Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate revisited

[andie nachgeborenen]

Leontiff also won the Nobel Memorial prize in economics -- not for work he did 
in the USSR, though. He had great respect for Marx, I believe contributed a 
paper to an MR anthology on Marxist Economics put together by David Horowitz 
(!) in the old days.

Oskar Lange, later like Kantoworitz a hands-on central planner, showed that on 
neoclassical assumptions you could model a nonmarket economy to mimic market 
efficiencies using shadow prices (see Lange  Taylor, On the Economic Theory 
of Prices, a response to Hayek from, I think 1938

http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Socialism-Oskar-Lange/dp/B0006AO488

The calculation debate swayed back and forth for a long time. The standard 
view, last time I checked, and I think this is correct, is that Lange actually 
missed Hayek's point. Hayek is not a neo-classicist but a sharp critic of 
neo-classicism. He's an institutionalist whose critique of planning is based on 
realistic observations about the operation of people in organizations gives in 
the incentives pure planning gives them. In this respect Hayek also differs 
sharply from Mises, who was ferociously a priorist, though not neoclassical. 
Hayek is a lot closer than Lange or Mises to Marx's approach. I'd say he's been 
soundly vindicated. Btw, he was not opposed to planning on efficiency grounds, 
as opposed to ideological ones, where experience showed it would work. He 
supported national health care, for example. 

Kantorowitz's mathematical achievement was awesome and knocks the math of 
neoclassicals into a cocked hat. It's also true that, as Cockshott argues, he 
was in many ways ahead of his time in that a lot of what he advocated could not 
be done on any existing computer technology available in his lifetime, 
especially in the USSR. 

However, I think he also does not come to grips with Hayek's objections. Not to 
put a fine a point on it, with a computer-based planning system running linear 
program models, you have the engineer's standard worry: GIGO. Hayek's 
fundamental argument was that the incentives of central planning produced GI, 
guaranteed you bad data to start with, so any models, no matter how good and 
how fast, starting with that data, would produce GO. Kantorowitz -- and I've 
read his big book -- does not concern himself with the quality of the input 
data.

I have a long-standing interest in the calculation debate, as some of you know, 
but in some ways it's passe. There's no active audience outside a small handful 
of academic theorists interested in what is now the purely theoretical 
possibility of a nonmarket economy. There's a small handful of die-hard, mostly 
Stalinist, leftists, who Believe, but they're really not interested in even the 
broad strokes of the debate, because they Know the answer. No state exists 
anymore that even aspires to a nonmarket system, and none is likely to emerge. 

So apart from amusing people like Cockshotte and me, what exactly is the point? 
I suppose if you're writing about Marx and you are persuaded by one or the 
other side you can say, well there exist models that show that a nonmarket 
system, maybe like what Marx envisaged, is theoretically possible. Or: not. 

Anyway, work calleth.

Justin





--- On Tue, 9/22/09, Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org wrote:

 From: Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the 
 socialist calculation debate revisited
 To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
 the thinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu, 
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Cc: marxist philosophy marxistphiloso...@yahoogroups.com
 Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 10:39 AM
 Not that I endorse an exclusive
 concentration on economic 
 calculation, but Cockschott's overall perspective can be
 found here:
 
 21st Century Marxism
 http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/21stCenturyMarxism.htm
 
 At 11:02 AM 9/22/2009, Ralph Dumain wrote:
 Some time ago Jim gave us this reference. If you are
 interested in
 Cockshott's analysis of the socialist calculation
 debate, high-tech
 socialism  e-democracy more generally, see his web
 site:
 
 http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/
 
 
 At 09:37 PM 5/24/2009, Jim Farmelant wrote:
 
  Paul Cockshott on how the Soviet economist and
 mathematician,
  Leonid Kantorovich (who was the only Soviet
 economist
  to ever win the Nobel Prize in economics),
  used his work on linear programming to
  answer the arguments of economists like Ludwig von
 Mises
  and Friedrich Hayek who argued that rational
 socialist
  economic planning was, even in theory,
 impossible.
  
  Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to
 Kantorovich
  
  http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/standalonearticle.pdf
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate revisited

[andie nachgeborenen]

The spell checker replaced Kantorovich with Kantorowtz, and I didn't catch it. 
Please insert the correct name. Sorry.

--- On Tue, 9/22/09, andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgebore...@yahoo.com wrote:

 From: andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgebore...@yahoo.com
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the 
 socialist calculation debate revisited
 To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
 the thinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 1:35 PM
 Leontiff also won the Nobel Memorial
 prize in economics -- not for work he did in the USSR,
 though. He had great respect for Marx, I believe contributed
 a paper to an MR anthology on Marxist Economics put together
 by David Horowitz (!) in the old days.
 
 Oskar Lange, later like Kantoworitz a hands-on central
 planner, showed that on neoclassical assumptions you could
 model a nonmarket economy to mimic market efficiencies using
 shadow prices (see Lange  Taylor, On the Economic
 Theory of Prices, a response to Hayek from, I think 1938
 
 http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Socialism-Oskar-Lange/dp/B0006AO488
 
 The calculation debate swayed back and forth for a long
 time. The standard view, last time I checked, and I think
 this is correct, is that Lange actually missed Hayek's
 point. Hayek is not a neo-classicist but a sharp critic of
 neo-classicism. He's an institutionalist whose critique of
 planning is based on realistic observations about the
 operation of people in organizations gives in the incentives
 pure planning gives them. In this respect Hayek also differs
 sharply from Mises, who was ferociously a priorist, though
 not neoclassical. Hayek is a lot closer than Lange or Mises
 to Marx's approach. I'd say he's been soundly vindicated.
 Btw, he was not opposed to planning on efficiency grounds,
 as opposed to ideological ones, where experience showed it
 would work. He supported national health care, for example.
 
 
 Kantorowitz's mathematical achievement was awesome and
 knocks the math of neoclassicals into a cocked hat. It's
 also true that, as Cockshott argues, he was in many ways
 ahead of his time in that a lot of what he advocated could
 not be done on any existing computer technology available in
 his lifetime, especially in the USSR. 
 
 However, I think he also does not come to grips with
 Hayek's objections. Not to put a fine a point on it, with a
 computer-based planning system running linear program
 models, you have the engineer's standard worry: GIGO.
 Hayek's fundamental argument was that the incentives of
 central planning produced GI, guaranteed you bad data to
 start with, so any models, no matter how good and how fast,
 starting with that data, would produce GO. Kantorowitz --
 and I've read his big book -- does not concern himself with
 the quality of the input data.
 
 I have a long-standing interest in the calculation debate,
 as some of you know, but in some ways it's passe. There's no
 active audience outside a small handful of academic
 theorists interested in what is now the purely theoretical
 possibility of a nonmarket economy. There's a small handful
 of die-hard, mostly Stalinist, leftists, who Believe, but
 they're really not interested in even the broad strokes of
 the debate, because they Know the answer. No state exists
 anymore that even aspires to a nonmarket system, and none is
 likely to emerge. 
 
 So apart from amusing people like Cockshotte and me, what
 exactly is the point? I suppose if you're writing about Marx
 and you are persuaded by one or the other side you can say,
 well there exist models that show that a nonmarket system,
 maybe like what Marx envisaged, is theoretically possible.
 Or: not. 
 
 Anyway, work calleth.
 
 Justin
 
 
 
 
 
 --- On Tue, 9/22/09, Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org
 wrote:
 
  From: Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org
  Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid
 Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate revisited
  To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues
 raised by Karl Marx and the thinkers he inspired 
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu,
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
  Cc: marxist philosophy marxistphiloso...@yahoogroups.com
  Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 10:39 AM
  Not that I endorse an exclusive
  concentration on economic 
  calculation, but Cockschott's overall perspective can
 be
  found here:
  
  21st Century Marxism
  http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/21stCenturyMarxism.htm
  
  At 11:02 AM 9/22/2009, Ralph Dumain wrote:
  Some time ago Jim gave us this reference. If you
 are
  interested in
  Cockshott's analysis of the socialist calculation
  debate, high-tech
  socialism  e-democracy more generally, see
 his web
  site:
  
  http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/
  
  
  At 09:37 PM 5/24/2009, Jim Farmelant wrote:
  
   Paul Cockshott on how the Soviet economist
 and
  mathematician

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate revisited

[andie nachgeborenen]

I'm not holding my breath. Bad idea for Zen practice anyway.

--- On Tue, 9/22/09, c b cb31...@gmail.com wrote:

 From: c b cb31...@gmail.com
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the 
 socialist calculation debate revisited
 To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
 the thinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 3:34 PM
 On 9/22/09, andie nachgeborenen 
 No state exists anymore that even
 aspires to a nonmarket system, and none is likely to
 emerge.
 
 
 CB: I know most American lefties consider the Chinese CP to
 be liars,
 but I'm not one of them. They do claim to be aspiring to a
 non-market
 system. Also, there is , of course, Cuba. And the
 Bolivarians
 explicitly  claim to aspire to socialism.
 
 On China, as I've said many times, China was not a
 capitalist country
 at its revolution. By socalled stagist theory, which is
 only wrong for
 Trostskyists and some others, not classical Marxists like
 Marx and
 Engels,  also people like Ted Winslow of lbo-talk and
 Pen-L,
 capitalism is a necessary step before socialism. This is
 pragmatically
 true given that imperialism with super superior weaponry
 based on its
 industrial might over pre-capitalist societies like China
 or even
 USSR, will not permit socialist peaceful coexistence and
 development.
 This is the lesson of the last 90 years.
 
 In sum, I disagree that Chinese CP's claims to still aspire
 to
 socialism can be dismissed.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  --- On Tue, 9/22/09, Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org
 wrote:
 
   From: Ralph Dumain rdum...@autodidactproject.org
   Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on
 Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate
 revisited
   To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical
 issues raised by Karl Marx and the thinkers he inspired
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu,
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
   Cc: marxist philosophy marxistphiloso...@yahoogroups.com
   Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 10:39 AM
   Not that I endorse an exclusive
   concentration on economic
   calculation, but Cockschott's overall perspective
 can be
   found here:
  
   21st Century Marxism
   http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/21stCenturyMarxism.htm
  
   At 11:02 AM 9/22/2009, Ralph Dumain wrote:
   Some time ago Jim gave us this reference. If
 you are
   interested in
   Cockshott's analysis of the socialist
 calculation
   debate, high-tech
   socialism  e-democracy more generally,
 see his web
   site:
   
   http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/
   
   
   At 09:37 PM 5/24/2009, Jim Farmelant wrote:
   
Paul Cockshott on how the Soviet
 economist and
   mathematician,
Leonid Kantorovich (who was the only
 Soviet
   economist
to ever win the Nobel Prize in
 economics),
used his work on linear programming to
answer the arguments of economists like
 Ludwig von
   Mises
and Friedrich Hayek who argued that
 rational
   socialist
economic planning was, even in theory,
   impossible.

Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to
   Kantorovich

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/standalonearticle.pdf
   
   
  
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate

[andie nachgeborenen]

It's not a Nobel Prize. It's Nobel MEMORIAL Prize. Not sure the point of the 
question about the creation of the Prize (?) in a  context of the fear of the 
success of socialism, idea is that the Prize was meant to shore up capitalism 
by honoring its apologists? (Not all NMP have been capitalist apologists btw, 
Wassily Leontiff and Joseph Stiglitz for example).Perhaps. 1969 seemed at the 
time a revolutionary year, capitalism threatened at the time a legitimation 
crisis. Objectively state socialism didn't look as good by the numbers as it 
had a decade before.

--- On Wed, 6/3/09, c b cb31...@gmail.com wrote:

 From: c b cb31...@gmail.com
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the 
 socialist calculation debate
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, June 3, 2009, 3:13 PM
 CeJ jannuzi
 
 
  The Nobel Prize in Economics is arguably
  not a real Nobel Prize since Alfred Nobel
  made no provision for such a prize in his
  will.  It was instead established by the
  Bank of Sweden in the late 1960s as a Prize
  in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
 
 Yeah most people don't recall that it was first awarded in
 1969!
 
 
  And they arguably did this for ideological
  reasons since conventional mainstream
  economics was coming under fire in the
  wake of the upheavals of the 1960s.
 
 Do you think it was still yet another time when the
 liberal-conservative spectrum was afraid of the success of
 some form
 of socialism (while both liberals and conservatives have
 long
 cherry-picked the weirdo Austrians and other various
 heterodoxists and
 libertarians) ?
 
 
 
 CB: Think about it. To admit that macroeconomics can be
 understood
 scientifically is to admit that there can be macroeconomic
 planning,
 ie. centralized planning, that Hayek is wrong. So, the
 bourgeoisie are
 always going to be leery of a prize for the science of
 economics.
 This contradiction also must doom  the project of
 every school of
 bourgeois, i.e. free market, economics to fail or else
 it
 undermines free market ideology.
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Translation history of Das Kapital

[andie nachgeborenen]

You are correct. FYI the present IP edition of Vol. II makes extensive use of 
the 1893 Kerr edition but names no translator. The MECWE identifies the 
translator as Charles Untermann. MECW uses the Moore and Aveling translation of 
vol I (approved by Engels, Aveling was his son-in-law) but notes the many 
extensive textual divergences from the German incorporated to make the book 
easier (ha!) for an English audience. And I thank you for this question because 
it call to my atttention that I seem to have overloked purchasing Vol. III in 
the MECW, a failing that I will rectify.


--- On Sun, 5/31/09, Jim Farmelant farmela...@juno.com wrote:

 From: Jim Farmelant farmela...@juno.com
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Translation history of Das Kapital
 To: marx...@lists.econ.utah.edu, marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Sunday, May 31, 2009, 10:29 AM
 
 
 A friend of mine is working on a bibliography
 of books read by Mahatma Gandhi.
 
 Among the works read by Gandhi
 was the English translation of
 Das Kapital by Samuel Moore
 and Edward Aveling.  It is my
 understanding that Moore  Aveling
 only translated volume I, and that
 volumes II and III were only
 first translated into English later
 on by Ernest Untermann
 for an American edition that was published
 by Charles H. Kerr  Co. of Chicago.
 Is that correct, or am I in error on that point?
 
 Thanks in advance.
 
 Jim Farmelant
 
 You're never too old to date. Senior Dating. Click Here.
 http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTQbQWOfkQKQvfAq3Yy8qksKyGd53R95smf8SxKk7KkBGJHUQTgJAs/
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The theologicalization of Marx.

[andie nachgeborenen]

Now that's an ugly word, Charles. Did you make it up yourself?


--- On Wed, 1/21/09, Charles Brown charl...@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us wrote:

 From: Charles Brown charl...@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The theologicalization of Marx.
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 4:07 PM
 Waistline2 9 
 
 
 The theologicalization of Marx. 
  
 Saying something is true does not make it so. Tearing a
 quote from Marx to  
 prove a proposition, rather than using common sense based
 on thinking things  
 out; pondering the issue, and at least trying to grasp the
 logic of his method, 
  is not only boring after several years, but reveals
 extremely dogmatic 
 thinking. 
 
 ^^^
 CB: Maybe, but taking a quote from
 Marx to prove what _Marx_ thought 
 on an issue is very logical and
  correct.
 As to thinking through the
  issues as well,
 if you can't tell that I think
  through these 
 issues that just means you
  aren't thinking clearly, cause 
 I'm thinking through them very well.
 
