirely new domain of life-existence unknown in 
non-human species.  To see how little your paragraphs below contribute to 
this kind of understanding - I am not saying this about you, just the 
passages you offer below - substitute the term "respiration" for 
"reproduction" below - or for that matter, substitute any essential 
biological function.  Humans would die from the lack of any of them 
(digestion, excretion, etc. etc.).  You make this point yourself 
explicitly.  But this point that humans absolutely require a successful 
biological existence to become the historical creatures we have become is 
certainly true, but unenlightening - even, if you will allow me to put this 
sharply, trivial, if that is as far as one goes.  Who would dispute 
you?  The challenge is to explain how we grew from being once upon a time 
*just* mammals to the sociological humans we are today - and the communists 
we aspire to be in the future.  This line of inquiry is what Marx and 
Engels invented, and which I encourage all to continue developing.


Again to put it bluntly, simply placing an equal sign between biology and 
sociology does not seem to contribute anything of much value that I can 
see.  On the other hand, showing how the biological becomes sociological is 
very helpful. How did humanoid primates became historical beings?  For 
example, a study into the role cultural transmission plays in production 
and socio-historical development, the investigation you suggested yesterday 
- based, I would urge, on the classical Marxist insights into the role of 
production in history as the motor force of the creation of humanity - 
could well qualify as such a helpful piece.  That is my motivation for 
encouraging you to pursue your insights and studies on this - I believe 
this kind of study enhances Marxism and human science.  On the rich 
question of reproduction that you raise below, much study is needed there, 
too - on how modes of reproduction have originated and developed in 
history, and how forms of reproduction, family systems, etc. have been 
major motor forces in the development (forward, backward, sideways and 
other ways) of human society and human psychology.  Perhaps this is another 
formal piece of writing you could work on.  Good luck!


- Steve




At 11:32 AM 6/2/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:


Actually , this essay ( rough copy here) is not on the issue that Steve
suggested I develop. But it does deal with the anthropological passages at
the beginning of _The German Ideology_ that are close to the one Steve first
adduced for discussion.

As I read this essay, I am claiming that M and E are not materialist enough
in the GI. I don't have the part here, but in _The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State_ Engels has much more advanced anthro
knowledge than in _The G I_ , and in the Preface , he says production AND
the family are cofundamental in determining _history_.

  I sent this to Thaxis several years ago

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1998-April/008694.html

Charles


For Women's Liberation : Whoever heard of a one genearation species ?


 Every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical
materialism or the materialist conception of history.
The history of all hitherto existing society, since the
breaking up of the ancient communes, is a
history of class struggles between oppressor and
oppressed.
 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels
asserted an elementary anthropological or
"human nature" rationale for this conception.
In a section titled  (in one translation)
"History: Fundamental Conditions" , they say:

 ...life involves before everything else
  eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing
and many other things.  The first historical
 act is thus the production of material life
itself. And indeed this is an historical act,
a fundamental condition of all history, which
today, as thousands of years ago, must daily
and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain
human life

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm several steps behind in this thread.  But beginning from the beginning 
. . .


The initial "problem" here is the lack of specificity of the assertion, but 
it's more of a problem when people don't pay careful attention to the wording.


Note the double-assertion here:

(1) People distinguish themselves from animals by means of labor (the 
essential defining characteristic)


(2) This distinction is "conditioned by their physical organisation."

So actually, labor is not the defining characteristic as a bare 
abstraction.  The qualification about physiology implies all the old stuff: 
Man is distinguished by language, brain capacity, opposable thumbs, upright 
gait, menstrual cycle, etc.  Indeed, labor for humans as opposed to beavers 
is an impossibility without the requisite physiology, which is a problem 
for evolutionary biology to solve.


So Charles begins with a correction:


What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and
methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next.


This is the essential point.  The question about subsistence/foraging is a 
subsidiary though important issue.  If one uses the concept of labor 
loosely, then it legitimately becomes the starting point for the conception 
of _historical materialism_, which ultimately has to be united with 
evolutionary theory (Marx wrote this before Darwin hit the bookstands, 
let's remember), but which stands on its own as a methodology of social 
scientific explanation.  The "one science" Marx cryptically alludes to in 
the 1944 mss is still not here, and it will not be the science of history 
as we know 'history'.  All we have so far is the simple-minded conceptions 
of sociobiology, which oversimplifies a systems approach to the interaction 
of nature and culture.  It also elides the mediating factor of conscious 
activity, and its historicity, in the relation of man and nature.


This is the issue I was fighting with Lisa about around the time of her 
death.  As you may recall, Lisa was an evolutionary biologist.  She was in 
the process of sussing out Engels' murky dialectics of nature, which she 
did not see as terribly productive--correctly--but she was also resistant 
to the importance of consciousness as a distinguishing characteristic of 
the human species.  I pointed out to her "activity theory" as a perspective 
(I had recently heard Ethel Tobach speak about it at an APA meeting), but 
she was unsympathetic to the idea.  Her speciality, BTW, was foraging 
(hunting and gathering) societies.  Anyway, this was one of the last topics 
we discussed before her sudden death.  Her efforts toward synthesis were, I 
think, inhibited by the philosophical naivete of evolutionary biologists 
and the scientific naivete of Marxists.


A few remarks now about emergent materialism.  Note that Marx does not 
develop an ontology in the way that Engels does later on.  Marx engages the 
mind-body problem and social organization as an emergent phenomenon to the 
extent he needs to do so to explain human activity and the nature of the 
money economy, in distinction to physical objects--artifacts which 
participate in a system of social relations, which cannot be grasped via 
the physical properties of the objects alone).  Functionally, physicalism 
would be entirely useless as an ontological foundation of historical 
materialism and the analysis of political economy.  This didn't stop Otto 
Neurath from adopting physicalism as the basis of his Marxism, which he 
attempts to justify in an essay on sociology anthologized in Ayer's LOGICAL 
POSITIVISM.  I think it's a load of shit myself.  I've not read Neurath's 
book on the subject.  But to reiterate, Marx doesn't get to a technical 
analysis of the mind-body problem; he begins from the observation that man 
is a conscious physical organism and proceeds from a conception of the 
nature of human activity historically conditioned by the social 
organization necessary to produce and reproduce his material existence.


Remember, by the time Engels' Anti-Duhring rolls around, the intelligentsia 
is filled up with pseudo-evolutionist muck-a-muck oozing out of all its 
orifices.  This is what he has to contend with, and thus he has to tackle a 
set of problems that Marx didn't have to worry much about in the 1840s and 
1850s.


Let us also remember that the positivist tendencies of the late 19th 
century yielded a variety of rebellions, including those of irrationalism 
(Nietzsche and lebensphilosophie), phenomenology (Husserl), and a backlash 
from the Catholic Church (ultimately Neo-Thomism).  Only Marxism--with all 
of its defects under the 2nd International--held the line against both 
positivism and irrationalism.  But 'Marxism', an artifact of German social 
democracy, in staking out and defending its territory, was no more 
positioned to engage in a total synthesis of human knowledge any more than 
mainstream bourgeois thought was capable of accommodating Marxism

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

Thanks for your response, it was a very good one.

Charles, I think you have the makings of a coherent Marxist essay on these 
questions you raise.  It seems you already have the ingredients at hand for 
such a study.  For my part, I see the point you stress about the centrality 
of the intergenerational transmission of culture not as counterposed, but 
as complementary to the theorizing Marx and Engels did about human 
production and the social origins of humanity.  I think they would heartily 
agree with you that the key is SOCIAL labor - (is there evidence to the 
contrary?) - and would welcome your bringing to bear some of the relevant 
wealth of new scientific knowledge from the social and life sciences that 
has emerged since their time - knowledge that has greatly increased our 
understanding of what humans have really done with nature, with one 
another, and just what it means to be and act human.  Well-written and 
researched Marxist articles on these kinds of questions are always 
needed.  Why not give it a go?  Its a very important topic, and I think you 
are asking some really good questions.


- Steve





At 02:04 PM 6/1/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:


Steve Gabosch

Charles, in that quote from German Ideology below, M&E refer to producing
their *means* of subsistence, as in means of production, not the
subsistence itself, as in gathered berries or hunted game, which as you
point out humans did not domesticate until quite recently.


CB: Could be as you interpret it. But "means of subsistence" could
correspond to their later "means of consumption" as opposed to their later
"means of production".

^


  Wouldn't social
labor - including tools, like baskets and spears, as well as language to
plan expeditions, and culture to pass on knowledge to future generations -
count as "means of subsistence?"  We of course know far more today about
what pre-historic human life was like than anyone in the 19th Century did -
or at least we have much more archeological data - but I think M&E were on
the right track on this one.  I don't think they would disagree with your
point about culture and language, which I think enhances their essential
point about human social labor - the ability to produce - being the core
difference between humans and animals.

- Steve

^

CB: Yes, means of production could include language and planning as part of
means of subsistence, but later on in this part of the German Ideology they
make a big point about "only then does consciousness arise " or some such.
Also, note they contrast "producing means of subsistence" with consciousness
and religion. Well, in fact socalled ancestor worship would be a prime
example of a method cultural transmission.
But furthermore, even if we take "producing means of subsistence" to mean
"producing means of production" or the famous "tool-producing", I have
concluded after many years of contemplating this that "tool-producing" is
not the key distinction of humans.

It is the passing on of how to make tools from one generation to the next
that is uniquely human. Chimps in the wild today make tools. They just don't
have tool making ,intergenerational traditions.

I'm willing to discuss this more. This issue is a sort of speciality for me.
It is a critique of Engels "The role of labor in the whatever of man "
essay.  The key is SOCIAL  labor, not social LABOR. And even more "social"
must most importantly include intergenerational sociality. I can elabortate
if you like.


To give another one of my favorite examples,each generation's not having to
reinvent the wheel is the key, not inventing it in the first place. It is
the cultural mechanism that allows ACCUMULATION of inventions that is
critical, not the initial act of inventing some tool or form of labor. An
individual primate might invent some tool, but they have no way to pass it
on to future generations. Imitation is insufficient for that; culture is
needed. Things like rituals and myths are needed.

I know this is sort of heresy in that it seems to be idealism. I think not.
Critique of idealism is only pertinent once we get to class divided society,
antagonism between mental and physical labor, idealist philosophers and the
like.

I _am_ saying, frankly, that Marx and Engels essentially make a mistake in
projecting this pertinent issue for the era of antagonism between mental and
physical labor back onto the origin of human society.

The great original human _material_ advantage compared with other primates
is the ability to _pass on_ "how to make a wheel". In other words, _not_
having to _re_invent the wheel because the original invention can be passed
on to you via culture is the critically unique human ability.  Allowing
future generations to share the experiences of ancestors is a great
_material_ advantage for the species, and the main , original distinguishing
characterisitic of our species.

To get back to your original p

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

Charles, in that quote from German Ideology below, M&E refer to producing 
their *means* of subsistence, as in means of production, not the 
subsistence itself, as in gathered berries or hunted game, which as you 
point out humans did not domesticate until quite recently.  Wouldn't social 
labor - including tools, like baskets and spears, as well as language to 
plan expeditions, and culture to pass on knowledge to future generations - 
count as "means of subsistence?"  We of course know far more today about 
what pre-historic human life was like than anyone in the 19th Century did - 
or at least we have much more archeological data - but I think M&E were on 
the right track on this one.  I don't think they would disagree with your 
point about culture and language, which I think enhances their essential 
point about human social labor - the ability to produce - being the core 
difference between humans and animals.


- Steve



At 04:11 PM 5/31/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:




Steve Gabosch quotes:



Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a
step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual
material life.

^

CB: Actually this isn't quite true. The first human modes of production are
termed "hunting and gathering" because humans do not produce their own
subsistence, but rather gather what nature has produced without human
intervention. , so to speak. That doesn't happen until tens of thousands of
years after the origin of the human species with horticulture, farming and
domestication of animals.

I'm not sure what implication this has for our dialectics and nature
discussion

What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and
methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next.




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

Ralph says: "I do not understand the meaning of the three quotes from 
Ilyenkov."  Fair enough.  I find the insights reflected in these quotes 
helpful in applying the dialectical materialist ontology about the 
relationship of matter to mind - and human activity - to some of the 
categories and questions we have been discussing.  What is specifically 
interesting to me in each of these paragraphs is how Ilyenkov uses the 
categories external world and laws of existence.  He is showing us how to 
acknowledge and view both the independence and priority of nature - the 
point I stressed - while at the same time discussing it in terms of human 
activity, the only way we can consciously experience it - the point Oudeyis 
stressed.


- Steve


Here are these same passages by Ilyenkov reduced to one snappy sentence 
from each for clarity:


from page 283:
"Marx and Engels established above all that [the] external world was not 
given to the individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his 
contemplation, but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that 
both the contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products 
of history."


from page 285:
"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic."


from page 286-287:
"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws 
of existence."



*


At 11:42 PM 5/30/2005 -0400, Ralph wrote:

I do not understand the meaning of the three quotes from Ilyenkov.

At 02:03 PM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

...
from my 1977 Progress edition, which I was lucky to get through the 
internet last year.  I corrected a couple scanning errors from the MIA version.


Copied from:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

from page 283:
"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of history."


from page 285:
"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. 
The individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate 
the development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it 
a premise independent of the individual."


from page 286-287:
"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and 
laws of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions 
on objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that 
are independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I do not understand the meaning of the three quotes from Ilyenkov.

At 02:03 PM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

...
from my 1977 Progress edition, which I was lucky to get through the 
internet last year.  I corrected a couple scanning errors from the MIA version.


Copied from:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

from page 283:
"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of history."


from page 285:
"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. The 
individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate the 
development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it a 
premise independent of the individual."


from page 286-287:
"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws 
of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions on 
objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that are 
independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

s hard to imagine how men would know things about which they have
absolutely no experience and how they would know how things work without a
working experience with them or with things like them. Divine revelation
perhaps?  Finally, there is no doubt that nature must also include that
which is beyond the observed and acted upon and that its existence is
important for the creation of a materialist ideology. There are three ways
the "unknown" makes itself felt in material human experience:

1.The fact that human practice and the science that represents it in thought
is open ended or, better yet, appears to have no outward limits is a clear
indication of the existence of more to nature than that which is treated by
our current state of knowledge and practice.

2. The classic observations by Marx in the first chapter of German Ideology
(1845) and the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1844) that the physical and
sensual interface between man a nature in human labour is far more concrete
than can ever be represented by even the most developed dialectics.  The
rational representation of men's activity in the world is then an inherently
uncompletable task.

3.  Hegel in his discussion of being makes the point that the logical
formula A = A has no demonstrable correspondence with actual experience;
diversity is an inherent property of identity (Andy B. presents a pretty
thorough discussion on this in his The Meaning of Hegel, Chapter iv section,
" Diversity(essential Identity )" ).  The whole basis of all rational
activity, all dialectics, conscious and unconscious, deliberated and
automatic, is the unity between the essential transitoriness of experienced
moments and the determination of identities; qualities, quantities, measure
and all the other things we have to "know" to develop a working model of the
world.  It's the unity of logical categorization and the essential
temporality of immediate experience that fuels the dialectic and makes it so
important a tool for exploration of the unknown.

Second paragraph:
The clarification of what exactly is the significance of the *objective*
nature of nature is probably Ilyenkov's most important contributions to
Scientific Marxism. Indeed for orthodox Marxists, including Lenin in his
earlier writings (prior at very least to his readings in Hegel in 1914 and
possibly as early as his article on Emprio-positivism), did indeed inherit
the classical materialist concept of the objectivity of nature in the
metaphysical sense of the essential being of nature; known, unknown,
whatever.   Ilyenkov in the last paragraphs of chapter 8 of Dialectical
Logic summarizes the reasoning that is the basis of the concept of nature as
prior to and independently of humankind.  Here he distinguishes between Marx
and Engel's theories of human activity and Hegel's idealism by
recapitulating their description of man as a product and force of nature
that transforms nature into the instruments of his activity in appropriating
nature's goods and producing from them the means for the perpetuation of his
body organic and inorganic.  Nothing could more clearly describe the
independence of abstract nature from the emergence of human activity in the
world.   After all, if man has his origins in the development of the natural
world, then nature as a whole precedes and is a prerequisite for human
activity. Nature regarded abstractly cannot be described as a product of
human activity Then too, the laws and principles of nature whereby men
transform nature into the instruments and products of labour are hardly a
product of pure logic, of men's unfettered imagination.  The laws of nature
as men know and accommodate their actions to them are firmly connected to
the physical and sensual properties of man the organism and to the natural
conditions he confronts in the course of his prosecution of labour activity.
Men do not produce in a vacuum which they then fill with ideas and concepts.
Nature is a partner with man in his determination and production of his
needs, and its presence is identifiable in all human activity in the world.