 As to common sense, I'm using plenty
 of that too.
 
 ^^
 
  Marx challenged the workers to think and Capital is
 written for the 
 workers. 
 
 ^^^
 CB: There's plenty of thinking here.
 
 
  
 With study what leaps from the pages of Capital Vol. 1 is
 an incredible  
 moving story of the history of property forms, wealth,
 conquest, poverty, riches  
 and the story of humanity fighting to get
 behind the historical process by  
 thinking things out. 
  
 The approach to an issue is never whose wrong
 but what wrong.
 
 ^^^
 CB: In the course of debating 
 an issue,
 some people can be correct 
 and incorrect.
 
 ^
  What is  
 wrong with some of these discussions is treating Marx as
 some kind of God like  
 infallible entity.
 
 ^^^
 CB: That's so tired. So many people say
 that as an excuse for not _thinking_
 clearly about the discussion. Adhering
  to Marx strictly is not theology. 
 It's science.  Physicists adhere to 
 Einstein strictly. Biologists adhere
 to Darwin and Mendel strictly.
 This is known as discipline, and
 thus scientific fields are called
 disciplines.  It's not theology  or
 dogma.  Science involves rigor.
 Marxism as a science has rigors.
 
 
 
  There is nothing wrong with quoting Marx, but one must  
 recognize that many people have studied Marx for years and
 also may have strong  
 opinions. 
 
 ^^^
 
  
 Taking a position that does not admit the possibility of an
 incorrect  
 reading of Marx is the road to dogmatism. .
 
 ^^^
 CB: I am taking a position 
 that admits of
  an incorrect reading Marx. 
 Your reading of
  Marx on this issue of
  poverty and restricted
 consumption of the masses
   as cause of
  crises is incorrect.  
 That's not theology.
 That's thinking clearly.
  
 WL.
  
 
 
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Should Revolutionaries Work in ReactionaryTrade Unions?

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, I used to work for a big union Litigation Department, which was at the 
time 10 or so years ago about 50 yards to the left to the of rest of the union. 
(Shh, don't tell anyone.) And we, or some of us, would discuss this at lunch or 
after work. What are we doing in this place? (It wasn't a very lofty 
theoretical discussion.) General consensus seemed to be:

1. biz unions are still afer all in some sense worker's organizations. There 
are rank and file militant union democracy organizations in many unions, 
including ours, which do good work to help take them back. The TDU in trucking 
is probabl;y the best known. We couldn't help them, the union was our client, 
but we could be inspired by them and they gave us some hope.

2. there aren't any revolutionary or even particularly progressive unions that 
we could work for as alternatives -- at the time some of participants in the 
discussion were also members of the IWW, but while that has had the stray 
success with Starbucks and canning in Alaska, it's nowhere in thr industry our 
union had organized.

3.   The issue of dual unionism was, for those with historical memories, 
discussed on the far left a long time ago, this really poses the question, if 
you could create alternative unions that meant something,. should you. If there 
was a common view we came to, it was really, depends. 

a. Right now unions are really weak and on the defensive. If your organization 
would split the pro-union working class even more and make the union movement 
weaker, not a good idea.

b. If your organization stands a fighting chance of being a real alternative, 
one that would draw and energize even a substantial minority of organized or 
organizable workers, go for it.

c. (b) seemed then and seems even more now like a pipe dream for the 
foreseeable future.

So there's that FWIW.


--- On Wed, 12/31/08, Charles Brown charl...@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us wrote:

 From: Charles Brown charl...@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Should Revolutionaries Work in ReactionaryTrade 
 Unions?
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, December 31, 2008, 2:09 PM
  waistli...@aol.com:
 
 --
 --
 
 Comment  
 
 (Expanded, edited version) 
 
 Yes. 
 
 I worked in one for the  better part of my life. There are
 those who do not  
 consider the auto  workers union - UAW, reactionary. 
 
 I do. 
 
 ^^^
 CB: It has been  anti-Communist, which is very pertinent to
 Communists 
 working in  it.
 
 Comment
 
 Actually, the UAW was, is and still remains  reactionary. 
 
 ^^^
 CB: Being reactionary and anti-Communist are compatible. 
 
 ^^^
 
 For almost the first 40 years of its existence black 
 members were fought and 
 keep out of higher union positions. In the Detroit, the 
 change in this 
 fascist ideology underlying exclusion began after the 1967 
 Detroit Rebellion with 
 the notable election of Homer Jolly Sr. as President of 
 Local 51, my home 
 local. The exclusion of blacks from union office and their 
 regulating to the 
 worse jobs, and segregation and exclusion out of the skills
  trades, was not 
 anti-communism but Jim Crow.   
 
 ^^^
 CB: Scratch a redbaiter and find a race hater.  There is no
 contradiction between Jim Crow and anti-communism. 
 
 ^^^
 
 What accounts  for the reactionariness of the UAW in the
 political sense is 
 somewhat different  from its reactionariness in the
 historical sense. 
 
 During my tenure the  anti-communist clause could not be
 used against any of 
 us in a legal way or  other than telling other workers
 Waistline is a 
 communist. 
 
 ^^^
 CB: Before your tenure they used it to kick out Dave Moore
 and others from Local 600.
 
 See Coleman Young's _Hardstuff_
 
 ^^^
 
 ^^
 The fact of the  matter is that the CIO was segregated and
 exclusionary 
 and basically the  organization of the unskilled whites.
 This does not mean 
 there were not blacks  and that individual units did not
 have blacks.
 
 In the historical sense  the industrial form of unionism
 blocks a huge sector 
 of unorganized workers by  definition. Lenin does in fact
 speak of these 
 reactionary tendencies - in the  historical sense, in the
 material you printed.  
 
 The UAW is today  reactionary. However, it is not fascist .
 . . yet.  And 
 hopefully never,  but that depends.
 
 Again the purpose of discussion and debate is for  clarity
 and creativity. 
 
 
 Waistline  
 
 **New year...new news.  Be the first to know
 what is making 
 headlines. (http://www.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntaolcom0026)
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama falters McCain the winner

[andie nachgeborenen]

I have no intention of defending BHO's idea of taking the war on terror of 
Afghanistan and, if he deems it necessary, to Pakistan. I'm a knee-jerk, US Out 
Of ___ anti-interventionist, and even if I were not, the Afghan war is even 
more lost than the Iraq war, if possible. I think the departing Brit commander 
acknowledged as much the other day. 

No one has conquered Afghanistan since Alexander the Great -- a point actually 
made, astonishingly enough, by McCain in the first debate, who didn't seem to 
appreciate its force. Mostly that didn't stick when the troops left whatever 
town they had just taken, although the Afghans, or many of them, paid 
tribute, er, blackmail to Alexander while he lived, fortunately for them, not 
long. To the extent that Alexander's Afghan conquest stuck beyond that it did 
because he married a Bactrian (Afghan, we'd now say) princess, or chieftain's 
daughter, Roxanne. I don't think that Michelle Obama would approve of that 
solution (Roxanne is among other things, suspected of poisoning Alexanders 
first, Persian wife, Darius; daughter); and unlike today, polygamy was both 
legal and popular in Alexander's time and constituencies. 

Be that as it may, what BHO actually says should be noted. He says he wants to 
send two more brigades of new troops into Afghanistan. This would be a fairly 
significant escalation of the war. NATO has about 43,000 personnel (mostly 
noncombat, ratio these days is roughly 10:1) in Afghanistan, 26,000 of which 
are US. A US military brigade comprises 1,500 to 4,000 personnel, so this could 
mean as many as 8,000 new us troops, or a roughly 15% increase in the total 
number of NATO troops, an increase by a third of the number of US troops. But 
as a practical matter that is a drop in the bucket. It will not make any 
military difference whatsoever in a country where the Taliban and the warlords 
own everything outside three or four major cities. 

Now BHO is a very smart guy who has highly competent military advice. He has to 
know this escalation won't do a damn thing militarily, and it's not even 
significant as an escalation compared to the withdrawal of 140,000 troops 
(plus, one presumes, a roughly equal number of contractor/mercenaries) from 
Iraq, even if BHO were to leave a residual force behind. 

The BHO Afghan escalation proposal, like the threat to go after bin Ladin in 
Pakistan without asking if they find him (ha!) and the Pakistantis are unable 
or unwilling to take him out, is purely for domestic consumption. It is meant 
to show a US audience that Democrats can be as aggressive and militaristic as 
Republicans, and to justify withdrawal from Iraq in the context of BHO's 
suggestion that that is the wrong war. It's a play for the US political 
middle. 

That doesn't make BHO a wonderful guy and an ideal candidate of the left, 
although ending the Iraq war would be a real improvement from any sane 
political perspective. Apart from the young men and women the proposed Afghan 
escalation would put in harms way and those near them, and the extra Afghan 
civilians who will be killed by some of those troops, the Afghan idea is not a 
major military change. 

What is really scary, though, and what no one I have heard discuss has 
remarked, is that both candidates, including BHO, want to get the former Soviet 
Republics, including Ukraine, into NATO. For people -- both McCain and BHO -- 
who sday they don't want to start a new cold war, that is a pretty strange way 
to go about it, because that is exactly what surrounding Russia with NATO 
countries, some of which used to be sister Republics and share extended borders 
with Russia, would do. 

I do trust that the Russians will continue to be stable and cool-headed and not 
start shooting, but they will reignite the arms race, and we, of course, will 
have to respond, and we will back in the pre-perestroika era with the great 
power politics of the 19th century. That will be extremely expensive for 
countries that, like us, can't afford it, and extremely dangerous in terms is 
raising the geopolitical military temperature fought, if people are sane about 
it, through proxy wars. One doesn't really want top have to start thinking 
(again)( aboout what it means if they are not sane.


--- On Wed, 10/8/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama falters McCain the winner
 To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and 
 thethinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 9:56 AM
  Doug Henwood 
 
 
   No, the distinct characteristic of Obama's
 position is that he
  proposes a definite timetable for
 withdrawal as opposed to an
  indefinite one or eventually.
 
 Yeah, and he explicitly wants to take the troops withdrawn
 from Iraq  
 and send them to Afghanistan. Surely you've noticed
 that.
 
 Doug
 
 
 CB:  Surely since you don't allow 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber

[andie nachgeborenen]

Call me a Kantian liberal then. 

I acknowledge the linguistic division of labor, as Hilary Putnam (then in PL) 
called the need to defer to real expertise that any given person necessarily 
lacks. If I want to learn about medicine, I consult a doctor, if something is 
wrong with my car, I take it to a mechanic, when my computer doesn't work, I 
call tech support (or my wife), when I have to do my taxes, I take it my 
accountant. I hope that when you have a legal problem you refer it to a lawyer. 
Etc.

I also agree with Charles that two heads are better than one in the sense that 
often, if there is mutual consultation even amoing the relatively ignorant, but 
especially among people with different relevant expertise, or both, we often 
get better results than trying to think up stuff all by ourselves alone, maybe 
unless we are Kant. Knowledge is a social process. That is wht we have 
departmentys and acvademies of science, seminars and conferences, bull sessions 
and get togethers. And, Al Gore bless it :-, the internet. (I just showed a 
mystified student how to find the local court rules in three steps with google, 
knowning nothing more than the name of the court.)

BUT none of this means that any two heads are better than one. Heydsrich and 
Himmler together are worse, unless what youi want is to figure out how to kill 
millions. But that's a bad example, they were real experts in something bad. 
Two ignorant heads are nothing to defer to. If, for example, you took me, a 
civil litigator and criminal defense attorney and law prof who teaches mostly 
procedure, and my hall neighbor, an intellectual property scholar, and put to 
us a question about the collapse ofg Mayan civilization, you'd be lucky to get 
half-baked speculations misremembered from Jared Diamond, who may or may not 
know anything himself, even though he sounds pretty good. 

I have absolutely to reason to think that whatever real expertise and knowledge 
in government that Castro and Chavez have leaves me any reason whatsoever to 
think they they, individually or collectively, have anything illuminating to 
say about 9/11. Maybe, conceivably, they have intelligence sources that give 
them information, and with a truckload of salt I might listen to a Cuban or 
Venezualian intelligence analyst who had special knowledge of the shadow world 
of terrorism, and I include in that many US government activities. But I'd want 
to see the cards on the table. I wouldn't take their word for it without 
support. given that they might have a special interest in belief in certain 
propositions that might or might not be true. 

Frankly, I don't take my _doctor's_ word for what's wrong with me without some 
explanation or at least explanation of why I couldn't have an explanation. I 
recall in grad school, after my dad had had a heart attack, having an EKG, I 
went for the results and the Dr leafed through the paper, a bunch of squiggles, 
and said, Your heart is fine. I asked, how could you tell? He picked up a fat 
treatise from his desk and said, For me to explain in a meaningful way, you'd 
have to understand THIS. OK, I'll buy that, I said. 

Anyway, I guess it depends on which two heads are better for what and what's in 
those heads as wella s what goes on between them, whether they are better than 
one.



--- On Thu, 9/18/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 1:34 PM
 Louis Proyect 
 
 Walter Lippmann wrote:
  Cuba is the subject on which I choose to focus my
 political
  work. It's at the heart of my interests, though
 hardly the
  only one. 
 
 Your posts on Cuba would have more credibility if you
 didn't appear to
 
 be such a slavish follower of every public utterance. When
 Fidel Castro
 
 (and Hugo Chavez) spoke nonsense about 9/11, you parroted
 their
 analysis 
 without ever giving any indication that you had thought
 seriously about
 
 the whole question.
 
 ^^^
 CB: Trouble with this is that its question begging: You
 haven't
 demonstrated that your thinking on 9/11 is better than that
 of Fidel
 Castro and Chavez. Given the historical record on most
 issues, I'll take
 Castro and Chavez's thinking first.  Absolute
 anti-conspiracism is not
 superior thinking. It is refusal to think. 
 
 Think for yourself is a Kantian , liberal
 mantra. The criticism so
 and so doesn't think for himself is a liberal
 taunt , not an indication
 of better thinking.
 
  Two heads are better than one.
 
 
 
 
 
 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl
 plc. www.surfcontrol.com
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

My point, in response to Charles's idea that perhaps we don't need any more 
Marxist theory, was just that there are theoretical gaps, including those 
listed, and I could extend the list; that vibrant movement would have people 
working on them, and we don't particularly. That is a polical problem in part 
for the resaons indicated. The fact that there used to be in the 60's or the 
20's just underscores the point. If the problems are politically insoluble, 
well, maybe that shows the theory is defective, possibly fatally, and therefore 
we don't need Marxist theory not because it's all wrapped up with a bow but 
because it's failed and refuted. Or do you just think that it has achieved 
whatever limited success it can achieve and we can move on? But you are not 
moving on.


--- On Thu, 8/14/08, Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008, 12:50 AM
 But how mysterious are these topics? As for solving the
 problems: 
 perhaps the problems are perfectly comprehensible but
 unsolvable:
 
 (1) the failure to account for the failure of proletarian
 revolution 
 in the advanced West
 
 Why is this hard to understand?
 
 (2) the collapse of state socialism in the East.
 
 Why is this hard to understand?
 
 (3) an account of the middle classes
 
 Is this big news? Wasn't this recognized as an issue in
 the '60s?
 
 (4) The relation of class to other fault lines in divided
 societies, 
 race, gender, etc.
 
 Hasn't this question been de rigeur for 35 years?
 
 (5) plausible account at general level of how  a classless
 society 
 might be feasible.
 
 Now here's a real problem. It does of course relate to
 the 
 aforementioned failures, but also to the complexity of
 advanced 
 industrial societies?
 
 As for working these problems, the problems can be analyzed
 and 
 understood, but it's quite possible that they can't
 be fixed.
 
 I'm guessing that whatever insightful analysis does
 exist is divorced 
 from political movements.
 
 There's not only a problem communicating these ideas to
 a general 
 public--the proletariat or the middle classes--but also to 
 progressives, activists, whatever
 constitutes the left, at least 
 in the USA. These people are in as much a state of decay as
 the 
 society at large.  Especially obnoxious are the crackpots
 holding key 
 positions in the Pacifica Radio Network.  The Washington
 station is 
 holding yet another fund drive. Today's featured topic
 was mystical 
 drivel, and the guest of honor was Dick Gregory, who
 spouted more 
 ignorant crackpot gibberish this time than I've ever
 heard him 
 speak--and that's saying quite a mouthful.  Apparently
 his illiterate 
 grandma represents the sum total of human knowledge and
 wisdom that 
 it's possible to have.  And what's worse, the other
 idiots on the 
 radio fawning over his every word.
 
 I think all these problems can be analyzed, but they
 can't be fixed.
 
 At 05:01 PM 8/13/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
 We've been around this block before. Two reasons
 why we need a 
 Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the
 other political
 
 Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory,
 problems the 
 tradition has not solved. To take some less
 controversial ones, old 
 and new: the failure to account for the failure of
 proletarian 
 revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add
 the new 
 problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East.
 The related 
 question of an account of the middle classes, since
 Marx and the 
 tradition say little except that these will disappear.
 Didn't 
 happen. A general account of the nature of class;
 Marx;s own final 
 story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The
 relation of 
 class to other fault lines in divided societies, race,
 gender, etc. 
 A plausible account at general level of how  a
 classless society 
 might be feasible.
 
 Practically and politically, if the movement were
 vital, it would be 
 attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its
 vitality 
 depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its
 being 
 intellectually vital, on having more than just the old
 pieties to 
 express. But there is no movement and what there is not
 attracting 
 bright minds; it's a vicious circle.
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

 CB: Ok, but the theory needed is more some kind
 of extraordinary
 strategy to get around the extraordinary viciousness and
 material power
 of the capitalists.it's not abstract theory,
 philosophy or critique
 of political economy.


Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf 
an, sie zu verändern. Thesis 11

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in different ways; the point, 
however, is to change it.


 Somehow,  we have to persuade a new
 generation
 that it was _humanity_ and the new generation of humans
 that lost when
 the Cold War was lost to the capitalists and imperialists. 

I'm listening . . . .

 Something
 like Workers of the West, it's our turn. 
 Russians, Chinese, Viet
 Namese, Cubans have done their part.  It's on you to
 save humanity.
 
 I guess it's more of a spiritual renaissance than a
 theoretical one. 
 Revolutionary elan more than intellectual advance.

There's that, though your formulation has a bit of a Maoist ring.

Now of course Russia is kleptocracy, China is the developing world 
ultra-capitalist economic superpower, and Vietnam is a region capitalist 
developing country. Cuba is, alas, a relic. Not an inspiring vista.

So maybe we better think of something else to save humanity and get folks to 
rally round the whatever flag. This is not a criticism of you. If I had any 
ideas I would not keep them a secret.

The ___'s  flag is deepest 
It shrouded oft our martyred dead (too grim?)
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold (definitely too grim)
Their lifeblood dyed its every fold

I think we need a new marketing job here.




  

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

We've been around this block before. Two reasons why we need a Marxian 
theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the other political

Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, problems the tradition 
has not solved. To take some less controversial ones, old and new: the failure 
to account for the failure of proletarian revolution in the advanced West; to 
which we may add the new problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. 
The related question of an account of the middle classes, since Marx and the 
tradition say little except that these will disappear. Didn't happen. A general 
account of the nature of class; Marx;s own final story breaks off 40 lines into 
the notes in Cap 3. The relation of class to other fault lines in divided 
societies, race, gender, etc. A plausible account at general level of how  a 
classless society might be feasible.

Practically and politically, if the movement were vital, it would be attracting 
bright minds to work these problems, and its vitality depends in part on its 
appearance of vitality and its being intellectually vital, on having more than 
just the old pieties to express. But there is no movement and what there is not 
attracting bright minds; it's a vicious circle.


--- On Wed, 8/13/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 10:08 AM
  andie nachgeborenen 
 
 If there are they aren't contributing much to a
 theoretical renaissance
 of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world.
 
 
 CB:  Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where
 Marxism needs a
 theoretical renaissance.  It needs a revival in practice,
 but the
 fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history
 (dare I say
 philosophy ;smile) seem valid.   The world bourgeoisie have
 won some big
 victories over the world working class, but even in that
 the basic
 dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very well
 described by
 Marxism.  Finance capital is on top of the world with
 imperialist wars
 regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, etc. 
 
 
 The main update of Marxism might be that the bourgeoisie
 have turned
 out to be  more dangerous - with the development of weapons
 of mass
 destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars -   than even
 Marx or
 Lenin warned.
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

I used to have Anti-Oedipus, even taught some of it once many years ago, but in 
accord with my current philosophy of selling anything I haven't used in 10 and 
don't see using in another 10, I sold it on Amazon. I recall its been sort of 
fun.

--- On Wed, 8/13/08, CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 8:23 PM
 RD:Value theory is not my hobby, but I'm curious
 to know why it's
 come to a dead end.
 
 It's interesting (I think anyway) to see what
 Deleuze-Guattari do to
 with it--along with modes of production.
 
 How many on this list have a copy of Anti-Oedipus (D-G work
 on Freud
 and Marx, but also Lacan and Althusser) on their
 bookshelves? Anyone
 know an online English-language version of the text?
 
 CJ
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- On Tue, 8/12/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 4:20 PM
 Logical Positivism was a relic even when I was an undergrad
 in the mid
 70s and had a part of a class with one of the last great
 LPs, Carl
 Hempel, who, however, had implicitly renounced most of the
 tenets of
 classical LPism. 
 
 Carnap and Hempel had actually deconstructed it from the
 inside in the
 late 40s, and Quine and Goodman drove a  stake through its
 heart, but as
 Kuhn predicted, it did not die until its last adherents
 did.  
 
 
 CB: What was the critique ?

Familiar stuff now, atomic sentence-by-sentence verification wasn't possible, 
maybe the whole v-theory of meaning had to go; readthe last few pages of Two 
Dogmas of Empiricism or meditate on Quine's use of Neurath's remark as an 
epigraph for Word and Obvject: We are like sailors on a sea, we can take up any 
plank, but not all at once. It took a long time for the force of this sort of 
idea to make itself felt.

 
 
 
 In the mid-70s there was a  sense of excitement in
 analytical
 philosophy, what with Kripke, Putnam, Quine, and Davidson
 on language,
 Kuhn and Feyerabend on science, Fodor, Rorty, the
 Churchlands, Stich, on
 mind, Rawls and Nozick on political philosophy; it seemed
 to be making
 progress and in fact there was a lot of still vital work
 being done,
 much of which is still very interesting and we haven't
 exhausted it.
 
 CeJ is right about what happened, dead end, hermetic
 self-enclosed
 cult. 
 ^
 CB: Before it became a cult, was it being
 related to a wider social
 group ?

As we've discussed here there has been some writing about how the LPs were 
mostly modernist radicals in Europe, before coming to America and becoming 
domesticated. 

 
 In what sense do these schools of thought  make progress ?
 get
 exhausted  ? have or lack vitality ?  I have some trouble
 understanding
 how what was valid in analytical philosophy before is
 invalidated by the
 shift to a cult.

Here Lakatos' notion of a progressive versus a degenerating research program is 
helpful. Progressive research programs in science identify new problems and 
propose new solutions for them, unifying and even creating different fields and 
expanding their scope and the strength of the predictive and explanatory 
ambition. Degenerating programs circle the wagons, defending old theories with 
increasingly elaborate refinements while (to wax Rortian here) everyone else 
gets bored and moves on.

 What was valid in AP --a broad church -- is still valid in the sense that it 
(some proposition of AP) was true it still is. (Same with scholasticism, for 
that matter.) But at some point in the last 25 years AP stopped being able to 
generate new problems or generate new solutions to old olds; it became 
hyperrefined and very specialized and lost whatever interest it had in and for 
the world outside itself, so the impression one gets from a middle distance, 
which is far as I will ever be able to get from AP, is that APers are making 
very small, highly refined adjustments to the deck chairs on a Titanic that 
everyone else has long since left.

At the risk of being provocative value theory in Marxism bears the marks of a 
degenerating reserach porogram as well.

 -thaxis


  

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

 ^^^
 CB: I really don't have a dog in this hunt, and I
 appreciate the general survey of the state of philo, but I
 thought Jacoby said that Marx, Freud and Hegel aren't
 taught much.   I didn't read what you said as majorly
 contradicting that. ??

Sop far as he's saying that, yes. So far as he is contrasting that state of 
affaiurs to what he thinks is being taught, he's out of touch and out of date.

 Marx of course enjoyed a renaissance at the prestige
 schools under the Analytical Marxists in 1975-1995 until
 they collapsed, along with the rest of Marxism, with the
 fall of Communism.
 
 
 CB: Aren't there lots of Marxists in China , still ?
 Cuba ?

If there are they aren't contributing much to a theoretical renaissance of 
Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world.




  

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

Little in the training of analytical philosophers prepares them to do 
historical scholarship. In this respect they are like lawyers who write legal 
history, at best inspired amateurs. Sometimes inspired amateurs can be quite 
good or better. Kuhn was a physicists who taught himself history of science, 
Bernal a biologist the same, both of their work is far better than rigorously 
trained historians of science, even very fine ones like Westphal.

 That said wrt to history of analytical philosophy it is my impression that 
Michael Friedman, who is actually a real Kant scholar if not one of the first 
rank, is a pretty good historian of logical positivism. Scott Soames at 
Princeton has a two volume history of analytical philosophy. I don't know how 
it is as history. I suspect it is a historical account of doctrine, the sort of 
thing Kuhn called internal history when writing about approaches to the 
history of science, as opposed to external history that places the subject in 
a wider social context. That can be valuable if it has its limits. 

Logical Positivism was a relic even when I was an undergrad in the mid 70s and 
had a part of a class with one of the last great LPs, Carl Hempel, who, 
however, had implicitly renounced most of the tenets of classical LPism. 

Carnap and Hempel had actually deconstructed it from the inside in the late 
40s, and Quine and Goodman drove a  stake through its heart, but as Kuhn 
predicted, it did not die until its last adherents did.  

In the mid-70s there was a  sense of excitement in analytical philosophy, what 
with Kripke, Putnam, Quine, and Davidson on language, Kuhn and Feyerabend on 
science, Fodor, Rorty, the Churchlands, Stich, on mind, Rawls and Nozick on 
political philosophy; it seemed to be making progress and in fact there was a 
lot of still vital work being done, much of which is still very interesting and 
we haven't exhausted it.

CeJ is right about what happened, dead end, hermetic self-enclosed cult. That's 
why Rorty left. If you look at the major departmedbts today and compare them 
with the lineup I had at Princeton in the mid 70s -- Rorty, Kripke, David 
Lewis, Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Gil Harman, Paul Benacerraf, Thomas Nagel, Tim 
Scanlon, Michael Frede -- well, some of them are still there, or around, but 
the replacements for the ones who left aren't anything like that stature. And 
Harvard didn't find anyone of similar weight to replace Quine, Goodman, Nozick 
or Putnam (Putnam's still there but he's a caricature of himself and has been 
for decades); they brought in Scanlon to replace Rawls and good as Tim is, he's 
not a heavy element of the atomic number of Rawls. NYU and Rutgers, the rising 
styar schgools, just don't compare. 

It's symptomatic that analytical philosophy is now being treated as a subject 
for history, you might as well put a big sign up saying, This Is Over. But we 
have no idea what comes next.

--- On Fri, 8/8/08, CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Friday, August 8, 2008, 2:58 PM
 Wrong thread title, sorry about that. Here it is again, with
 the proper title.
 
 
 
 I think, as the originality of original work is in
 sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d
 analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history
 of philosophy, and are being treated historically by
 philosophers who formerly did original
 work.
 
 LP was a relic when I studied philosophy in the early 80s.
 The problem
 with getting an historic perspective on it was that most
 people in
 American philosophy were not good scholars of the history
 of any
 philosophy, not even their own 'tradition' (after
 Frege), which
 relegated little bits and pieces of Kant and Hegel and Marx
 (if at
 all) to history of philosophy overview courses for
 undergraduates who
 had to take it as a general education requirement.
 
 Philosophy as an academic 'research' or scholarship
 endeavor was for a
 while an academic indulgence thought to be in support of
 the 'social
 scientification' of the former humanities. Hence
 Chomsky, for example,
 reads more like  a philosopher of linguistics and
 psycholinguistics
 (the non-clinical parts of it) than a real linguist much of
 the time.
 And the philosophy of 'sociobiology' came from
 Wilson. Now that so
 many of  these areas of academia are  stable if thoroughly
 unscientific and unproductive fields, philosophy is
 produced by a
 relatively small cult of professional academics for the
 same small
 cult of professional academics. What they do is to quite an
 extent
 hermetically sealed in their academic life worlds.
 
 CJ
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School

[andie nachgeborenen]

Jacoby is really out of touch here. Linguistic analysis is at least a  
generation dead. We are at least two generations from the last of the LPs; I 
had the honor of being taught briefly by Carl Hempel, one of the last of and 
greatest of the lot. 

Hegel is off the untouchables list, at least since Charles Taylor's big book, 
itself a generation old now, although you wouldn't do Hegelian philosophy using 
Hegel's jargon. I have a huge shelf of recent Hegel scholarship, much done by 
people at mainstream institutions, that I cannot keep up with. 

Decartes is certainly not out and has ever been in my recollection. When I was 
at Tigertown on the mid 70s Margaret Wilson was teaching Descartes to crowded 
classrooms and Bernard Williams had just published. 

Marx of course enjoyed a renaissance at the prestige schools under the 
Analytical Marxists in 1975-1995 until they collapsed, along with the rest of 
Marxism, with the fall of Communism.

History and scholarship was and probably is somewhat disfavored as a general 
rule over original work in metaphysics, normative ethics, philosophy of mind, 
and other areas that ther logical positivists thought they'd put an end to, and 
continental history and scholarship, but even that is changing, I think, as the 
originality of original work is in sharp and visible decline and logical 
positivism a d analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history of 
philosophy, and are being treated historically by philosophers who formerly did 
original work.


--- On Tue, 8/5/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 1:28 PM
 [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School
 Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com 
 Fri Aug 1 14:15:29 MDT 2008 
 
 Previous message: [Marxism] Paul Le Blanc on the Trotsky
 Legacy conference 
 Next message: [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New
 School 
 Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [
 author ] 
 
 
 
 A couple of items that I stumbled across on the net lately
 have gotten 
 me thinking about time spent as a graduate student in the
 philosophy 
 department of the New School back in 1965 to 1967.
 