All these descriptions of nature relate directly to the interaction of man
with nature as a force of nature, and not one of these statements asserts
some sort of universal state of being for nature itself. The activist
interpretation of men's relation to the world first proposed by Kant,
further developed by Hegel and given a material natural interpretation by
Marx and Engels obviates all necessity to make broad ontological statements
about the world in order to realize the objects of theory.
with Regards,
Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> If I am reading Oudeyis correctly, he is saying that nature is determined
> by human interaction with it; that nature is 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Well, if you got my point (2), the rest shouldn't be so mysterious.  M&E 
openly admit they're not going to tackle directly either the natural 
sciences as an intellectual enterprise or their objects of study (laws of 
nature).  At the same time they admit that's part of the picture, though 
they are specifically beginning their studies from the standpoint of 
historical materialism.  That's a pretty damn important point, esp. for 
those who would make claims about Marx's attitude to science.


As I recall, at that stage, Marx only really considers science as something 
that plays a role in industry--man's advanced interchange with 
nature.  Science as an intellectual activity in itself, as theorizing, 
method, or research, is not part of the picture at this time.  Hence, M&E 
do not turn their attention to the philosophy of the natural sciences.


I'll add to that: when Marx makes remarks criticizing prior materialism, 
this belongs to the history of philosophy, not actual modern 
science.  Discussing Epicurus and Democritus or the French materialists is 
not engaging with science.  I'll add also, that a philosophy of nature is 
not a philosophy of science, if a perspective on scientific methodology as 
a means of understanding nature is not included in it.


BTW, Marx's early writings (vol. 1) includes some outline of Hegel's 
philosophy of nature.  But I don't really know how Marx may have used 
Hegel's PN.  Does anyone know something I don't?


At 12:06 AM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

Steve responds to a post from Ralph:

Ralph:
on 5/29/2005 at 12:48 PM Ralph explained, referring to the passage from 
M&E copied below:
... Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate historical 
analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this point.  Two 
conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category for Marx 
as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to 
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as 
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of 
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn"t practical interaction include natural 
scientific research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, ...


Steve:
I am with Ralph so far, but I am puzzled by where Ralph goes next:

Ralph:
... but note that Marx is onto the direct, practical transformation of 
nature as it applies to material production and not that aspect of it 
that deals with specialized scientific activity. Note the plural 
references to physical preconditions--nature in general and human 
physiology in particular--that are acknowledged as preconditions and then 
set aside.  Do you see the distinction here?


Steve:
To be honest, I don't get what point Ralph is trying to make yet, so I 
guess I have to answer:  no - I don't yet see the distinction being made 
here - sorry!  Ralph, if you would be so kind as to explain this 
distinction ...


- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

Steve responds to a post from Ralph:

Ralph:
on 5/29/2005 at 12:48 PM Ralph explained, referring to the passage from M&E 
copied below:
... Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate historical 
analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this point.  Two 
conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category for Marx as 
some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to investigate 
natural science and especially not its objective correlate as an activity 
in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of man's 
practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn"t practical interaction include natural 
scientific research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, ...


Steve:
I am with Ralph so far, but I am puzzled by where Ralph goes next:

Ralph:
... but note that Marx is onto the direct, practical transformation of 
nature as it applies to material production and not that aspect of it that 
deals with specialized scientific activity. Note the plural references to 
physical preconditions--nature in general and human physiology in 
particular--that are acknowledged as preconditions and then set aside.  Do 
you see the distinction here?


Steve:
To be honest, I don't get what point Ralph is trying to make yet, so I 
guess I have to answer:  no - I don't yet see the distinction being made 
here - sorry!  Ralph, if you would be so kind as to explain this 
distinction ...


- Steve


as copied in the earlier post Ralph is responding to:

by Marx and Engels, from German Ideology (page 42 in my 1970 
International Publishers edition).

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2


First Premises of Materialist Method

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but 
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. 
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions 
under which they live, both those which they find already existing and 
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in 
a purely empirical way.


The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of 
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the 
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation 
to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the 
actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which 
man finds himself ­ geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The 
writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their 
modification in the course of history through the action of men.


Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or 
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves 
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, 
a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing 
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual 
material life.


The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of 
all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in 
existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be 
considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of 
the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these 
individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of 
life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What 
they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they 
produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends 
on the material conditions determining their production.


This production only makes its appearance with the increase of 
population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of 
individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again 
determined by production.


 




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Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Let me isolate your point that addresses the crux of the debate:


That said, there are comments within Marxism that involve the claim that
dialectics exists in thought because change exists in nature.  On this model
science must be dialectical because it seeks to describe a reality in flux.
Heraclitus not Parmenides.This is slightly interesting. Particularly 
because it
suggests that the term 'Dialectics of Nature' is a conceptual confusion, 
while
also allowing us to affirm that dialectics is grounded in nature.  But its 
not
quite clear to me what this kind of claim is for. It works as some sort of 
rule of

thumb model for critque, I guess.  Maybe we cannot hold to the understanding
that all science tends to a dialectical form if we don't also hold that 
nature is a

flux.


You've pinpointed why the usual assertions about dialectics of nature are 
so unproductive.  The relationship between objective and subjective 
dialectics is fudged, with the presumption that they are characterized by a 
unified system of dialectical laws.  But in fact one cannot show the 
interdependent relationship of one thing to another without also analyzing 
their distinction.  Hence also my remarks on the conflation of logic with 
ontology.  Yes, nature in flux has implications for our conceptual grasp of 
it.  However, the nature of making abstractions and relating them to the 
object of discourse is key.


Sartre was ensconced in a dualism which harms his critique of materialism, 
but his 1946 critique of diamat contains some shrewd analysis.


At 04:31 PM 5/29/2005 +, gilhyle wrote:

I would have thought that the issue arises only for someone who sought to
claim that there is nothing in nature that requires our thinking to be 
dialectical
and, thus, that all dialectical features of scientific thinking must 
reflect social

factors or methodological error or some such thing. Is that where Sartre is -
no, but only because he was located firnly within the phenomenological
tradition that refused the question.

It seems to me an impossible thesis to defend.

If THAT thesis is not defended (and I can't see it being a helpful 
thesis), then

what is the point/purpose of the question?

The issue is not really why thinking or science is dialectical, but simply 
that it
is and how we need to engage in its critique within these social relations 
and

political struggles, given that it is.

It might even be argued (I'm tempted) that the question involves a conceptual
confusion. For what it seeks is a material explanation of the occurence of a
very vague, formal characteristic across a range of activity (of thinking) 
that is
not sufficiently homogenous to allow a single explanation of the 
recurrence of

the formal feature (of dialectical character).

Nor,just because dialectics is a general feature of science need it be
universal. Far from it. Some (even much?) thinking may be entirely
undialectical in its internal construction.

The point is that science struggles with grasping particulars and 
universals in
a single theory, of differentiating qualities from quantities etc. That 
fact is just a

part of the context of the critique of science. The phenomenon of being
dialectical may not be of the essence of science (whatever that might be), 
but

rather be something it shares with much other thinking.

That said, there are comments within Marxism that involve the claim that
dialectics exists in thought because change exists in nature.  On this model
science must be dialectical because it seeks to describe a reality in flux.
Heraclitus not Parmenides.This is slightly interesting. Particularly 
because it
suggests that the term 'Dialectics of Nature' is a conceptual confusion, 
while
also allowing us to affirm that dialectics is grounded in nature.  But its 
not
quite clear to me what this kind of claim is for. It works as some sort of 
rule of

thumb model for critque, I guess.  Maybe we cannot hold to the understanding
that all science tends to a dialectical form if we don't also hold that 
nature is a

flux. Back to the Tao, I guess.

 --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science
> as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically,
> we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't
> speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical
> possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from 
intelligent

> life activity that, after all,

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm taking  some time to catch up with the flurry of posts, as I've been 
preoccupied with a memorial service for my nearest and dearest. . . .


At 02:26 PM 5/27/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
I appreciate the way Ralph separates out some of the vital questions.  I 
also found myself once again really appreciating the work he does on his 
website.  I googled for an article by Ilyenkov - and there Ralph's site 
popped up with just what I was looking for!


Thanks for your appreciation of my work.

On the ontology question - whether nature is dialectical, etc. - let me 
just begin with something from Marx and Engels.


I took a peek at German Ideology (1846), the earliest joint work of Marx 
and Engels and probably the first mature statement of Marxist ideology, as 
we have come to look at their work.  I would interpret the following 
passage from GI as supporting one part of my suggested position - that 
classical Marxism starts with nature - and humankind's interaction with 
it.  I certainly find myself resonating with this passage.  But Ralph may 
have a different take on what M&E were trying to get at, so I thought I'd 
just start with a major quote, which has the heading "First Premises of 
Materialist Method."