 The first was an article titled “Why are some of the
 greatest thinkers 
 being expelled from their disciplines?” that appeared in
 the July 25th 
 Chronicle of Higher Education (unfortunately limited to
 subscribers or 
 some university employees like myself). Written by UCLA
 professor and 
 long-time semi-Marxist social commentator Russell Jacoby,
 it called 
 attention to the disappearance of Freud, Marx and Hegel
 from academia:
 
 How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology
 departments, Marx is 
 not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in
 philosophy? 
 Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in
 fields far from 
 their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature
 departments, Marx in 
 film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated,
 or have they 
 been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and
 Hegel have 
 turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a
 scientistic 
 ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they
 simply progress by 
 sloughing off the past.
 
 I was fortunate to study at the New School from 1965-1967
 long before 
 this trend set in. But I am afraid that Jacoby is not that
 well tuned in 
 to the philosophy scene on campus if he thought that Hegel
 was ever some 
 hot commodity for the sad fact is that philosophy
 departments have been 
 Hegel-free (and Descarte-free, etc.) for an entire
 generation except as 
 examples of how not to “do” philosophy. The so-called
 Continental 
 philosophy that traces its lineage back to Descartes is for
 the most 
 part not practiced nowadays. And if it is taught, it is
 taught as a part 
 of true philosophy’s prehistory. This school, descended
 from Logical 
 Positivism, has also been described as linguistic analysis.
 Much of its 
 effort was directed at debunking the classic “problems”
 of Continental 
 philosophy in the style of A.J. Ayer, one of the leading
 figures who 
 focused on the “verification principle”, which means
 that a proposition 
 can only be true if it can stand up to empirical testing.
 As such, all 
 philosophy that derives from Descartes cannot be
 “verified”.
 
 Parenthetically, I must admit a certain admiration for Ayer
 based on a 
 wiki article that reveals among other things that he put in
 a stint at 
 Bard College in 1987, my alma mater. That year, he had a
 run-in with 
 boxer Mike Tyson that ended well apparently:
 
 At a party that same year held by fashion designer
 Fernando Sanchez, 
 Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then
 little-known) 
 model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Gil Scott-Heron

[andie nachgeborenen]

Yeah, that's an ambiguous statement. Taken one way it is just wrong. First the 
radical power of video imagery is tremendous. Think of Chicago '68 and the 
taping of the police riot (The whole world is watching! the crowd chanted); 
the tape of the beating of Rodney King, or the lone protester standing in front 
of the tanks in Tienanmen Square. Besides, unless we could somehow shut down 
the TV and videocams (much less possible than when the song was written), the 
revolution and everything else will be televised or at least put on the net and 
podcast. See the, er, exploits of Paris Hilton or more recently young Mosley 
with his tea and SM, each respectively giving different kinds of sex a bad 
name. On the other hand if Scott-Heron meant that the revo is not a 
staged-for-TV event but a change in social relations, then, pace Baudriallard 
((he of the proposition that the Iraq war, I think the first one, did not 
happen; it was a TV event) -- does anyone read
 that stuff anymore?), then he had a point.

--- On Sat, 4/19/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Gil Scott-Heron
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008, 10:20 AM
 I thought of Heron because of his famous dictum
 that the revolution
 will not be televised.  As important at the internet is,
 television is
 still politically important.   Of course, we should not
 just accept the
 caveat. It is a challenge to us to televise the rev. It is
 a warning
 that the Man is not going just hand over that powerful
 medium to us
 radicals in the 60's to empower the People. But we are
 still going to
 have a plan. Notice that the television stations in
 Venezuela were way
 behind, as the famous documentary is evidence of the
 validity of Heron's
 generalization.
 
 Any way, I'm thinking  the rev  potential is on the
 radio in leftwing
 talk radio shows.
 
 There is a struggle for the internet, now of course.
 
  Ralph Dumain
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 04/18/2008 11:44 PM
 
 Heron, though, doesn't belong to the same era as
 Charlie Parker.  I 
 heard about his smack rap but I was kinda surprised.  I
 could see 
 maybe if he was hooked back in the '60s or earlier, but
 it seems so 
 odd for something so recent.
 
 Getting busted back in parker's time was serious
 business, because 
 you would lose your cabaret license and hence your
 livelihood.  It 
 was a deliberate way of keeping black musicians down.  Just
 saw a 
 documentary on the Heath brothers, which included
 interviews with 
 Sonny Rollins and others from that era, and the
 drug-cabaret-license 
 racket was discussed in some detail, esp. by Sonny,
 who's here 
 playing in DC tonight.  It's been a few years since I
 last saw 
 Rollins, and he was still awesome even at an advanced age.
 As a child 
 I memorized practically every note from The
 Bridge and Sonny 
 Rollins Brass/Trio, as these were two of the only
 albums my uncle 
 ever played out of his jazz collection.  (The third was
 Earl Garner's 
 Closeup in Swing--you gotta hear El Papa
 Grande, baby, my 
 all-time favorite.)
 
 I met Heron in 1977.  He had that ghetto-bred harshness
 about him, 
 but I liked his political sincerity.
 
 Perhaps Charles could tell us why he submits this bio at
 this 
 particular moment.
 
 At 08:59 PM 4/18/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
 I didn't realize, altough I am not surprised, that
 Scott-Heron, whom 
 I saw a few years ago, was doin drug time. Art Pepper
 and Frank 
 Morgan both did real hard time. Art Pepper wrote a book
 about it, 
 Straight Life, that is quite good. Drug abuse among
 musicians is 
 commonplace, unfortunately, not just rockers. I think
 Charlie Parkie 
 and Billie Holiday made it seem glamorous. (When Parker
 died at 34, 
 the coroner thought his body was that of a 64 year old
 man. Like 
 Holiday, he was also  drunk as well as  junkie. Neither
 of them did 
 real jail time.) Armstrong, who liked dope, nothing
 stronger, 
 actually wrot Eisenhower advocating legalization, got
 no response. 
 The band masters of the swing bands were pretty
 ruthless about drug 
 and alchohol abuse and would discipline, fine, or fire
 abusing 
 musicians. For both black (especially) and to some
 extent white 
 musicians of that era it was a middle class job, to be
 taken pretty 
 seriously. Miles later actually cured himself of his
 smack habit by 
 tying himself to a post in his father's barn in
 Central Illinois and 
 sweating it out, not pretty. Better than jail. --- On
 Fri, 4/18/08, 
 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Gil Scott-Heron

[andie nachgeborenen]

I didn't realize, altough I am not surprised, that Scott-Heron, whom I saw a 
few years ago, was doin drug time. Art Pepper and Frank Morgan both did real 
hard time. Art Pepper wrote a book about it, Straight Life, that is quite good. 
Drug abuse among musicians is commonplace, unfortunately, not just rockers. I 
think Charlie Parkie and Billie Holiday made it seem glamorous. (When Parker 
died at 34, the coroner thought his body was that of a 64 year old man. Like 
Holiday, he was also  drunk as well as  junkie. Neither of them did real jail 
time.) Armstrong, who liked dope, nothing stronger, actually wrot Eisenhower 
advocating legalization, got no response. The band masters of the swing bands 
were pretty ruthless about drug and alchohol abuse and would discipline, fine, 
or fire abusing musicians. For both black (especially) and to some extent white 
musicians of that era it was a middle class job, to be taken pretty seriously. 
Miles later actually cured
 himself of his smack habit by tying himself to a post in his father's barn in 
Central Illinois and sweating it out, not pretty. Better than jail.


--- On Fri, 4/18/08, Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Gil Scott-Heron
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Date: Friday, April 18, 2008, 8:51 AM
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron 
 
 Gil Scott-Heron
 
 Jump to: navigation, search
 Gil Scott-Heron (born April 1, 1949) is an American poet
 and musician known primarily for his late 1960s and early
 1970s work as a spoken word performer. He is associated
 with African American militant activism, and is best known
 for his poem and song The Revolution Will Not Be
 Televised; and for writing Home is Where The
 Hatred Is an eerie account of drug use that was a hit
 by the grammy-award winning RB singer Esther Phillips
 in 1972. Scott-Heron's father, Giles Gil
 Heron (nicknamed The Black Arrow) was a
 Jamaican football player who, in the 1950s, was the first
 ever black player to play for Glasgow's Celtic Football
 Club.
 
 Contents [hide]
 1 Early years 
 2 Recording career 
 3 Drug use and prison 
 4 Discography 
 5 Books 
 6 Films 
 7 Samples 
 8 References 
 9 See also 
 10 External links 
  
 
 
 [edit] Early years
 Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois, but spent
 his early childhood in the home of his maternal grandmother
 Lillie Scott in Jackson, Tennessee. Gil's mother Bobbie
 Scott-Heron sang with the New York Oratorial Society.
 Gil's father was a professional soccer player and is
 also a poet. His father's family is of Jamaican
 descent. When he was 13, his grandmother died and he moved
 with his mother to the Bronx, where he enrolled in DeWitt
 Clinton High School. He transferred to The Fieldston School
 after one of his teachers, a Fieldston graduate, showed one
 of his writings to the head of the English department there
 and he was granted a full scholarship.
 
 Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University because it was the
 college of choice by his biggest influence: Langston
 Hughes. It was at Lincoln University that Gil met Brian
 Jackson and they formed the band Black  Blues. After
 about two years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania,
 Scott-Heron took a year off to write a novel, The Vulture.
 He returned to New York City, settling in Chelsea,
 Manhattan, which was a multiracial and multicultural
 neighborhood. The Vulture was published in 1970 and well
 received. Although Gil never received his undergraduate
 degree, he has a Masters in Creative Writing from Johns
 Hopkins University.
 
 
 [edit] Recording career
 Scott-Heron began his recording career in 1970 with the LP
 Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Bob Thiele of Flying
 Dutchman Records produced the album, and Scott-Heron was
 accompanied by Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on conga
 and David Barnes on percussion and vocals. The album's
 15 tracks dealt with themes such as the superficiality of
 television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some
 would-be Black revolutionaries, white middle-class
 ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city
 residents, and fear of homosexuals. In the liner notes,
 Scott-Heron acknowledged as influences Richie Havens, John
 Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday,
 Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and
 the pianist who would become his long-time collaborator,
 Brian Jackson.
 
 Scott-Heron's 1971 album Pieces of a Man used more
 conventional song structures than the loose, spoken-word
 feel of Small Talk. He was joined by Johnny Pate
 (conductor), Brian Jackson (piano and electric piano), Ron
 Carter (bass and electric bass), Bernard Pretty Purdie
 (drums), Burt Jones (electric guitar), and Hubert Laws
 (flute and saxophone), with Thiele producing again.
 Scott-Heron's third album, Free Will, was released in
 1972. Jackson, Purdie, Laws, Knowles, and Saunders all
 returned to play on Free Will and were joined 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Notion of falsifiability (from RE: Presentations to the Fifth International....)

[andie nachgeborenen]

I am not sure about what is wrong with staying close
to the intuitive judgments of science.

It is only partly accurate to say that falsifiability
has not received any interest among philosophers of
science.  First, things are more complicated. The
question to which Popper posed the falsifiability
thesis as an answer is itself passe. This is What
Criterion Demarcates Science From Non-Science (or
Nonsense). The positivists posed a Verification
Criterion (Scientific statements can be verified by
empirical observation, roughly).  Popper proposed a
F-Criterion, Scientific statements can be falsified by
empirical observation.  

But the issue of demarcation is not a big concern and
has not been for decades.  Partly this is because of
the influence of Quine, Goodman, and the
neopragmatists,w which have tended to blur the line
between science and other kinds of activity. 

That doesn't mean that the F-Criterion or something
like it isn't a good rough test of whether a
hypothesis is worth entertaining from a scientific
p.o.v.. What's the use of a hypothesis that is immune
to test? Btw, so regarded Popper was anticipated by JS
Mill in his Logic, where Mill's Methods a re
falsifiability tests.

Secondly, Popper himself soon realized the point later
made with great force by Quine and the neoprags, that
simple F-test of Die Logik der Forschung was flawed
because it did not take into account the holism of
scientific statements, the fact that, as Quine later
and Duhem earlier had put it, you could hold true any
statement in the face of apparent refutation bu making
suitable adjustments elsewhere in the web of belief
(Quine's term). Not all adjustment are equally easier,
which is why the F test has some bite.

Third, neoPopperians of various stripes, including
mostly Lakatos as well as a whole whole of English
neo-Pops developed Popper's ideas to a more
sophisticated level and got them incorporated into the
philosophy of science mainstream or at least
discussion. Lakatos was a big influence on Feyerabend,
not that PKF was mainstream. The neo-Pops were big in
Britain at least last when I checked and when I was in
grad school there in the early 80s, though more at
London and a bit at Oxford than at Cambridge. On the
other hand in the 1980s while in phil grad school at
Michigan I had to argue my Quine, Kuhn  Rorty trained
(same as me) phil of sci teacher into including Popper
in his phil of sci class that I was TA-ing. Less Ayer,
I said, more Popper. He did it, though. 

--- CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 One observation and then one part of the discussion
 that created a
 point of interest for me.
 
 1. Papers and presentation texts don't make for very
 good discussion
 topics, but I don't think they are posted for that
 purpose. I for one
 appreciate them more than 'clippings' from the NYT,
 like we see on all
 those other lists, like A-List, Marxmal, RadGreen,
 etc.
 At least there is the potential of having one's
 attention drawn to
 something in the mainstream media.
 
 2. RD's response to the presentation at this point
 caught my interest:
 
 This appears to be the germ of a critique of
 Popper.  While the notion of falsifiablity
 appears to be commonly accepted among the
 scientific community, I don't see much evidence
 of a detailed interest in Popper's ideas or for
 that matter any concern whatever about certainty,
 which is the philosopher's anxiety.
 
 I would have to agree, but I would bet most
 scientists publishing
 research in the 'scientific community' believe that
 they 'prove what
 is true' (while most put their names on papers they
 had nothing to do
 with, not in the writing or in the research--haven't
 most likely even
 read the papers their names go on as second
 authors).
 
 Popper never really moved that far away from
 intuitive judgements
 about what scientists might actually do and believe.
 Perhaps
 philosophy of the 20th century would have been
 better if Wittgenstein
 had brained him with the poker.
 
 As for the philosophy of science, post-Kuhn,
 post-Feyerabend, and
 post-Lakatos, the notion of falsifiability itself
 doesn't get much
 discussion anymore. It is too cutting edge for the
 belief sets of
 practicing scientists, and quaint for philosophers
 and sociologist of
 science.
 
 CJ
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] West_Side_Story: artists romanticizing gangs

[andie nachgeborenen]

I've read from some possibily reliable sources that
the Mob was big in W.Va and IL in the 60 election, but
not that Joe K was involved in that. Daley, like his
son, was no hood and not on their payroll. He
tolerated all sorts of official corruption and
organized crime, but he and Dickie D were solely
interested in power, and if they put up with the
Outfit it was because the Outfit was a player that you
had to deal with to get power. Of course from a
prosecutor's perspective that theoretically left Daley
f + p on the hook for conpsiracy, aiding and abetting,
mail and wire fraud, extortion, bribery, and after
1970, RICO. But Daley p was never caight and Dalet F
probably won't be.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 
 andie nachgeborenen 
 The story about Joe K as a bootlegger is romantic
 but
 untrue. The Kennedy money was from Rose F's dad,
 Honey
 Fitz, Mayor of Boston, big time Mass politician, and
 hand over first crook:
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald
 
 Joe himself made his money as a successful stock
 speculator and insider trader (then mostly legal),
 and
 was SEC Chair under FDR. His seed money was from his
 dad's share of a Boston bank.
 
 He may have run some liquor, but it was a sideline.
 His main involvement in alcohol was after
 prohibition,
 because, as agent in Canada for Gordon's and
 Dewar's,
 he had a lot of liquor on hand to sell when the bell
 rang in '33.
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
 
 He was certainly not a gangster in the way Capone
 was
 a gangster. He was just a  zillionaire anti-semitic
 capitalist slimeball.
 
 ^^
 
 CB: I'm openminded on the facts of this :). What
 about the supposed
 connection with the Mob through the father that
 influenced some aspect of
 some vote, maybe in Chicago, I forget, in the Pres
 election of 1960 ?  No
 Chicago, would have been Daley ( a 
 gangsta mayor, like Honey Fitz and Taminy Hall).
 Maybe some other city ?
 
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] West_Side_Story: artists romanticizing gangs

[andie nachgeborenen]

The story about Joe K as a bootlegger is romantic but
untrue. The Kennedy money was from Rose F's dad, Honey
Fitz, Mayor of Boston, big time Mass politician, and
hand over first crook:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald

Joe himself made his money as a successful stock
speculator and insider trader (then mostly legal), and
was SEC Chair under FDR. His seed money was from his
dad's share of a Boston bank.

He may have run some liquor, but it was a sideline.
His main involvement in alcohol was after prohibition,
because, as agent in Canada for Gordon's and Dewar's,
he had a lot of liquor on hand to sell when the bell
rang in '33.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.

He was certainly not a gangster in the way Capone was
a gangster. He was just a  zillionaire anti-semitic
capitalist slimeball.

I'm in Chicago indirectly because of him, btw. Judge
Walter Cummings, Jr., of the 7th Cir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Cummings,_Jr.

 for whom I clerked, was a Friend of the Kennedeys
through his dad, Walter Sr., first chair,an of the
FDIC and Pres of the Continental Illinois Bank;
Kennedy associate Sargent Shriver 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargent_Shriver

ran Chicago's Merchandise Mart for Joe, Sr., and
Walter Jr. made friends with Joe Jr., them with  Bobby
and  Jack. Walter Jr. was rewarded for his services
to the Illinois D.P., chairing Paul Simon's campaign
and the Kennedy campaign in Illinois, with a federal
judgeship. 

Judge Cummings was clean and ethical as the day is
long and it is inconceivable to me that he would ever
have countenanced a dirty deal in his life, which
going some for an Illinois public figure, especially
of that era.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  
  
 
 
 
 
 ^
 Truly.  It is not really a very unique observation
 on my part to point to
 heroizing gangs, gangsters and outlaws in American
 popular culture.
 
 Of course, Joseph Kennedy was gangster rumrunner.
 
 
 On glamorizing hoods, I forgot Frank Sinatra and the
 Ratpack. Of course,
 Sinatra is supposed to be the model for a character
 in _The Godfather_.
 
 Gangsta Rappers are as American as apple pie.
 
 Charles
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] West_Side_Story: artists romanticizing gangs

[andie nachgeborenen]

The real hoods like their neighborhoods nice and crime
free. Youth gangs learn early, fast, and the hard way
not to fuck with the Mafia. I have sories, but later.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 
 As for the relationship between youth gangs and
 underworld crime, I
 guess the assumption is that there is a connection,
 but I would also
 guess that it is not always straightforward and
 simple. Nothing in
 real life is. In the film 'A Bronx Tale', the mafia
 group who operate
 in the neighborhood really don't encourage youth
 gang activity in that
 neighborhood.
 
 ^^
 
 CB; I don't have studies, but one would imagine that
 most youth gang members
 don't make it to the bigtime as criminals. There are
 only a few bigtime
 criminals, like Butch Jones. They become sort of
 famous.
 
 
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] West_Side_Story: artists romanticizing gangs

[andie nachgeborenen]

WSS is coming to Chicago on tour, as a degenerate
Sondheim fan, I await this with considerable
eagerness. I am also a hopeless fan of gangster movies
and stories, and an occasional client.  But the gangs
romanticized in WSS are so abstract and stylized it is
difficult to think of them in the same category as
those in the Sopranos, Wiseguys, or the Godfather
movies. For one thing, it's really inconceivable to
attempt to imagine Tony's crew or the Corleone family
doing a fabulously homo-balletic Jerome Robbins
choreographed dance. The level of violence is quite
different and much lower. In that innocent era, there
is one shot fired in WSS and far from being a casually
gory murder of the sort that decorate the Mafia
stories, it is catastrophic tragedy; two more deaths,
also tragic, are racked up in a knife fight. Finally,
gangs of juvenile delinquents in Hell's Kitchen are
really quite a different animal from the Mafia. 

A final note: the original treatment of WSS called for
the gangs to be Irish and Jewish rather than Polish
Puerto Rican. Don't laugh at the idea of Jewish hoods.
My wife's father's family and to a much lesser extent
my mom's, were a bunch of minor Jewish thugs. They
were minor bookies, mostly, although one of them was
important enough to be called before the Kefauver
Committee; but the Jewish killers in Murder, Inc. --
no relation! --, headed up  by Louis Lepke
Buchalter, were no laughing matter (Lepke, the
Yiddish diminutive for Louis, is the only top level
hood to go to the chair), nor were Benjamin (Buggsy)
Siegal, who gave us Las Vegas, Mickey Cohen of LA, or
Meyer Lansky, or the Detroit Purple Gang. 

Sergio Leone's very great but very flawed Once Upon A
Time In America is a magnificent tribute to the Jewish
mob, and should not be left out of consideration of
any discussion of romanticizing gangs.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  
  
 
 
 
 West Side Story
 
 
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
 Jump to: navigation, search
 This article is about the musical. For the 1961
 film, see West Side Story
 (film).
 For The Game's song, see Westside Story (song).
 West Side Story   
 Music  Leonard Bernstein  
 Lyrics Stephen Sondheim   
 Book   Arthur Laurents
 Based upon Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
 Productions1957 Broadway production
 
 


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The Big Bourgeoisie Like Affirmative Action (Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Nappy-headed Hos of the World Unite!)

[andie nachgeborenen]

I don't know if the BB wants racial harmony -- I
believe that there is somerthing to the divide and
conquer theory of the persistence of racism (John
Roemer has a theorem on this, FWIT!) -- although they
surely don't want race riots. But the BB has always
liked Affirmative Action. (It was urged by LBJ and
implemented as federal policy by Nixon.) It reduces
exposure to lawsuits. It allows them to seem to others
and themselves nonracist in giving advancement to nice
middle class minorities (as well as women, although
the story there is a bit different, probably) and
bright and feisty poor minorities. The BB no longer
likes to think of itself as racist, that's vulgar.
Today you wouldn't even necessarily mind if your
daughter married one if he was like Barak Obama. And
best of all, AA doesn't require an attack on
structural racism, e.g., by requiring full employment,
decent schools and real desegregation both educational
and residential, ending the war on drugs (that is,
the war on young Black men), etc. 

--- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 On Apr 17, 2007, at 9:25 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
 
  Although, I'm still trying to figure out the
 vulgar materialist
  explanation of GM, the Pentagon, et al. supporting
 affirmative  
  action in
  Michigan last year.
 
 The big bourgeoisie in the US wants racial harmony.
 They know they  
 have to deal with a workforce and a customer base
 that gets less  
 white every year. Same with the military - they
 don't want their  
 forces breaking down along racial lines.
 
 Doug
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Robert Service

[andie nachgeborenen]

Very scholarly, careful, state-of-the-art research.
Not terrifically sympathetic, to say the least. But if
you are interested in Soviet Russia, you MUST read
Service.

--- paddy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Is Robert Services book on Lenin any good. Also the
 ones on Stalin and 
 Russia.
 
 Paddy Hackett
 - Original Message - 
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 10:51 AM
 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lenin and the legacy of
 classical Germanphilosophy 
 (German)
 
 
 
  Alles Einbildung?
  Lenins dialektisches Konzept der Materialität
 steht gegen das von Kant.
  Vermittelt durch Hegels und Marxens Kritik an der
 Auffassung des 
  klassischen
  Philosophen steht es dennoch in dessen Tradition
  Dogan Göçmen
 
  Lenin gehört zu jener Generation marxistischer
 Politiker, die  einen
  umfassenden philosophischen und hohen
 wissenschaftlichen Anspruch hatten. 
  Georg
  Lukács (1885–1971) bezeichnete ihn als den
 »größte(n) Denker (...) seit 
  Marx«1 und
  wies darauf hin, daß die Arbeiterbewegung und der
 sozialistische  Kampf
  »dringend einen heutigen Lenin« (1870–1924)
 braucht, der in der Lage 
  st,  »den
  heutigen Stand der marxistischen Theorie in
 politischen Aktionen«2 
  umzusetzen.
  Dies deutet auf den Stellenwert der Philosophie im
 Leninschen Werk 
   hin. »Alles
  ist Politik«, sagt Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937),
 »auch die  Philosophie 
  oder
  die Philosophien (...), und die einzige
 ›Philosophie‹ ist die  Geschichte 
  in
  Aktion, das heißt das Leben selbst. In diesem
 Sinn läßt sich die  These 
  vom
  deutschen Proletariat als Erbe der klassischen
 deutschen Philosophie
  interpretieren – und läßt sich behaupten, daß
 die von Iljitsch gemachte 
  Theoretisierung
  und Verwirklichung der Hegemonie3 auch ein großes
  ›metaphysisches‹ 
  Ereignis
  gewesen ist.«4 Gramsci verweist hier auf Engels' 
 Aussage, daß 
  die »deutsche
  Arbeiterbewegung (...) die Erbin der deutschen 
 klassischen Philosophie« 
  sei
  (MEW 21, S. 307) und stellt Lenin damit in die 
 Tradition der klassischen
  deutschen Philosophie, deren Universalisierung
 dieser  durch die 
  Oktoberrevolution
  wie kein anderer bewirkt hat.
 
  Lenins  philosophischer Kampf zu Beginn des 20.
 Jahrhunderts richtet sich
  gegen die  reaktionären Strömungen, die sich
 alle in einer oder anderer 
  Weise auf
  den  Begründer des Empiriokritizismus, auf Ernst
 Mach (1838–1916), 
  beziehen.
  Im  Mittelpunkt dieser Auseinandersetzung steht
 das Erbe der klassischen
  deutschen  Philosophie, die sich am Konzept des
 »Dinges an sich« von 
  Immanuel Kant
  (1724–1804), das dieser in der »Kritik der
 reinen Vernunft« zur 
  Bezeichnung
  des  Wesens der äußeren Gegenstände zu einer
 Kategorie erhoben hat, 
  entzündet
  hatte.
 
  Nun kann man fragen, wo Lenin seine Philosophie
 ausgebreitet hat.  Auf die
  Frage, wo Marx seine materialistische
 Geschichtsauffassung, d.h. die 
  Theorie
  der proletarischen Befreiung, dargelegt habe,
 antwortete Lenin mit einer
  Gegenfrage: »In welchem Werk hat Marx seine
 materialistische 
  Geschichtsauffassung
  nicht dargelegt?« (LW 1, S. 134) In Analogie dazu
 kann man  auf die Frage, 
  wo
  Lenin seine Philosophie dargelegt habe, sagen: In
 welcher  Schrift und dem 
  Werk
  hat Lenin seine Philosophie nicht dargelegt? Sein
 ganzes  Werk ist
  durchdrungen von einer dialektischen Philosophie,
 die er sich durch  sein 
  ständiges
  Studium der Werke der klassischen deutschen
 Philosophie und von  Marx und 
  Engels
  angeeignet und in seinen »Philosophischen
 Heften« bestens  dokumentiert 
  hat.
  Doch im engeren Sinne des Wortes ist sein
 philosophisches  Hauptwerk das 
  im Mai
  1909 erschienene Buch »Materialismus und
 Empiriokritismus«.
  Das Ding an sich
  Lenin charakterisiert Kants Philosophie als einen 
 Versuch zur »Aussöhnung
  des Materialismus mit dem Idealismus, ein
 Kompromiß  zwischen beiden, eine
  Verknüpfung verschiedenartiger, einander
 widersprechender  philosophischer
  Richtungen zu einem System« (LW 14, S. 195).
 Diese angestrebte  Aussöhnung 
  ist der
  Grundzug des Kantschen Systems. Schon der Titel
 seines 
   Hauptwerks, »Kritik der
  reinen Vernunft«, macht deutlich, daß die reine 
 Vernunft, also das reine
  Denken wie es die Philosophie als Metaphysik bis
 in  Kants Zeiten hinein
  praktiziert hatte, kritisiert werden müsse, weil
 es ihr an  Empirie, an 
  Materialität
  fehle. Er hat das in den »Prolegomena zu einer
 jeden  künftigen 
  Metaphysik« von
  1783 so formuliert: Wenn ich zugebe, daß
 »›alle Körper  mitsamt dem Raume,
  darin sie sich befinden, für nichts als bloße
 Vorstellungen  in uns 
  gehalten
  werden und existieren nirgend anders als bloß in
 unseren  Gedanken.‹ Ist 
  dieses nun
  nicht der offenbare Idealismus? Der Idealismus
 besteht  in der Behauptung,
  daß es keine anderen als 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] God is Nietszche - dead

[andie nachgeborenen]

Some short answers for misunderstandings:

N is not a racist, despite his talk of races. He
doesn't, e.g., think that whites are superior to
blacks because of blood or race or a lot of the
common 19th C  subsequent lies.  He's such an elitist
that he thinks that most Europeans are pretty inferior
too, and not less inferior than people of other races.


The stuff about master and slave races you get
backwards: N doesn't think that historical master
races (really ethnic groups) are masters because
they are superior; he thinks that they became
superior, in the sense of able to impose their
values, because they were literally masters, owners of
others as slaves, exploiters and dominators.  

Unlike people on the left, N does not automatically
think this is a bad thing, they question for him is
whether it promotes life, creativity,
self-realization, etc., for the few (even among the
Masters) whom he thinks are capable of that sort of
thing. N does think that it would be absurd and
hopeless to try to recreate the sort of brute force
mastery that marked the ancient slave societies. 

That is because the slaves themselves, needing values
to enable them to survive, created a slave morality
through their own superior members (the priests),
which ultimately conquered the old morality of the
masters (this is Christianity) and incidentally made
us hopelessly clever and smart -- at least the higher
souls.  The slave morality is itself now untenable, he
thinks (hence God is dead) and self destructive for
higher types (maybe for lower ones too -- bear in mind
this has no correlation with classical racial
stereotypes), so a new transvaluation of values is
required but not available.

Being an advocate for the strong is not particularly
admirable itself but it is not racist because N does
not think that strength is based on race in anything
like the modern sense of the term. As I said, he
thinks the era of physical brute force strength by
ignorant brutes is over forever, and the real strength
of the higher man today is in self-mastery, in being
able to remake his own personality and life, control
and shape his impulses, into a creative and
aesthetically complete life. (Here again is the
analogy with self-realization in Marx and Mill, though
with an elitist twist.)