I could analyze the passage from M&E for purposes of a different 
discussion.  Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate 
historical analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this 
point.  Two conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category 
for Marx as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to 
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as 
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of 
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn't practical interaction include natural scientific 
research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, but note that Marx 
is onto the direct, practical transformation of nature as it applies to 
material production and not that aspect of it that deals with specialized 
scientific activity. Note the plural references to physical 
preconditions--nature in general and human physiology in particular--that 
are acknowledged as preconditions and then set aside.  Do you see the 
distinction here?



BTW, I don't think quotes settle questions, just help clarify them.  So 
this is just a place to start.


- Steve


Ralph points out:
(1)  "I agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical." Marx 
and Engels did not make exactly the same claims about nature.


(2)  "this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological 
statement about the nature of reality": historically, historical 
materialism came first, albeit as an outgrowth of engagement with 
Hegelian philosophy.  What was later called 'dialectical materialism' 
came later.  Still later, histomat was declared an application of 
diamat.  So the question is: what is the reality whose nature was 
characterized by Marx and Engels (prior to his independent work we've 
been debating)?  The reality was society, and not the domain of natural 
science.  True, Marx wrote about Epicurus, but he was really dealing with 
philosophical, not natural-scientific concepts.



from German Ideology ( page 42 in my 1970 International Publishers edition).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2


First Premises of Materialist Method

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but 
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. 
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions 
under which they live, both those which they find already existing and 
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a 
purely empirical way.


The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of 
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the 
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation 
to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual 
physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds 
himself ­ geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of 
history must always set out from these natural bases and their 
modification in the course of history through the action of men.


Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or 
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves 
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, 
a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing 
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual 
material life.


The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of 
all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in 
existence and hav

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I am putting off the discussion of Oudeyis' subtle argument for last.  But 
already here we find ourselves confronted with a basic dialectical 
paradox.  It is a tautology that we can't make any assertions about any 
independently existing physical reality with which we do not interact in 
some fashion.  Consider even that most basic ontological-epistemological 
old saw: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a 
sound?  Discounting the complexities of the meaning of 'sound' for the 
moment, note the other presuppositions in the question.  Of course the 
materialist/realist answer is 'yes', but the ability to even formulate the 
question is chock-full of presuppositions.  Suppose we were a species that 
knew the existence of neither trees nor sound.  Suppose we generalized the 
statement to "if an entity creates an effect not perceived by another 
entity, does it really create that effect?"  Note that there is an 
ineluctable circularity even in positing hypotheticals of this sort.  We 
are already entering into a conceptual relationship with the hypothetical 
by positing it, even though its reality may be totally independent of our 
existence.


Now when Marx makes the statement, the reality or non-reality of thought 
independent of practice is a purely scholastic question, he rejects the 
skeptical argument outright, just as he rejects the old apriori 
argumentation of 'first philosophy'.  Marx also argues that certain 
questions themselves have to be questioned, as they are products of 
abstraction.  He states that it is illogical to imagine away the whole 
universe but not yourself (making such conjectures) in the process.


I'm convinced there is a subtlety here that distinguishes Marx's view from 
pragmatism.  (It also addresses, I suspect, my unease with Popper.)  Marx 
is a materialist, but he's onto something different from the old 
metaphysical concerns.  But the next step in my argument is to engage Oudeyis.


At 12:35 AM 5/29/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
If I am reading Oudeyis correctly, he is saying that nature is determined 
by human interaction with it; that nature is strictly a product of the 
unity of human purposive activity and natural conditions; and that nature 
is a function of human labour.  If by "nature" we are only referring to 
that portion of reality that humanity consciously observes and/or acts 
upon, then Oudeyis successfully makes that point.  But this conception of 
reality restricts nature to human experience, which can only be a subset 
of nature.  Nature must also include that which is beyond the observed and 
acted upon. The "unknown" - the not yet experienced - must also be taken 
into account in the creation of a materialist ontology.


It is certainly true that humans only consciously experience that portion 
of nature they observe and/or act on through the lens of culture and the 
plethora of human activity, a key idea in Ilyenkov's concept of the 
ideal.But how humanity, through its social relations, activities, 
languages, etc. *subjectively* experiences nature (individually or 
collectively) is a different question than the *objective* nature of 
nature itself.  I can see little room for doubt that all these Marxists 
insisted upon making this fundamental distinction.  They maintained that 
nature exists prior to and independently of humankind, holding the 
ontological view that nature also includes that which humankind has not 
yet - and may never - experience.  I am aware of no evidence to support 
Oudeyis's claim that the conception of nature held by these classical 
Marxists was restricted to only that which humans have interacted with 
and/or laboured on.


- Steve


At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's activist determination of nature as
a product of the interaction of man with
nature (human purposive intervention in nature) , but revised it to include
that human intervention as a force of nature rather than just an exercise of
intellect.  For Marx, Engels, and Lenin the objective, materialist
determination of the nature of nature must be regarded as strictly a
dialectical product of the unity of human practical activity with the
natural conditions that are the subject of that activity, i.e. as a function
of human labour.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

See comments interleaved below.

At 11:19 AM 5/27/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

 Ralph Dumain
 .

Briefly:

(1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and argued in
this manner: these examples are empty verbiage.


^
CB: As stated here, this assertion is unsupported,i.e. it itself is empty
verbiage.




RALPH:

Well, specifically, how does the progression plant-seed-plant constitute 
the negation of negation?  How does the physiology of plant reproduction 
correlate to a logical relationship?  Is not the burden of proof on a 
person making a positive assertion to indicate why it makes sense?  What 
could the concept of negation mean in this instance but some kind of loose 
metaphor?


Imaginary numbers belong to the realm of pure mathematics, yet this example 
too seems senseless.  Is -1 the negation of 1?  (Are there in fact two 
notions of negation at work in such discussions?)  How then does creating a 
logical entity that when squared yields -1 constitute a negation of a 
negation?  Even as a metaphor I don't get it.



 Engels was indeed in
pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a
number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing, which was
later taken as gospel.


^^
CB: Claim that Engels' example of imaginary numbers is "taken as gospel" is
strawman argument. Important thing here is _I_ don't take it as "gospel" but
an interesting suggestion from a teacher of dialectics. You haven't
demonstrated, that I see, that it is ill-thought out. You just make an
unsupported assertion.

Yes, I think the unpublished aspect is important to consider. A big reason
why it is not "gospel". It's like an email discussion with Engels on the
list.

^^



RALPH:

I've indicated above how it's ill-thought out.  But precisely because it 
comes from a manuscript not offered for publication, we shouldn't be too 
harsh on Engels for trying out various ideas that he might have not stuck 
with after further deliberation.





(2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is a basic
conflation between natural law and logical law.  Engels seems to have
finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though there
have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman).

^^
CB: Where exactly does Engels do this ?

^



RALPH:

For starters, see

Jean van Heijenoort
Friedrich Engels And Mathematics
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/math.htm




 Formal logical laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters
such as stasis, motion, change, etc.  The real issue is the relationship of
logic to ontology.  These problems arise in the fusion of logic with
ontology, as occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and
dialectical
logic.  But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent
inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of
assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of logic
and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis.  If it turns out that
we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being without
eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then
dialectical logic has something to do.  But physical processes have nothing
to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such exist,
are logical abstractions describing the categorial relationships of concepts
(which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.

^^
CB: This seems worth thinking over.

^^^



RALPH:

This is the crux of the matter.



(3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical problem with
diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial
statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know since
Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories &
examples of natural phenomena).  To wit, your examples:


CB: Problem is you assert that there is a "problem" but you don't make an
argument supporting your assertion. Pronoucements are not rebuttals.



RALPH:

The very fact that we are having this old discussion indicates a continuing 
problem.  If one follows the literature over the past century, one will 
find the problem recurrent.  Do I need to compile a bibliography of every 
bad piece of Marxist argumentation I've ever read?  If you take a look at 
Sean Sayers' side of the argument with Richard Norman, you will find that 
Sayers commits every blunder associated with the entire history of 
Marxist-Leninist philosophy.




Are you saying there is never a step of correlating abstract categorical
statements with specific empirical contents ? If so, your claim here seems
invalid.

^^^



RALPH:

The problem is that a logical relationship is not prima facie the same 
thing as a physical process.  A physical process does not take place as a 
result of a logical law.  If there is a logical relationship 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Oudeyis]

Nicely put.

Several tentative responses:
The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings? Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?