N is no social Darwinist either on the individual or
the social level.  He knew very little of Darwin,
probably never read Spencer or Sumner or the other
SDs.  He does not believe that social success is
explained by natural selection based on biological
fitness, or that the existing rulers are entitled to
rule because the competition has proved them fitter. 
He has little but contempt for existing rulers,
whether the old aristocracies, the bourgeois
plutocrats, or the democratic politicians. 

There is very little in N that would appeal to the
Nazis if they had bothered to try to understand him. 
They were nationalist, militarist, racist and
antisemitic, committed to mass industrial
organization, and totally uninterested in
self-expression or artistic creativity or
self-realization. N is a rabid anti-nationalist who
loathed the Germans; he despised militarism as stupid
-- the violence he speaks of is either old (that of
the old masters -- or predictive of horrors -- or
spiritual struggle for self mastery).  As explained,
he's no racist; he is an equal-opportunity elitist. 
He hated anti-Semites and anti-semitism like the
plague (this was part of his break with Wagner),
expresses great if qualified respect for the Jewish
priests who created the slave morality (in his story)
and made us smart, and liked to think he was part
Jewish himself. His opinion of mass industrial
organization was low. 

The long and short of it is that the reactionary
themes that N picks out the late 19th C air are not
the ones that rang the Nazis' bells. They looted him
for scraps, elitism (misunderstood) talk of master
races taken out of genealogical context, metaphors of
violence that they did not grasp referred to spiritual
and internal struggle for self-mastery to create a
whole _individual_ life. 

More later, maybe.


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] God is Nietszche - dead

[andie nachgeborenen]

These anti-Nietzsche remarks are childish. As I have
said there is a lot in to criticize, also to learn
from, but this Nietzsche the inspirer of Nazis and
racists is just stupid, I mean, idiotic, and I m not
using this in the Ralph Dumain I'm pissed sense,
it's really dumb and uninformed. This crap has been
demolished by a half century of patient scholarship.
References on request: I cited Kaufmann's old book
that sort of started the rehabilitation; it's an oldie
but a goodie. (Walter was a  teacher of mine, I didn't
like him.) 

As I've said about misuse of Nietzsche by others,
well, are we going to blame Marx for misuse by Second
International sellouts Stalinist butchers, Pol Pot,
Chinese tyrants, etc?  

Nietzsche's contempt for academics with so intense
that you could weld with it. (See We Scholars in
Ecce Homo.) He wrote essentially for his friends like
Paul Ree and Lou Andreas Salome, people whom he
considered free spirits who were capable of
understanding his work. After scoring a great
professorship he wrote a  good (the Birth of Tragedy)
that was designed to piss off all the academic powers
that be and then retired to Basel and genteel poverty,
solitude, headaches, and creeping insanity (probably
due to syphilis.)

Of course, just as Marx appealed to every sectarian
nut who wanted to hitch his wagon to the locomotive of
history or every flat brained bureaucrat who wanted to
feel some justification for working horrors according
to orders, Nietzsche has a wider appeal too. He did
write the bells of every petty bourgeois bohemian who
wanted to feel superior to the Herd that misunderstood
him (see Mencken, who translated Nietzsche -- badly --
on the booboosie, the Babbitts and Bromides that
Sinclair Lewis also wrote about). 

N also resonated with the dying German aristocracy --
I mean the literally dying German aristocracy -- whose
bodies were found in the trenches and the wire in
no-man's land of Verdun with little copies of Also
Sprach Zarathustra in what was left of their pockets. 
I used to have a little copy like that, splotted with
brown stains.  I gave it a German friend who reads
Fraktur better than I do. Here the appeal is obvious
-- the expression of being the last few superior
beings in a world where all values are collapsing and
the Herd is taking over with socialism and democracy
and industrialism.

N's appeal to the Nazis -- and Kaufmann among other
demonstrates that very few of the Nazis ever actually
read N, any more than the Stalinists read Marx -- was
largely due to the propaganda efforts of N/s sister,
Elisabeth Fra Foerster-Nietzsche, who married an
raving anti-Semite named Georg Foerster and
unfortunately became the guardian not only of her
brother after he became incompetent in 1888, but of
his literary legacy, supervising, e.g., the assembly
the collection of notes known as The Will To Power. 
She assiduously presented N as a nationalist
conservative antisemite, all of which was false -- he
hated nationalism, fled Germany for Switzerland, was
apolitical and insofar as he had politics they were
leave me alone radical reaction, and loathed
anti-Semites, believing (falsely) that he was part
Jewish and part Polish. All to no avail: Elisabeth
palled with Hitler: I have seen a photo of her at an
unveiling of a busy of N with Hitler present.  

But Hitler never read or (I believe) refers to N, most
of the Nazis were not smart or literary enough to
bother.  His appeal among the German upper classes was
to conservative aristocrats who despised Hitler as a
low class thug and a corporal of no background, and
served the Reich out of misplaced loyalty to their
oaths -- some of them, many actually, joined the July
conspiracy and died, mostly horribly, for resisting,
if too little too late. Nor did N's mass base respond
to N particularly, much more to poverty, inflation,
and unemployment, as a Marxist would expect.

I should not have to say this.

Let us criticize N's elitism, his antisocialism, his
hatred of democracy, his apolitical reactionary
politics, his misogyny, his half-baked vitalism and
half-baked Social Darwinism, his wacko ideas about the
Eternal Return, lots of other things. We can argue
about whether he's an idealist -- current revisionist
scholarship says he's not.  We can argue about what he
means by life and whether that is a value worth
promoting in the sense that he meant it. Etc. But just
knock off this proto Nazi, inspirer of antisemitism
shit. I don't want to have to say this again. Twice is
enough.










--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Most of this is prototypical fascist garbage that
 only a French or Yale 
 philosopher could love.  But the picture regarding
 the Jew is unclear.
 
 Nietzsche clearly indicts the Jews as a defeated
 people who in revenge 
 inflicted Xianity on the noble Romans and the rest
 of the world.
 
 It's not clear that Nietzsche thinks the Jews were
 bad before the Romans 
 crushed them.
 
 In other writings Nietzsche shows 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Rosa Lichtenstein on Wittgenstein and Marxism

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 All this is rather superficial, however.  I think
 Ernest Gellner nailed the 
 essentially conservative nature of Wittgenstein's
 philosophy.

Oh, agreed. W thought that philosophy done right
leaves everything as it is. That is a quote or at
least a translation of one.  But just because he
thought that is what philosophy could do doesn't mean
he couldn't had radical politics.

 
 Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy is hardly a
 notch above Carnap's 
 dismissal of metaphysics as bad poetry or
 Neurath's 
 metaphysicophobia.  

This is totally different. Carnap and Neurath did not
see philosophy as conservative but as radical, they
wanted to put on a scientific basis in the service of
a modernist project of social reconstruction of a
rational society -- see Carnap's autobiography in the
Schlipp Library of Living Philosophers volume.  (A
fascinating document in many ways, has a hilarious and
scathing portrait of the Univ. of Chicago Phil Dept in
general and Mortimer Adler in particular.)

Given an initially plausibly notion of cognitive
content (the verification theory of meaning) and a
scientific model of what counts as knowledge, it's
hard to know what to make of traditional metaphysics.
It's not scientific knowledge, whatever it is. And
it's not, for the most part, good poetry. Besides,
like people since Kant 9a big influence on the LPs),
the LP were annoyed that metaphysics wasn't making
progress in the sense that sciences seemed to, so it
wasn't crazy or conservative of them to try to shitcan
it.

The notion of philosophy as
 language on holiday or as 
 bewitchment by language is infantile. 

Well, when you out it that way, but there's more to
it.

 Such a view
 is itself a metaphysical 
 abstraction and bewitchment by language, divorced
 from history or any 
 extralinguistic investigation of human cognition. 
 Compared to Adorno's 
 socio-historical conception of philosophy,
 Wittgenstein is a piss-ant.

W's philosophy actually calls out for following up
with such investigation.  If you want to go beyond
philosophy, you have to go _somewhere_ -- maybe to
political economy and political sociology, like Marx,
maybe to Ideologiekritik like Adorno and the early
Frankfurters (Adorno also did flat out scientific
sociology or social psychology, see The Authoritarian
Personality), maybe to genealogical critic and
psychology like Nietzsche, maybe to mystical
pragmatism like Heidegger or scientific-sociological
pragmatism like Dewey -- there are a lot of
possibilities.  But some people, and W was one of
them, are like Moses at the Jordan, they point the way
to the land of Canaan but cannot cross the river.
Quine was another: he wanted to naturalize
epistemology, but that meant actually doing cognitive
psychology, and he wasn't suited for or able to do
that.

 
 Nor does Wittgenstein have anything in common with
 Marx, whom you 
 consistently misrepresent.  For Marx, philosophy was
 not a linguistic 
 disease,

I never said he said it was. He says it's ideology, a
mystification arising from the conditions of social
life that reflects and promotes the ruling interests
in certain ways, making the social seem natural, the
changeable permanent, the existing order inevitable,
and it does so by virtue of overgeneralizing and
inverting certain truths.   This is not W at all, but
a sociological analysis of why philosophy is
pointless.

 nor did he limit himself to Feuerbach's
 framework,

Given what I just said, obviously I agree with this
too. M;'s theory is novel and powerfully original.

 though 
 Feuerbach did take the decisive historical step of
 analyzing idealism as 
 inverted consciousness.  For Marx philosophy as
 practiced his milieu was 
 the dream history of Germany, not to be summarily
 dismissed but to be 
 analyzed in  its structure and related to its social
 genesis.

Agreed.

 
 The task of doing this for our time is infinitely
 more complicated, for the 
 interrelationships of science, mathematics, logic,
 philosophical systems 
 and their connection to alienated, inverted
 consciousness and social being 
 are not simple and obvious, at least not until one
 develops a framework in 
 which to place them, and even then there remains the
 long, hard labor of 
 the negative.

Now you are waxing Adornian. Marx was not really
interested in this.  I think he thought that
philosophy wasn't worth the bother as a target, given
his aims.

 But Rosa knows nothing of this,

No comment, haven't read the posts.

  


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Kant Serious Marxism (Was Bhaskar)

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Paddy Hackett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Paddy Hackett: I dont see how any serious marxist
 can forge an argument by 
 using Kant's categorical imperative.

It's talk like this that helped persaude mt that the
term Marxist is merely an impediment to clear
thinking and socialist practice. But see 

Harry Van Der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872200280/sr=8-1/qid=1148589079/ref=sr_1_1/104-9543287-2544746?%5Fencoding=UTF8

The Amazon review is helpful:

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

 Kingdom of ends, February 2, 2003
Reviewer: John Landon nemonemini (NYC, NY United
States) - See all my reviews
 
Interesting work, back in print. The political
perspective of Kantianism tends to reflect the legacy
of classical liberalism(e.g. the Kantian Hayek),
revolutionary for its time, but the inherent dialectic
of the Kantian ethics proceeds to its universality as
a social conundrum, which produced a most significant
commentary on the socialist idea in the period of the
'back to Kant' movement at the end of the nineteenth
century. This fascinating work reviews the logic and
tells the history of this period and initiative, and
its outcome in the era of Social Democracy leading up
to the period of the Weimar collapse. These Kantians,
e.g. Cohen, Vorlander, and the Marburg school,are of
great historical interest still, as we forget that
many of the critiques of the original Marxism now
brandished by conservatives found their source in
these Kantians. If only the history had been
different! This corner of history was eliminated in
the later stages of madness (the twenties, Eisner was
assinated by early Nazis). The book is filled with all
sorts of curious discussions, e.g. a critique of
Hegelian teleology, Rawlsian implications, etc. It
should be of interest as it will keep both left and
right honest, on their, your, toes. 
See also Willey's Back to Kant

 * * * *

The Austro-Marxists tended to be Kantian in lots of
ways. I don't really care if anyone thinks they ere
not serious Marxists -- they were, in fact, part of
a vibrant living self-identified Marxist worker's
movement, as we are not.

That said, I think there is a point to saying that
materialists ought to be somewhat skeptical of any
supposed a priori principles of practical reason. For
my money, I think Hegel's critique of the
universalizability version of the Categorical
Imperative that Charles likes is quite powerful -- H
regards universalizability as a merely negative and
empty criterion.  The version of the CI that appeals
to me is the one that says that we are to treat people
as ends, and not as means only. I think materialists
can accept this without buying into the Kantian
transcendental a priori apparatus or treating the
imperative as categorical in Kant's sense, as a 
somehow absolute and self-validating principle of
(practical) reason. 

It is possible to say in a pragmatist manner that this
version of the CI is one we'd hold in reflective
equilibrium, accepting its consequences, which it
explains as a sensible principle of action.  But,a s
with every pragmatic principle, it is up for revision.
And accepting it in this way does not commit us to the
Kantian ideas that only moral action in accord with
the CI is rational, thus free -- in some
transcendental sense.

I don't know what subjectivism means as a charge
leveled against Kant and the CI.

jks


 

 
 Charles Brown: I am presently preparing/reworking
 the chapter in which I put 
 forward my
 case for egalitarianism (my thesis is a critique of
 the New Classical Model
 and Liberal Capitalist orthodoxy - in particular the
 way in which both
 legitimise inequality) and I am trying to forge my
 argument by using Kant's
 categorical imperative and especially his deontology
 in contrast to
 utilitarianism, and consequentialism... Still
 trying, need a lot of help...
 runing late on deadline.
 
 Paddy Hackett 
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet economic success

[andie nachgeborenen]

thanks for the ref, I'll get this book.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
  Soviet economic success
 
 http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7611.html
 Co-Winner of the 2005 Ranki Prize, Economic History
 Association
 Farm to Factory:
 A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial
 Revolution
 
 Robert C. Allen
 
 Cloth | 2003 | $47.50 / £32.50 | ISBN: 0-691-00696-2
 264 pp. | 6 X 9 | 34 line illus. 36 tables.
 
 To say that history's greatest economic
 experiment--Soviet communism--was 
 also its greatest economic failure is to say what
 many consider obvious. 
 Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen
 argues that the USSR 
 was one of the most successful developing economies
 of the twentieth 
 century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by
 recalculating national 
 consumption and using economic, demographic, and
 computer simulation models 
 to address the what if questions central to Soviet
 history. Moreover, by 
 comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced
 but with less developed 
 countries, he provides a meaningful context for its
 evaluation.
 

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet economic success

[andie nachgeborenen]

Gbgkrxksnkphl? Mphlmp!
Brtzm.

jks

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Soviet economic success
 
 andie :
 
 thanks for the ref, I'll get this book.
 
 
 
 
 CB:
 
 welcome 
 1) ïðèâåòñòâèå
 * you are welcome to *INF*
 * welcome!
 2) æåëàííûé
 ïðèÿòíûé
 3) ïðèâåòñòâîâàòü (*ALSO*FIG*)
 ðàäóøíî ïðèíèìàòü
 welcome! 
 äîáðî ïîæàëîâàòü!
 you are welcome to ÇINFÇ 
 ÿ îõîòíî ïîçâîëÿþ âàì (+ *INF*)
 (you are) ~ íå çà ÷òî!
 you are welcome to ÇINFÇ 
 ÿ îõîòíî ïîçâîëÿþ âàì (+ *INF*)
 (you are) ~ íå çà ÷òî
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] People's History of Science

[andie nachgeborenen]

 As for critiques of Engels and diamat, there's
 little original left to 
 say.  Two sources that immediately come to mind are:
 
 James Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR (1985)
 
 Richard Norman (good) and Sean Sayers (bad), HEGEL,
 MARX, AND DIALECTIC.

Both excellent. See also:

Gustav Wetter, Dialectical Materialism (1958)
Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet
Union (1972). 
David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science,
1917-1932 (1961)

That's pretty much the standard short bibliography of
works in English on the subject of the Soviet Diamat.
Norman and Sayers' exchange is a litle off point, not
being so closely tied to the Soviet expeience, being
pitched at a more abstract level, and coming more out
of Maoism. A better book in that vein, coming from a
ex-Trot perspective, is 

Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx's Capital, Replies to
Hegelian Criticisms (1990)

Must go pick up daughter. But I really think highly of
Smith's book, and even Ralph might like it, who knows.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dennett: Greedy_reductionism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Without taking credit where it it isn't due, I made
this point (better) in a 1991 paper, Reduction,
Elimintaion, and the Mental (Phil of Science). But I'm
not importtant enough for anyone to read my stuff. 

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  
  
 
 
 Your continued donations
 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
 keep Wikipedia running!
 
 Greedy reductionism
 
 
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
 Jump to: navigation, search
 
 Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel
 Dennett, in the book Darwin's
 Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable
 and erroneous forms of
 reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining
 a thing in terms of what
 it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the
 thing we are trying to
 understand is explained away instead of explained,
 so that we fail to gain
 any additional understanding of the original target.
 
 For example, we can reduce temperature to average
 kinetic energy without
 denying that temperature exists, so this is good
 reductionism. In contrast,
 when we consider the question of why clicking on a
 hyperlink takes us to one
 website and not another, any answer that says that
 it all comes down to
 electrons and that hyperlinks don't really exist
 anyhow is a greedy attempt
 to explain away the problem without solving it.
 
 Another example of greedy reductionism is B. F.
 Skinner's behaviorism, which
 not only reduced all mental attributes, such as
 beliefs and feelings, to
 behavior, but went on to deny that anything mental
 exists, thus failing to
 answer the questions it was supposed to. Instead of
 being able to explain
 behavior in terms of things such as beliefs, it
 casts everything in terms of
 conditioning. This example is particularly relevant
 because Dennett himself
 can be categorized as a type of behaviorist, but not
 the extreme sort who
 denies what they're supposed to be explaining.
 
 In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that,
 without denying that human
 consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming
 about from the
 coordinated activity of many components in the brain
 that are themselves
 unconscious. In response, critics accused him of
 explaining away
 consciousness because he disputes the existence of
 certain conceptions of
 consciousness that he considers overblown and
 incompatible with what is
 physically possible. This is likely what motivated
 Dennett to make the
 greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to
 freely admit that
 reductionism can go overboard while pointing out
 that not all reductionism
 goes this far.
 
 The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is
 throwing up your hands and
 denying that a reductionistic analysis of a complex
 system can work at all.
 This tactic is found in some theories that say
 consciousness is an emergent
 epiphenomenon that cannot be further reduced.
 Dennett's response is to call
 such notions mysterian.
 
 [edit]
 
 
 See also
 
 
 * Holism 
 * Golden hammer 
 * Monism 
 * Reductionism 
 
 
 
 
 This article or section does not cite its references
 or sources.
 You can help Wikipedia by including appropriate
 citations.
 Retrieved from
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism;
 
 Categories: Logical fallacies | Reductionism |
 Philosophy of science |
 Articles lacking sources
 
 
 
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RE: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and essentialism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Political felinology, of course. Althusser, Hegel, and
Marx were deficient in this. It is Charles'
contribution to Marxist theory, where it goes by the
name of the study of Brownian Movement. 

--- Phil Walden [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Reply to CB below:
 
 First of all, it makes
 the transformation of capitalist society into
 socialist society look
 like the transformation of a kitten into a cat, when
 in reality it is
 much more like the transformation of a rat into a
 cat's dinner.  We
 cannot look at capitalism and say there, but for
 accidents, goes a
 future socialism.
 ['Aristotelian Marx', in Inquiry no.29, p465]
 
 ^^
 
 Capitalism to communism is more like transformation
 of a cat into a
 kitten.
 
 Are you sure about that Charles?  I thought
 Althusser's work had put an
 end to that sort of historical teleology.  And I
 don't think there is
 much warrant in Hegel or Marx for your conclusion. 
 What is it based on?
 
 Phil
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Arguments for origin of philosophy in Egypt

[andie nachgeborenen]

Bernal, in his Black Athena, has a scholarly version
of this argument.

This is dumb stuff, anachronistic and plain stupid. 
Importing modern notions of Black and white into
the ancient world is anachronism, apart from the fact
that the Egyptians were not black in anything like
the sense intended by modern US racists, namely having
significant descent from sub-Saharan Africa. The idea
that Kleopatra (for example), a descendent of the
Greek-Macedonian Ptolemies, looked like Beyonce
Knowles is absurd.

The Egyptians were part of a Mediterranean culture
stretching from Sicily and Southern Italy through
Greece, Asia Minor (now the Western Turkish Coast),
Krete, Egypt, Lybia, and extending at least to
Carthage. Ideas that darker-skinned people were
inferior, naturally dumber, especially fit for
subordination, were foreign to this culture. Recall
the in the Illiad Zeus goes off the visit the
blameless Ethiopians, there is no suggestion that he
is slumming.

Slavery was a  misfortune that might befall anyone,
though some snobs (Aristotle, e.g.) argued that slaves
were less rational and properly subordinated, he did
not suggest that Africans, or subSaharan Africans,
were specially suited for slavery.  Plato expressly
describes  the division of humans into naturally
subordinate and superior groups based on metallic
content as a (necessary) lie.

The notion that something like philosophy or any
intellectual development can be stolen is ridiculous,
leaving aside modern intellectual property laws, which
would not apply then or have any analogies, and would
only apply to particular works, not to approaches to
thinking, such as philosophy. If  something like
philosophy orginated in Egypt, that did not gives the
Egyptians any special claim to it; ideas circulate.
Did we steal Marxism from the Germans or German
emigrees in England? 

And wherever philosophy in something like the modern
sense originated, it was developed in Greece. Though
not entirely by Greeks, Aristotle was a Stagyrite, a
Thracian, a people regarded generically with contempt
by the Greek proper. Finally, it's not clear why
philosophy is supposed to be specially a credit to
whoever invented it. A number of writers -- Marx,
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, for example,
have regarded it as a big mistake at best and an
ideological delusion at worst.



--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Diop also drew from the ideas of George M. James, a
 follower of black
 nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who emphasised the
 importance of Ethiopia
 as a great, black civilization, and who argued that
 black peoples should
 develop pride in African history. James's book,
 Stolen Legacy (1954) is
 often cited as one of the foundational texts of
 modern Afrocentrism. James
 claimed that Greek philosophy was stolen from
 ancient Egyptian traditions
 and that these had developed from distinctively
 African cultural roots. For
 James, the works of Aristotle and other Greek
 thinkers were, in fact, poor
 synopses of aspects of ancient Egyptian wisdom.
 According to James, the
 Greeks were a violent and quarrelsome people, unlike
 the Egyptians, and were
 not naturally capable of philosophy. This conclusion
 may have been based on
 the fact that the period of Egyptian history
 regarded as the most prominent
 (14th B.C.E.) was considered the early dark age of
 Greek culture. The early
 sculptural and artistic achievements of
 pre-classical Greece had strong
 similarity to Egyptian sculptural style and artistic
 design.
 
 
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Miles, Bebop Cool (Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cool_African_philosophy)

[andie nachgeborenen]

Miles, bebop? I don't think so. He did play with
Parker for bit but that was before be made himself
into Miles. Bebop is high-voltage variations on chord
changes, set up the melody with eight or 12 or 16 bars
played in unison, then rapid fire solos, often
escalating to flurries of 32d notes, often in bizarre
time signatures and wierd tonalities with the
dissonances unresolved on purpose. And it's -not_, not
cool. Miles's and the West Coast's cool sound was
relaxed melodic variations, generally rather slow
(Miles in particular didn't have the chops to blwo
like, say, Dizzy or Fats Navarro -- I don't decreate
him, he's great, but like Billie Holiday he made a lot
with a little), no dissonances, no wierd tonalities. 
Miles got into that sort of stuff later with Jack
Johnson, Bitches Brew, Pangea, etc., but that was way
beyond cool.

I think Monroe is more beboppy than cool. The Rat Pack
was definitely cool.

--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The disputes on the talk page for this entry are
 not very productive:
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cool_%28African_philosophy%29
 
 I can see cool in the black American cultural
 context, but to predicate 
 an African philosophy of which it is a descendant
 smacks of crackpot 
 afrocentric nonsense to me.
 
 Comment
 
 Yea . . . cool is a post WWII cultural artifact that
 was not limited to black 
 America at all. Frank Sinarta and his Rat Pack Crew
 - Sammy, Dean, Joey, 
 etc., were cool. Actually, Marylyn Monroe was part
 of this cool. Miles Davis was 
 of course of the BeBop cool school. 
 
 Waistline 
 
 
  
 
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Externalism/Intrrnalism (Was: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] hull_sociobiology)

[andie nachgeborenen]

The concepts are not hard and I can't recall any
free-standing discussion of them. Internalism is the
ide athat scientific change is driven by factors
internal to science itself -- problems posed by the
consistency of theories with observation, the
coherence of the theories themselves, whether the
reserach programs are progressive or degenerating.
Kuhn is the figure usually associated with this view,
although he is verry far from being digmatic about it.
Nonetheless hsi idea of a scientific revolution is
internalist: the old paradigm cannot accomodate
accumulating anomalies, leading to a period of
revolution and its replacement by a new paradigm. I.B.
Cohen is another distinguished internalist, as is
Richard Westfall --maybe. Neither writer nor any other
historian or philosopher of science who are is
classified as internalist of which I know, anyway,
denies that extrascientific factors play a role in
scientific change -- for example everyone who works in
the 17th century acknowledges the role of social
groupls like the Royal Academy, which is not a
scientific theory. It's really a matter of how much
emphasis one puts on extrascientific factors and which
ones.

There is no single figure of their caliber associated
with externalism -- probably because the more science
one understands the more one is likely to talk about
it and the nore weight one is likely to give it.
Externalism in its strongest views would say that
scientific change is driven entirely by factor
external to the activity of science per se -- the
propounding and testing of theories. I am not sure
anyone respected in history and philosophy of science
actually goes that far, but may something like this
view is approcahed by some radical feminists like
Sandra Harding or Carolyn Merchant.  Weaker
externalisms claim that extra-scientific factors have
a highly important role to play in explaining
scientific development.  Most Marxist history and
philosophy of science from Bernal to Lewontin takes
something like this position, agreeing that scientific
research has its own logic, but that its timing,
direction, agenda, in some cases standards of proof,
are determined in significant by, e.g., class
interest. (This was the position I took myself in The
Paradox of Ideology.)

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Internalism and externalism are standard concepts in
 the sociology of 
 science.  Perhaps andie could point us to key
 reference works.  I don't 
 think I have the wherewithal right now.  I'm
 checking wikipedia:
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_science
 Doesn't quite hit it.
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalism
 Completely off my topic.
 
 This isn't working.
 
 I'm not finding entries in other online
 philosophical dictionaries and 
 encyclopedias.  I guess I'll have to check my hard
 copy philosophy 
 reference sources for a quick fix.
 
 
 At 05:48 PM 1/25/2006 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
 Ralph Dumain :
 Yes, I think we're pretty much on the same page. 
 I'm not up on
 anthropology, so I don't know to what extent
 cultural anthropology has
 integrated evolutionary theory into it, if at all. 
 Or for that matter, to
 what degree cultural anthropology has integrated
 physical anthropology.
 
 ^
 CB; Well, when you major or do graduate work in
 one, you have to take a
 minimum of basic classes in the other. At the
 University of Michigan, they
 are the same department.
 
 A key link is that culture is the main and
 qualitatively unique adaptive
 mechanism of the human species. As I wrote in the
 letter to Lewontin that I
 sent a copy of to the list here, culture creates a
 LaMarckian-like adaptive
 mechanism ( I sent the wikipedia note on LaMarck
 back then; see also William
 Bateson note) This is profound. It means human
 adaptation is not bound by
 the dogma against inheritance of acquired
 characteristics.  Our culture is
 like another body that we can modify for the next
 generation based upon the
 direct experience with the adaptive issue by the
 parent generation. Of
 course, the genetic mechanism of adaptation cannot
 do this.
 
 ^^
 
 I thought I mentioned this before, but perhaps I
 forgot: both internalist
 and externalist approaches in sociology of science
 are one-sided bourgeois
 positions, characteristic of the prevailing
 dualisms between which
 bourgeois thought vacillates.  This dualism in
 contrast to the perspectives
 of Hegel and Marx.  Probably some of the Stalinist
 interventions in this
 area, particularly Boris Hessen's 1931 paper, which
 inspired western
 sociologists and historians of science, gravitate
 toward the crudities of
 externalism.
 
 
 CB: I require a little more elaboration of the
 interalist/externalist
 terminology, please.
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] hull_sociobiology

[andie nachgeborenen]

Kuhn said in his later years that he was sorry he ever
gave currency to the word.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Andie: An interesting idea, but it's a stretch.
  
 ^
 CB: Yea, I saw your post after I posted. 
  
 By the way, paradigm has gained remarkable
 currency in civil society
 ,outside academe, or whatever. I hear City Council
 members using it ( for
 scientific civics) these 35 plus years after Kuhn
 was all the rave when I
 was an undergrad. I guess that's ironic in that it
 is being used in
 _political_ discourse. So,rather than science being
 shaped by politics,
 politics is being shaped by (philosophy of) science
 - a little bit :)
 
 ^

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Historical materialism

[andie nachgeborenen]

That Esotonian fellow whose
 name I can't remember 
 also wrote a book on what remains of historical
 materialism after a 
 thorough analytical going-over.
 
 

Yewah, I have that book, forget the author's name. So
did Erik Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliot Sobor,
Reconstructing Marxism, very similar results in a
shortter space.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Like Kant, he doesn't know anything

[andie nachgeborenen]

This is going nowhere. You say you understand these
terms and their meaning is so obvious as to not
rqequire explanation. I guess I'm stupid, I need
explanation because I don't understand them. I'm not
Kantian about them in the sense that I don't think
that some of them designate a priori impossible
positions or refer to unknowable reality or describe
the limits of knowlege.  I just want to know what you
mean by the terms. You seem to think this is a
philosopher's special idiocy. Maybe it is, but there
you are.

I'm not an agnostic about, e.g., whether there are
atoms or people or classes, I know there are
(therefore I am certainly not a Humean skeptic); I
just don't understand your philosophical positions. 
I'm not a physicalist in that I don't think everything
is ultimately made of mass-energy; like Ralph, I
believe in emergent properties. Class is not a
physical relation, for example. If that makes me not a
materialist in your book, I'm not a materialist, so
what? 

Wrt to your other post, we've reached a dead end. You
quote and paraphrase Marx and Engels as if that
settled things and say you find persuasive certain
criticisms and interpretation of Kant that no modern
Kant scholar accepts, in part for reasons I have
explained in in some detail. Whether or not you do it
because you take their ideas as gospel, a notion you
seem to regard as slanderous, but I don't knwo why,
since you have repeatedly said that Marxism does not
require creative work, just restating in
understandable terms of the truths they arrived at, or
whether you accept these implausible interpretations
and corresponding criticisn just because you don't
understand Kant, which is also not a criticism, I
don't understand him very well either.