Following Hegel's schema of the development of logic, I would argue that
just as there is objective logic (i.e. logical activity that can only be
"known reflectively" as an object of reflection) there is an objective
dialectic.  The basic kernel of both logic and dialectic (they are after all
the same) is purposive activity.  It matters not that the agents of
purposive activity are fully or even at all conscious of their cognitive
activity, the very prosecution of intentional activity implies
logic/dialectics.

 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.

> Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the natural world
independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?

I think I gave a partial answer to this question in my response to Steve's
last message.  The products of human activity should never be regarded as
the issue of pure logic or of the unfettered human imagination.  Even Hegel
would not accept this proposal.

Science no less then the material products of human labour represent a unity
of human activity in an independent external world that has existed prior to
man's emergence and confronts men's ambitions with conditions to which he
must accommodate his activity if they are to realize their goals.  Labour is
a cooperative activity in which men work with nature as their partner.

Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science
> as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically,
> we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't
> speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical
> possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings?  Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?  Again,
> here's the ambiguity.  Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the
> natural world independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?
>
> More to come.
>
> At 12:14 PM 5/27/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> >can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> >dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
> >adjust
> >itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> >conscioulsy by labour?
> >
> >NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> >IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> >WORLD
>
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Oudeyis]

ical and sensual properties of man the organism and to the natural
conditions he confronts in the course of his prosecution of labour activity.
Men do not produce in a vacuum which they then fill with ideas and concepts.
Nature is a partner with man in his determination and production of his
needs, and its presence is identifiable in all human activity in the world.

All these descriptions of nature relate directly to the interaction of man
with nature as a force of nature, and not one of these statements asserts
some sort of universal state of being for nature itself. The activist
interpretation of men's relation to the world first proposed by Kant,
further developed by Hegel and given a material natural interpretation by
Marx and Engels obviates all necessity to make broad ontological statements
about the world in order to realize the objects of theory.
with Regards,
Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Steve Gabosch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> If I am reading Oudeyis correctly, he is saying that nature is determined
> by human interaction with it; that nature is strictly a product of the
> unity of human purposive activity and natural conditions; and that nature
> is a function of human labour.  If by "nature" we are only referring to
> that portion of reality that humanity consciously observes and/or acts
> upon, then Oudeyis successfully makes that point.  But this conception of
> reality restricts nature to human experience, which can only be a subset
of
> nature.  Nature must also include that which is beyond the observed and
> acted upon. The "unknown" - the not yet experienced - must also be taken
> into account in the creation of a materialist ontology.
>
> It is certainly true that humans only consciously experience that portion
> of nature they observe and/or act on through the lens of culture and the
> plethora of human activity, a key idea in Ilyenkov's concept of the
> ideal.But how humanity, through its social relations, activities,
> languages, etc. *subjectively* experiences nature (individually or
> collectively) is a different question than the *objective* nature of
nature
> itself.  I can see little room for doubt that all these Marxists insisted
> upon making this fundamental distinction.  They maintained that nature
> exists prior to and independently of humankind, holding the ontological
> view that nature also includes that which humankind has not yet - and may
> never - experience.  I am aware of no evidence to support Oudeyis's claim
> that the conception of nature held by these classical Marxists was
> restricted to only that which humans have interacted with and/or laboured
on.
>
> - Steve
>
>
> At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
> >Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's activist determination of nature as
> >a product of the interaction of man with
> >nature (human purposive intervention in nature) , but revised it to
include
> >that human intervention as a force of nature rather than just an exercise
of
> >intellect.  For Marx, Engels, and Lenin the objective, materialist
> >determination of the nature of nature must be regarded as strictly a
> >dialectical product of the unity of human practical activity with the
> >natural conditions that are the subject of that activity, i.e. as a
function
> >of human labour.
>
>
>
> ___
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> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
>
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> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
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>
>



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is 
an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether 
nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is 
dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science 
as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically, 
we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't 
speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical 
possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of 
action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics 
just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more 
generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from intelligent 
life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious 
beings?  Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?  Again, 
here's the ambiguity.  Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the 
natural world independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this 
independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the 
dialectics of science?


More to come.

At 12:14 PM 5/27/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything that
can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply 
adjust

itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
conscioulsy by labour?

NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN HISTORY
IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH  THE
WORLD



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

If I am reading Oudeyis correctly, he is saying that nature is determined 
by human interaction with it; that nature is strictly a product of the 
unity of human purposive activity and natural conditions; and that nature 
is a function of human labour.  If by "nature" we are only referring to 
that portion of reality that humanity consciously observes and/or acts 
upon, then Oudeyis successfully makes that point.  But this conception of 
reality restricts nature to human experience, which can only be a subset of 
nature.  Nature must also include that which is beyond the observed and 
acted upon. The "unknown" - the not yet experienced - must also be taken 
into account in the creation of a materialist ontology.


It is certainly true that humans only consciously experience that portion 
of nature they observe and/or act on through the lens of culture and the 
plethora of human activity, a key idea in Ilyenkov's concept of the 
ideal.But how humanity, through its social relations, activities, 
languages, etc. *subjectively* experiences nature (individually or 
collectively) is a different question than the *objective* nature of nature 
itself.  I can see little room for doubt that all these Marxists insisted 
upon making this fundamental distinction.  They maintained that nature 
exists prior to and independently of humankind, holding the ontological 
view that nature also includes that which humankind has not yet - and may 
never - experience.  I am aware of no evidence to support Oudeyis's claim 
that the conception of nature held by these classical Marxists was 
restricted to only that which humans have interacted with and/or laboured on.


- Steve


At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's activist determination of nature as
a product of the interaction of man with
nature (human purposive intervention in nature) , but revised it to include
that human intervention as a force of nature rather than just an exercise of
intellect.  For Marx, Engels, and Lenin the objective, materialist
determination of the nature of nature must be regarded as strictly a
dialectical product of the unity of human practical activity with the
natural conditions that are the subject of that activity, i.e. as a function
of human labour.




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Oudeyis]

- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


>
> but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
adjust
> itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> conscioulsy by labour?
>
> NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> WORLD

Whether or not nature has a history is a question for nature, of little
relevance for the practical realization of human needs.

Man, in order to better determine his needs and the means necessary to
realize them investigates through reason and practice (experimentation and
informed search) the development of the relevant (essential) incohoate
features of the natural world, including those of his own activities.  The
result is the objective determinations of past events in the natural world
and of their relevance to the form and substance of our current needs and to
the realization of these in practical activity. The laws and principles as
well as the developmental schemas produced by our research into what is
called Natural History are a product of and the means for realization of
strictly human objectives. Is this a history of nature?  Well, we are
ourselves an integral part and force of the natural world and the massive
array of objects we depend on for perpetuation of our life activity have
their ultimate origin in nature, but that's a far cry from arguing that
human beings and their essential equipage is identical with the totality of
nature or that our activity in nature involves nature as a whole.
Regards,
Oudeyis


>
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Oudeyis]

- Original Message -
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
andthe thinkers he inspired'" 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 6:04 PM
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


>
> [Marxism-Thaxis]
>
> Oudeyis >
>
> -clip-
>   Describing
> their accomplishment in a dialectical form, the materialism of Marx,
Engels
> and Lenin is not a statement about the world but about the unity of
logical
> and physical and sensual activity in human labour (practice).
> NOTE, THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> IS NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> WORLD.
>
> ^
>
> CB: For me, this is a good way to say it. I would just add that their
> attitude was that the best way to conclude "what the nature of the world "
> is is to see what "works" in the world in practice. This is very clever,
> cunning, desirable to follow, as human's have no interest in "the nature
of
> the world" except in human interaction with the world.
>
> 
>
> As regards the universality of the laws of dialectics:
> The abstract laws of dialectics are universalities.  We may like
> McTaggart  find them less than perfect, but whatever the modifications,
> revisions and so on we may make on dialectics is a matter of dealing with
> universals.  That dialectic processes may produce divergent truths is a
> different issue from the universality of the logical process itself.  To
> understand the emergence of divergent dialectically arrived at truths, we
> must recognize the diversity of objects and subjects of dialectical
> activities.  Science, the development of practical knowledge, has as its
> object the realization of men's needs in the transformation of the
material
> world, or, in other words the realization of the needs of men that are
> ultimately the function of his being a part and force in nature through
the
> transformation of nature in conformance to the specifications implied by
> those needs.  All the components of this description; the object and
subject
> of the activity described, the means and ends of scientific activity,
> involve states universal to men and to the subject of his activity, hence
> divergence in science is always a temporary product of differentiated and
> limited practical experience.  For science truth, temporary as it may be,
is
> found in effective practice.
>
> ^^
> CB: This is fundamental for Marx, Engels , Lenin: Theses on Feurerbach,
> Anti-Duhring, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
>
> ^
>
> The divergencies of the dialectics of ethics (ideality) on the other
> hand are an inevitable and irresolvable consequence of all the
> differentiating forces that emerge in human social life; the gender
> distinctions, the division of labour, ethnic segregation, and so on.
True,
> the methods of Natural Science of History, Historical Materialism, can
> provide scientific universals that enable the development of theory and
> practice to produce, regulate and revise these distinctions, but these
> universals, theories and practices should never be confused with the
> arguments of the dialectics of ethics (the main object of Hegel and to a
> considerable extent of Kant).  In general, where we find irreconcilable
(in
> practice) dialectical arguments we have entered into a debate over ethics
or
> ethos  rather than over a scientific issue.  Dialectical arguments of this
> sort are properly the realm of religion and traditional philosophy,
classic
> materialism being an example of the latter.
> Regards,
> Oudeyis
>
> ^^^
>
> CB: What do you think of treating ethics as a category of practice , since
> ethics deals with what people as does practice ?

One of the most interesting and to me attractive aspects of Ilyenkov's (1977
The Concept of the Ideal, 1974 Dialectical Logic, and 1960 Dialectics of the
Abstract and the Concrete) discussion on ideality is the view that Capital
is basically a material (or natural scientific) analysis of the ethos and
ethics of the capitalist mode of production.  I. L. Rubin (1972 -originally
1928 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value) also presents capitalist practice as
a working ethical system.  Vygotsky (1978 -originally 1930 - Mind in
Society) also has a good deal to say on the role of ethics as a means to
social ends, particularly as regards the socialization of prospective
members of society.

Ethics and ethos are social practice.  However, the object and means of
social practice as ethics are considerably different from the practicalities
of science and practical labour. These differences are not always easy to
identify since the intellectual tools for theorizing about ethical social
practice and about labour practice are virtually the same: e.g. speech
forms, texts, graphic representations and of course dialectics.  The
difference is usually even harder to detect when the subject of theory is
social practice.  The ba

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics of the new class or communist class (2)!

[Waistline2]

Part 2

Dialectics of the new class or communist class


I am proud to be part of the communist movement and none of our errors, 
mistakes and lapses in judgment comes close on the scale of history to the 
murderous actions of the bourgeoisie and my very own imperial bourgeoisie. The 
politics of world communism as viewed from my own history as American and the 
most 
bourgeois of all bourgeois working classes is interesting. A brief summary is 
in 
order. 

Historically there was an objective communist movement as human history, 
because of the low means of development of the material power of production or 
as 
a social form of organization in correspondence to a primitive state of 
development of the material power of production. The greatest part of human 
experiences was carried on within/as some communist form of social 
organization. 

Mona Lisa was not a man and communism ain't Marxism, although it is a science 
current within the struggle for communism in the epoch of capitalism or the 
epoch of the bourgeoisie. 

Since the down fall and breakup of primitive communism, the communist 
movement has been the sum total of people who joined and became part of the 
social 
assertion believing in some form of communism. Since such a movement rests on 
thoughts, feelings, visions, dreams or conviction, the communist movement as 
groups of people organized for this goal has been subjective or ideological; a 
material striving of individuals and sectarian groups with a vision. The 
communist movement as a vision expressed the past as a lived experience of 
humanity, 
projected into the future. There however was no class aggregate consciously or 
unconsciously fighting for communism or driven to spontaneous demand the 
stated economic and political goals of communism, nor had society advance to a 
state of infrastructure evolution to transcend commodity exchange and value in 
the minds of men (men as the initial class aggregate owners of instruments of 
production). 


The bourgeoisie is a man born without convictions, casting off the existing 
convictions he is asked to inherit and then he creates the modern and his 
convictions as correspondence to what created him as "it" evolves. The "it" is 
the 
complexity we call society but "its" primacy or fundamentality is viewed as 
the material power of production and its various forms of ownership rights. 
 
The epoch of the bourgeoisie means he is "it" as the flesh and primary owner. 
 
The bourgeoisie and proletariat as a unity emerged welding instruments of 
production that created new social organization, new forms of wealth, real 
products as the force of exchange and battle cries of freedom for this new way 
of 
life to be what "it" could be. This concrete economic relationship evolved 
within the framework of feudalism not simply as potential of the new productive 
forces but as the actual emergence, working and reorganization of people around 
a 
new technology regime and system of product exchange.

The schematic presentation of the bourgeoisie as a scattered producer, then a 
middle class in feudal society; as guild owners and sturdy men of means and 
fortitude that advance lockstep with the development of the material power of 
production is an excellent explanation . . . after the fact and formation of 
the bourgeoisie as the social power of privately owned capital. The actual 
formation of the capitalist class and workers in unity as the new technological 
regime was more varied and complex but the abstraction as explanation holds 
true. 
 

There will not be, nor can there be, any concrete forms of communist economic 
and social organization as society within the framework of bourgeois social 
organization. We are not going to be able to grow a small communism in America 
and watch it get big and over take bourgeois production. Thus, the communist 
of my hue never scream bloody murder against reformism because the primary 
classes of a social system are locked in a life and death battle to reform the 
system in each others favor/flava. Rather, we speak of the revolutionary 
struggle 
for reform because our power as a force of history lies in our continuous and 
enlarging combination of communist visionaries. "Revolutionary combination 
due to association." 
 
The bourgeoisie and proletariat as a unity went to work everyday as 
bourgeoisie and proletariat within the crumbling environment of feudal society. 
There 
was an objective bourgeois historical movement within the environment of the 
destruction of feudal society as concrete material relations of (re)production, 
exchange, and distribution.  There were also always people who believed in 
communism because there were always people who believed in communism because 
that 
is where we come from. Communism lives in our hearts and had to be trained 
out of us. 

Since there has been no "objective" economic movement of the mass of people, 
as rising class aggregates, for communism during the rising

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics of the new class or communist class (1)!

[Waistline2]

Part 1

Dialectics of the new class or communist class

The new class is a class - aggregate of non-producing consumers, at this 
moment of history as society is leaping to a new mode of production. The new 
class 
appears to be the same superfluous population during the ascendency of 
capital as the industrial system because both groups are outside active 
engagement 
of production or non-producing consumers. 
 
I reject the logic that the superfluous population of the period of 
transition to industrial society or even the army of unemployed (permanent and 
temporary) of which Engels describes, and this new non-producing consuming 
class of 
the 21st century, are basically the same. 
 
Today's non-producing consuming class is not simply a quantitative 
enlargement of the folks of which Engels speak or Marx's generally description 
of the 
lumpen proletariat. From within what we call the Marxist's approach and its 
history of observation of class, "the same thing" - object, under a different 
environment is basically only the same in appearance form.  Not simply because 
the 
object is in motion but the interplay between that defined as object and the 
environment in which it operates. Even the old appearance form becomes a 
fetter that is discarded as the environment reacts upon that which is being 
defined 
as the object of the environment. 
 
The difference that is fundamental is the environment that is production 
relations as value creation on the curve of history or the difference between a 
society transition - leap, to industrial society and a society transition - 
leap, to post industrial society. That which is fundamental or the 
fundamentality 
being looked at is the changes in the material power of production. What is 
common is the leap or transition which manifest the general law of transition 
that Marx famously summarized in his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of 
Political Economy. 
 
At the front of the curve of industrial development the agricultural 
population is converted into a different - new mode of expression, of the 
working 
class existing in correspondence to rising development of industrial artifacts. 
At 
the end of the curve of industrial development the agricultural population as 
class aggregates have been more than less obliterated, atomized or reshaped 
as the result of the mechanization of agriculture and today, what is now being 
obliterated is the industrial working class itself. The mass of superfluous 
population is not a working class in any sense that we understand the word 
"working" and hence dubbed "the communist class" because their spontaneous 
demand 
is for distribution of the social products outside the sphere of labor exchange 
or the selling and buying of labor power. 
 
>From this point of view I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the 
historic presentation of nationalization of production as the form of 
transition 
to communism in the 21 century. The historic presentation of the program of 
nationalization of production is found in the "Communist Manifesto" and Engels 
"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," rather than Soviet history.  
 
I do tend towards one formulation that speaks of 21st century money as a 
technology tool or expression of value and this "expression" is legalized by 
state 
violence today because money is close to a valueless (zero value content) 
commodity as one can come. That is to say, money is fiat currency and contains 
virtually zero labor content and is not redeemable or representative for what 
was once a universal conveyor and store of labor - gold and other man reshaped 
metal objects or what is called species money expressing the laboring process. 
Then this fiat money, - paper, used as a credit and debt instrument backed by 
state violence, has attained a degree of abstractness where we are dealing 
with super-symbolic relations registered in machines as real world digital 
money. 
 
I am more comfortable with our "credit card" system or card system that 
registers consumption or distribution, rather than the systematic focus on 
labor 
content of the individual or labor coupons. Labor coupons - under socialism, in 
my understanding means a technology tool that expresses the measure of human 
laboring and serves as an indicator of exchangeability of products (things) of 
an equivalent labor quantity. This is called the value relationship no matter 
how it is expressed. 
 
In our society today and large sectors of the world, many millions of people 
are issued cards or script, that allows them access to the general treasure 
house of labor outside of registering their labor contribution. Many folks on 
welfare in America today - although this is changing under the heavy hand of 
the 
increasingly fascistic bourgeoisie, receive food stamps and rent subsidies, 
without the requirement of a labor coupon. 
 
When folks on welfare receive live off of the "dole" what is register is 
their consumption and dist

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Oudeyis]

- Original Message -
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 7:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> Interesting post!  But I don't understand all of it.  Comments interleaved
> . . .
>
> At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
>
> >In regards to this thread on emergence and dialectics:
> >Your discussion (the whole thread) on dialectics and emergence conflates
> >several contradictory objectives: the dialectics of dialectics, i.e. the
> >essence of emergence in Marxist theory; the determination of the
> >substantiality of emergence in nature as such, and the broader question
of
> >the relation of dialectics to nature.
>
> Well, I do jump from topic to topic depending on the focus of the moment,
> but I'm not sure I conflate objectives.  The whole thread is, however,
rife
> with conflation.

I was referring to the discussion in general, not to your contribution in
particular.

> >Several points:
> >
> >1. The essence of emergence in Marxist theory is the logical process
whereby
> >any judgement (for Marx and Hegel alike) regarding the particularities of
> >any universal inevitably sets that particularity against the universal.
The
> >negation is that totality of the universal that is "left out" by the
> >particular judgement.  The emergent or what is called by Engels the
negation
> >of the negation is the determination of another particularity that
includes
> >the original judgement within an action that incorporates that part of
the
> >universal that negates the original judgement.  All this logical activity
is
> >at least for Marx and Engels is what practice; physical/sensual and
> >intellectual is all about.
>
> I don't understand the above.

The logic of dialectics is essentially the logic of emergence (see next
response, below) that is itself the emergent product of a system of emergent
categories of logical activity.

Having said this (the least important part of the paragraph) we can address
the central issue of the description of dialectics.  Yeah, back to
kindergarten, but it appears that we need some basic reacquaintance with the
subject.  Hegel regarded dialectics as thought (hence he is, children, an
idealist).  Marx and Engels, while agreeing with Hegel's logic, argued that
it while it effectively represented the active relation of man to nature
Hegel's restriction of logic to thought obviated the actual interface
between man and nature the physical and sensual dimensions of men's
interaction with nature. Clearly, Marx and Engels were not here discussing
what nature is all about, but about how logic is manifest in the whole range
of men's activities in the world; physical, sensual and intellectual.

Still, it's hard to give up old habits, both for idealists and materialists
alike (even Marxists regard themselves as having sacred traditions).
Millennia of arguing whether the world is ideal or material has made a very
deep impression on the thinking of Europeans, and particularly on European
intellectuals. At the turn of the last century the two most "Hegelian" of
the Marxist theoreticians had great difficulty in adopting the idea that
Marx and Engels were concerned with how men act in and with the world and
not with the nature of the world. I suggest that Plekhanov's later
Neo-Kantian tendencies arose out of the contradictions implicit in his
identification of the dialectic as the mechanism of change of an
ontologically material world. Even Lenin's realization of the actual
significance came in stages.  He began life as a Plekhanov materialist and
appears to have only become aware of the dangers of classical materialism in
the course of his opposition to the Neo-positivism of the Machists (1908).
Even then, I doubt if he really became aware of the full distinction between
Marxian and classical materialism until after 1914, after he read and
digested fully Hegel's writings on logic and the Philosophy of Right.

Lenin's final stand on the issue of dialectics was that it is logic, the
theory of human knowledge, and the development of human interaction with
nature through labour in all its aspects; conscious and unconscious,
individual and collective, and material and intellectual. The issue as to
whether nature itself, whatever that may actually mean, is of no interest to
Marxian theory since, among other things, it has no real value for the
practical objectives of scientific theory of history, the determination of
the objectives of revolutionary policy.

The fact that the question, "is nature dialectical?" can still arise in
Marxist circles is an indication that we are still very much at the
kindergarten stage of learning Hegel and Marx and Engel's use of

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Dogangoecmen]

 
but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything that 
can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view 
dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply adjust 
itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less 
conscioulsy by labour?

NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN HISTORY
IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH  THE
WORLD


 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Steve Gabosch]

I appreciate the way Ralph separates out some of the vital questions.  I 
also found myself once again really appreciating the work he does on his 
website.  I googled for an article by Ilyenkov - and there Ralph's site 
popped up with just what I was looking for!


On the ontology question - whether nature is dialectical, etc. - let me 
just begin with something from Marx and Engels.


I took a peek at German Ideology (1846), the earliest joint work of Marx 
and Engels and probably the first mature statement of Marxist ideology, as 
we have come to look at their work.  I would interpret the following 
passage from GI as supporting one part of my suggested position - that 
classical Marxism starts with nature - and humankind's interaction with 
it.  I certainly find myself resonating with this passage.  But Ralph may 
have a different take on what M&E were trying to get at, so I thought I'd 
just start with a major quote, which has the heading "First Premises of 
Materialist Method."


BTW, I don't think quotes settle questions, just help clarify them.  So 
this is just a place to start.


- Steve


Ralph points out:
(1)  "I agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical." Marx and 
Engels did not make exactly the same claims about nature.


(2)  "this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological 
statement about the nature of reality": historically, historical 
materialism came first, albeit as an outgrowth of engagement with Hegelian 
philosophy.  What was later called 'dialectical materialism' came 
later.  Still later, histomat was declared an application of diamat.  So 
the question is: what is the reality whose nature was characterized by 
Marx and Engels (prior to his independent work we've been debating)?  The 
reality was society, and not the domain of natural science.  True, Marx 
wrote about Epicurus, but he was really dealing with philosophical, not 
natural-scientific concepts.



from German Ideology ( page 42 in my 1970 International Publishers edition).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2


First Premises of Materialist Method

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but 
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. 
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions 
under which they live, both those which they find already existing and 
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a 
purely empirical way.


The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of 
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the 
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to 
the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual 
physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds 
himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of 
history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification 
in the course of history through the action of men.


Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or 
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves 
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a 
step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing 
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual 
material life.


The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of 
all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence 
and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered 
simply as being the production of the physical existence of the 
individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, 
a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their 
part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, 
therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and 
with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the 
material conditions determining their production.


This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. 
In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with 
one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.



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Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Hegel, Marx, and dialectic : a debate / Richard Norman and Sean Sayers.
Brighton, Sussex : Harvester Press ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities 
Press, 1980.

viii, 188 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Sayers took the classical Stalinist (then Maoist) diamat party line, which 
I detest.  Norman took the position I support: upholding the spirit of 
Engels while criticizing the letter.  I reviewed this debate at length on 
the old marxism lists in the mod-90s.  It's quite instructive for those 
caught up in those old debates.


At 08:07 PM 5/26/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:

This is quite clear.  I think the second point is particularly well
put.  What is the Richard Norman work you are referring to?

Chris


> (1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and
argued in
> this manner: these examples are empty verbiage.  Engels was indeed in
> pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a
> number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing,
which was
> later taken as gospel.
>
> (2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is
a basic
> conflation between natural law and logical law.  Engels seems to have
> finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though
> there have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman).  Formal logical
> laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters such as
stasis,
> motion, change, etc.  The real issue is the relationship of logic to
> ontology.  These problems arise in the fusion of logic with
ontology, as
> occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and dialectical
> logic.  But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent
> inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of
> assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of
logic
> and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis.  If it turns
out that
> we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being
without
> eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then
> dialectical logic has something to do.  But physical processes have
nothing
> to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such
> exist, are logical abstractions describing the categorial
relationships of
> concepts (which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.
>
> (3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical
problem with
> diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial
> statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know
since
> Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories &
> examples of natural phenomena).  To wit, your examples:



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Re: [marxistphilosophy] marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Jim Farmelant]

It's my understanding that the later Korsch was rather sympathetic
towards logical positivism as indicated in the piece from his
*Lenin as Philosopher*.  I would speculate that he was
perhaps influenced in this regard by his friend, Sidney
Hook.  Hook and Korsch were friends ever since Hook
met up with him, while pursuing postdoc studies in
central Europe.  There he attended lectures by Korsch,
and those along with his reading of Lukacs' *History
and Class Consciousness*, profoundly shaped
the young SIdney Hook's take on Marxism.  This
understanding of Marxism was reflected in Hook's
*Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx*.
http://www.crimsonbird.com/history/hook.htm

Hook, a little later on would take an interest in
the work that was being done by members of
the Vienna Circle concerning logical positivism,
especially the work of Otto Neurath.  When 
Neurath visited the US in the late 1930s,
Hook was one of his hosts, and Neurath's
linkage of the positvists' distinction between
science and metaphysics and the Marxist
distinction between science and ideology,
influenced Hook.  Perhaps Hook influence
Korsch along these lines as well, I don't
know.  Perhaps, Justin would know.

Jim F.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 14:31:28 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Very interesting.  It is difficult to judge Korsch, Pennekoek, or 
> Lenin 
> from these fragments alone.  A more detailed study of all three is 
> indicated, I see.  Just a few hurried notes on the Korsch piece.
> 
> >He never conceived of the difference between the "historical 
> materialism" 
> >of Marx and the "previous forms of materialism" as an unbreachable 
> >opposition arising from a real conflict of classes. He conceived it 
> rather 
> >as a more or less radical expression of one continuous 
> revolutionary 
> >movement. Thus Lenin's "materialistic" criticism of Mach and the 
> Machians, 
> >according to Pannekoek, failed even in its purely theoretical 
> purpose 
> >mainly because Lenin attacked the later attempts of bourgeois 
> naturalistic 
> >materialism not from the viewpoint of the historical materialism of 
> the 
> >fully developed proletarian class, but from a proceeding and 
> >scientifically less developed phase of bourgeois materialism.
> 
> There is an obscurity here in delineating the precise relationship 
> between 
> the development of materialism and class conflict.
> 
> >He fully acknowledges the tactical necessity, under the conditions 
> in 
> >pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia, of Lenin's relentless fight 
> against the 
> >left bolshevik, Bogdanov, and other more or less outspoken 
> followers of 
> >Mach's ideas who in spite of their good revolutionary intentions 
> actually 
> >jeopardised the unity and weakened the proven revolutionary energy 
> of the 
> >Marxist party by a revision of its "monolithic" materialistic 
> ideology.
> 
> Korsch cites Pannekoek's view, which seems from an intellectual 
> standpoint 
> lacking in integrity, and then disagrees with it politically:
> 
> >In fact, Pannekoek goes somewhat further in his positive 
> appreciation of 
> >Lenin's philosophical tactics of 1908 than seems justified to this 
> writer 
> >even in a retrospective analysis of the past. If he had 
> investigated, in 
> >his critical revision of Lenin's anti-Machist fight, the tendencies 
> 
> >represented by the Russian Machists as well as those of their 
> German 
> >rnasters he might have been warned against the unimpeachable 
> correctness 
> >of Lenin's attitude in the ideological struggles of 1908 by a later 
> 
> >occurrence. When Lenin, after 1908, was through with the Machist 
> >opposition which had arisen within the central committee of the 
> Bolshevik 
> >party itself, he regarded that whole incident as closed.
> 
> Then a recitation of the sins perpetrated later by other Leninists 
> in 
> comdemning Bogdanov, which are redolent of Stalinist rhetoric.  The 
> description of Bogdanov's philosophical position is no more 
> edifying.  Korsch laments Lenin's attack against positivism as a 
> development of materialism.  Furthermore, he judges it to be 
> opportunistic:
> 
> >This fallacy is that the militant character of a revolutionary 
> materialist 
> >theory can and must be maintained against the weakening influences 
> of 
> >other apparently hostile theoretical tendencies by any means to the 
> 
> >exclusion of modifications made imperative by further scientific 
> criticism 
> >and research. This fallacious conception caused Lenin to evade 
> discussion 
> >on their merits of such new scientific concepts and theories that 
> in his 
> >judgement jeopardised the proved fighting value of that 
> revolutionary 
> >(though not necessarily proletarian revolutionary) materialist 
> philosophy 
> >that his Marxist party had adopted, less from Marx and Engels than 
> from 
> >their philosophical teachers, the bourgeois materialists from 
> Holbach to 
> >Feuerbach and their idealistic antagonist, the dialec

Re: [marxistphilosophy] marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Very interesting.  It is difficult to judge Korsch, Pennekoek, or Lenin 
from these fragments alone.  A more detailed study of all three is 
indicated, I see.  Just a few hurried notes on the Korsch piece.


He never conceived of the difference between the "historical materialism" 
of Marx and the "previous forms of materialism" as an unbreachable 
opposition arising from a real conflict of classes. He conceived it rather 
as a more or less radical expression of one continuous revolutionary 
movement. Thus Lenin's "materialistic" criticism of Mach and the Machians, 
according to Pannekoek, failed even in its purely theoretical purpose 
mainly because Lenin attacked the later attempts of bourgeois naturalistic 
materialism not from the viewpoint of the historical materialism of the 
fully developed proletarian class, but from a proceeding and 
scientifically less developed phase of bourgeois materialism.


There is an obscurity here in delineating the precise relationship between 
the development of materialism and class conflict.


He fully acknowledges the tactical necessity, under the conditions in 
pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia, of Lenin's relentless fight against the 
left bolshevik, Bogdanov, and other more or less outspoken followers of 
Mach's ideas who in spite of their good revolutionary intentions actually 
jeopardised the unity and weakened the proven revolutionary energy of the 
Marxist party by a revision of its "monolithic" materialistic ideology.


Korsch cites Pannekoek's view, which seems from an intellectual standpoint 
lacking in integrity, and then disagrees with it politically:


In fact, Pannekoek goes somewhat further in his positive appreciation of 
Lenin's philosophical tactics of 1908 than seems justified to this writer 
even in a retrospective analysis of the past. If he had investigated, in 
his critical revision of Lenin's anti-Machist fight, the tendencies 
represented by the Russian Machists as well as those of their German 
rnasters he might have been warned against the unimpeachable correctness 
of Lenin's attitude in the ideological struggles of 1908 by a later 
occurrence. When Lenin, after 1908, was through with the Machist 
opposition which had arisen within the central committee of the Bolshevik 
party itself, he regarded that whole incident as closed.


Then a recitation of the sins perpetrated later by other Leninists in 
comdemning Bogdanov, which are redolent of Stalinist rhetoric.  The 
description of Bogdanov's philosophical position is no more 
edifying.  Korsch laments Lenin's attack against positivism as a 
development of materialism.  Furthermore, he judges it to be opportunistic:


This fallacy is that the militant character of a revolutionary materialist 
theory can and must be maintained against the weakening influences of 
other apparently hostile theoretical tendencies by any means to the 
exclusion of modifications made imperative by further scientific criticism 
and research. This fallacious conception caused Lenin to evade discussion 
on their merits of such new scientific concepts and theories that in his 
judgement jeopardised the proved fighting value of that revolutionary 
(though not necessarily proletarian revolutionary) materialist philosophy 
that his Marxist party had adopted, less from Marx and Engels than from 
their philosophical teachers, the bourgeois materialists from Holbach to 
Feuerbach and their idealistic antagonist, the dialectical philosopher 
Hegel. Rather he stuck to his guns, preferring the immediate practical 
utility of a given ideology to its theoretical truth in a changing world. 
This doctrinaire attitude, by the way, runs parallel to Lenin's political 
practice.


Indeed, such instrumentalism is fallacious, but is this a correct portrayal 
of Lenin's attitude towards scientific developments?  I would add that one 
of the problems with the Marxist tradition is the general problem of the 
uneven development of science with respect to philosophy.  A person that 
knows only one of these is generally ill-equipped to tackle the other.  The 
moment Marxism was established institutionally as a body of thought, 
largely in the hands of the German Social Democrats, this problem was 
created, not by them specifically, but by the overall social fragmentation 
responsible for the fragmentation of intellectual trends.  Further, the 
problem of uneven development was exacerbated by the importation of Marxism 
into backward Russia.


I am puzzled by the following argument:

It is a long way from Lenin's violent philosophical attack on Mach and 
Avenarius's "idealistic" positivism and empiriocriticism to that refined 
scientific criticism of the latest developments within the positivist camp 
which was published in 1938 in the extremely cultured periodical of the 
English Communist party.[8] Yet there is underlying this critical attack 
on the most progressive form of modern positivistic thought the same old 
Leninist fallacy. The cri