Anyway I am not sure how much further we can go here.



--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Andie is just being a Kantian. Nothing is knowable.
 He doesn't know what
 materialism is. He doesn't know what spirit is. He
 doesn't know what nature
 is (!). He doesn't know what primacy is. He don't
 know nothin from nothin.
 He kant figure anything out. He's agnostic.
 Everythinginitsself is
 unknowable. so he doesn't know it. Total skepticism
 like Hume again. Kant
 started out at Hume, and ended up at Hume, of
 course, but Kant arrived back
 at Hume UNKNOWINGLY !
  
 And then there's the great Kantian swallowing
 ontology up in epistemology
 question. How do ve know ve know ? Is it possible to
 know anything?   Vell ,
 Kant, of course, I don't know.
  
 CB
  
  
 This is truly remarkable puzzlement for a
 professional philosopher.
 
 At 08:22 AM 1/11/2006 -0800, andie nachgeborenen
 wrote:
 Well, spirit and nature are not transparent
 terms
 either, not is primacy, so it's not much help to
 say
 that idealists make spirit primary to nature and
 materialists vice versa. This is a
 Hegelian-flavored
 formula that is highly specific to a narrow
 philosophical tradition.
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Further focus on Engels definition of materialism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, spirit and nature are not transparent terms
either, not is primacy, so it's not much help to say
that idealists make spirit primary to nature and
materialists vice versa. This is a Hegelian-flavored
formula that is highly specific to a narrow
philosophical tradition. 

Moreover, Engels mixes things up by dragging in the
afterlife in the longer quote in the previous post,
which is quite irrelevant to whether objective reality
exists independent of us, whatever that means. Someone
could deny the latter proposition in some sense and
still reject the idea of an afterlife; someone might
believe in an aferlife and insist that objective
material reality exists independently of us -- Newton
certainly thought this! 

I think here Engels is actually invoking the notion of
(mind-body) materialism vs dualism, the notion that
we/our minds are identical with our bodies and so die
with them -- a point which would not impress the early
Christians, btw who believed in bodily resurrection,
so for them that the afterlife itself was a part of
material reality.  But anyway mind-body materialism is
quite distinct from realist materialism, whatever
exactly that is.

Engel's comments about savagery and primitive
societies are now recognized as unacceptable 19th
century prejudice, of course. And are further
irrelevant to the issues.

The fact is there is no particularly clear notion of
what is materialism as a sort of realism, apart from
the proposition, now known to be false, that matter
(mass-energy, actually) exists independently of mind.
There is not much in the way of a clear notion of
realism at all, since mind-independence won't work as
a criterion tout cout. What concrete content there is
to talking about the objective existence of
independent reality is unclear, really, it sounds like
table-pounding. Reality is really real! Dammit! Nature
is primary over spirit! 

I mean, we agree that we don't make up atoms or chairs
just by thinking or talking or writing about them the
way we make up stories like Hmalet and we cannot
change their properties by thinking or wishing they
were otherwise. And we can have true or false ideas of
what there is and things are like that may help
further or frustrate our purposes, and the truth and
falsity of our ideas doesn't depend on the theories we
have about these things. And no one thinks any more
that all there is is ideas in the mind (though I guess
some pmos do sort of advocate a linguistic version of
this, saying that all there is is texts). And those
things and talk about them are not collections of
ideas or perceptions or signifiers. 

 Anyway, none of these sorts of mind-independence
alters the deep observer-dependence of the quantum
world or the wholesale dependence of the social world
on thoughts, wishes, ideas, desires, aspirations, and
language, not withstanding that we also cannot make it
as we please just by talking or thinking about it
differently.

So I am still not answered, what is materialism? Why
should we care? 

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 Well, I still don't know what materialism in this
 context. Presumably it doesn't mean that there is
 nothing but matter, because the denial of that view
 is
 not idealism but dualism or nonreductionism or the
 claim that there are emergent properties -- any of
 which Berkeley might accept.Indeed, Berkeley could
 be
 (though he isn't) a materialist in this sense, since
 he thinks that there is matter, but what that means
 is
 ideas of material things -- Berkley could say that
 any
 statements about ideas of nonmaterisl things are
 false.  If materialism is opposed to idealism, it
 probably means something more like realism, maybe
 realism about the external world, that is, the
 claim
 that there are some things that are independent of
 our
 (or anyone's?) mind that are material, whatever that
 means.
 
 ^^^
 
 
 The answers which the philosophers gave to this
 question split them into
 two
 great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of
 spirit to nature and,
 therefore, in the last instance, assumed world
 creation in some form or
 other - and among the philosophers, Hegel, for
 example, this creation often
 becomes still more intricate and impossible than in
 Christianity - comprised
 the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded
 nature as primary, belong to
 the various schools of materialism.
 
 These two expressions, idealism and materialism,
 originally signify nothing
 else but this; and here too they are not used in any
 other sense. What
 confusion arises when some other meaning is put to
 them will be seen below.
 
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Further focus on Engels definition of materialism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Sort of up against the wall with two  deadlines, so
very briefly

1) With Kant the issue is, the correct
characterization of his views (which is very hard),
and the incorrect characterization, as a  sort of
Berkeleyean (which is easy). This matters for lots of
reasons, undewrstanding the context of classical
German philosophy in which Hegel and Marx and Engels
operated, some of the difficulty in the notions of
idealism and realism, and the intrinsic interest of
Kant's views -- he still has a lot to teach us.

2) I reject Kant's transcendental idealism/empirical
realism, but what we are arguinga bout is in part what
I am rejecting. You can't actually reject the view
unless you sort of understand it. And sort of
understand is all claim, this is as hard stuff as
there is in philosophy.

3)This shamefaced stuff is a load of crap. Kant
thought he had good arguments that Berkleyean idealism
was necessarily wrong, but he also thought he had good
arguments that transcendental realism, more or less
your view and maybe mine, if it's taken more modestly,
was hopeless. So K think there are definite resaons
not to adopt this position and the idea that he's
chicken or embarassed is merely indivious.

4) Maybe Lenin studied Kant, no doubt Engels had done
at one point. That doesn't make them Kant scholars.
I've studied Kant and that doesn't make me a Kant
scholar. Kant scholars devote careers to this stuff.

5) Lenin's definition of materialism (as the existence
objective reality outside us) is not transparent,
Engels'(in terms of nature and spirit) less so. My
ability to raise difficulties for these definitions
does not show they are transparent but the reverse.
They show that the terms are slippery, unclear, and
obsure. I don't really understand them myself. 

6) That's why I say I'm a realist about somethings,
and by that I just mean that there are specific things
and types of things, some physical, some not (I'm not
an emergent materialist, at least in the sense that I
don't think there is any reason to think that
everything there is is physical), some of these have
more or less the properties we think they do as well
as others we might not know about, plus there are
other things we don't know about, some of which might
discover, and for some of these things they are not
made up by us, alterable just by thinking or wishing
or willing, or themselves psychological properties. 
Although I am a realist about psychology too -- I'm
not an eliminativist.  Cjhrist, evenever I start to
talk about this stuff it falls apart. Which just goes
to show it's not transparent.

7) Your are Lenin's identification of idealism,
whatever that is, and theism, is unjustified and
unjustifiable. As Ralph points out, for example, a
standard interpretation of Nietzsche, arguably wrong
but widely held and advocated by Nietzscheans and
postmodernists, is that his perspectivism is a form of
idealism, and he's the original God is Dead guy.  Your
insistence on this point reinforces my conviction taht
your attitude towards Marx, Engels, and Lenin is
scriptural rather than scientific. 

8) To say we are interested in this stuff because this
is a Marxism list is consistent with a merely
historical interest that has no current relevance.
Some of Marx(ism) is surely alive. Other parts are (in
my view) dead as doornail, interesting to Marx
scholars like me (I _am_ a Marx scholar if not a Kant
scholar), but nothing one would want to maintain
today. I wouldn't expecy you to agree, but it would be
interesting to know if there is any major point on
which you disagree with Marx, Engels, or Lenin.

Replt to Ralph when I am able. It's hellish here.



--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 Well, spirit and nature are not transparent
 terms
 either, not is primacy, so it's not much help to
 say
 that idealists make spirit primary to nature and
 materialists vice versa. This is a Hegelian-flavored
 formula that is highly specific to a narrow
 philosophical tradition. 
 
 CB; On the one hand you say the terms are not
 transparent. On the other hand
 you explain an esoteric connotation of the terms
 which implies that they
 _do_ have transparent meaning to you. Which is it ?
 You want to say you
 understand , but avoid understanding at the same
 time.
 
 Lenin's definition is succinct and transparent.
 
 ^
 Clip-
 
 
 So I am still not answered, what is materialism? Why
 should we care? 
 
 ^
 CB: You are dodging. The posts have given enough for
 you to understand what
 they are saying. Engels and Lenin are not unclear on
 what they mean by
 materialism. It is not a confusion on definitions.
 
   As to whether you should care, having an
 understanding as to what E and L
 mean by materialism is necessary for having
 discussions on Marxism and
 philosophy, a main topic on this MARXIST-thaxis
 list, from its beginning and
 throughout.  This is sort of a Marxist philosophy
 list. So, the Marxist
 notion of materialism is fundamental for discussion
 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Further focus on Engels definition of materialism

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 This is truly remarkable puzzlement for a
 professional philosopher.

An ex-professional now. But what's puzzling about it?
The whole point of philosophical training is to get
confused at deeper and deeper levers.

 
 At 08:22 AM 1/11/2006 -0800, andie nachgeborenen
 wrote:
 Well, spirit and nature are not transparent
 terms
 either, not is primacy, so it's not much help to
 say
 that idealists make spirit primary to nature and
 materialists vice versa. This is a
 Hegelian-flavored
 formula that is highly specific to a narrow
 philosophical tradition.
 
 Maybe so, but there are generic as well as specific
 characteristics.  When 
 Adorno and Horkheimer talk about 'spirit', they have
 Hegel in mind.  But 
 they are materialists, albeit of a peculiar sort,
 and their opposition to 
 idealism references the entire tradition from
 Parmenides to Hegel.

Not sure of your point here, Engels talks in these
terms and he's a materialist of some sort/

  Why is 
 primacy not transparent?

So you explain it if you find it so clear.

 
  
 Well, objective idealism and materialism both adhere
 to the primacy of the 
 external world. 

Meaning? N.B. so does Kan't empirical realism. And
what's this external world stuff -- are we going all
Cartesian?

 The question is the relation
 between material and 
 spiritual or supersensible entities.  It's not that
 difficult to figure 
 out,

Right. Like it's obvious in Hegel. For example.

 except in the case of Spinoza.  Secondly, many
 philosophical positions 
 are not 'pure', in that there are conflicting
 tendencies within them, as 
 Engels also recognizes.

Sure.

 
 I think here Engels is actually invoking the notion
 of
 (mind-body) materialism vs dualism, 
 
 Mind-body materialism is the only kind generally
 authorized in the 
 constricted world of anglophone philosophy.  I see
 this provincialism all 
 the time.  But the wider sense of 'materialism' is
 proscribed for political 
 reasons.  For example, for decades Marvin Farber
 used the more acceptable 
 indigenous term 'naturalism' and finally admitted
 that for him it's the 
 same 'materialism' everybody's scared to name.

Well I wouldn't scared to use the word if I knew what
it meant.
 
 Actually, your contention is false.  The 'observer'
 in quantum mechanics is 
 an impersonal measuring instrument that has nothing
 to do with mind. 

Sigh. It's you that are wrong. The observer may not be
personal, but it makes choices, whether to measure
velocity or position, for example, which slit to file
the particle through and kill or not Scheoedinger's
cat. So it's not a machine. It's conscious. Hence the
quantum world depends on a sort of comscousness and
intentionity, though not ours.

  
   Anyway, none of these sorts of mind-independence
 alters the deep observer-dependence of the quantum
 world
 
 Wrong.  Observer-dependence is physical, not mental.

Non, cher ami. You can't even go mind-body materialist
on this one (and if you did, all thinking would be
physical anyway); this observer is physical not in
being made of matter but in being a posit of physical
theory. But 

 
 or the wholesale dependence of the social world
 on thoughts, wishes, ideas, desires, aspirations,
 and
 language, not withstanding that we also cannot make
 it
 as we please just by talking or thinking about it
 differently.
 
 You've contradicted yourself again.
 

Explain. I don't see the contradiction. Man makes his
own history, but not just as he pleases . . . . ---
that's my point. Was Chuck contrading himself?

 So I am still not answered, what is materialism?
 Why
 should we care?
 
 A century of irrationalist mystification, which
 ultimately serves 
 reactionary ends.  Where have you been?  And you
 know what emergent 
 materialism is.

And why is materialism necessarily rationalist and
idealism not? You don't get more rationalist --
commited to reason -- than Kant. Or Mill. Both
idealists in different ways. And Heidegger is a
materialist, at least he doesn't think the world isn't
real and mind-independent.

No, I do not know what emergent materialism is, unless
it is like physicalism with emergent properties, which
need not be physical at all. As Hilary Putnam used to
point out, if functionalism is the correct theory of
mind (this is nor sociological functionalism, but the
idea that mental states are internal connections
between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs, it's
merely fortiutous if these states are realized in a
physical system, they could in principle be realized
in ectoplasm.  

If you guys are so smart, stop asking questions I
don't know how to answer and expressing amazement at
my stupidity, which I readily admit, and enlighten me.




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Correction: _Unknowable_ thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

 them what is this materialist
 realism
 you are defending? What is the significance of
 defending it?
 
 What have Quine and Rorty done to your mind?

Taught me how to think . . . .

Or is
 it the legal 
 profession?  Surely you know what emergent
 materialism is--of which 
 dialectical materialist was the first incarnation. 
 And what is the 
 significance of defending it?  Are you mad?

No, just puzzled. AS I said, I'm not sure what it is
because I still don't know what materialism is.

 
 So the relativism of Nietzscheanism, postmodernism,
 anti-realism and 
 subjectivist sociology of science is not a going
 concern, and even paves 
 the royal road to creation and 'intelligent design'
 in the schools?

Bad sociology, here, the creationists are hard-bitten
realists, They think God made us, really truley they
hate relativism like the plague.

Pomo's dying. Nietzsche is probably a realist, though
this is controversial and many so-called Nietzscheans
are not.  But who are we talking, Foucault? He's an
anti- or nonrealist materialist. Anti-realism, well,
its incarnations in analytical metaphysics and
philosophy of science are hardly threats to
rationality. Subjectivist sociology of science?
Leaving aside ignorant science studies foolishness,
a lot of subjectivist sociology of science is great
history and sociology -- but I'm a student of Kuhn as
well as Rorty, not that I believe in Kunian
incommensurability. 

Anyway, if irrationalism is your target, or
anti-scientic attitudes, go after those. This
undefined vague talk of materialism is a distraction.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Unknowable thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

I've done what I can to explain why this is wrong.
Kant rejects the position you attribute to him, he
sxpressly argues against it, and he offers an
alternative. It is not what he'd called a
transcendental realist alternative, which is sort of
what you want, the idea that we can have knowledge of
things as they are in themselves.  (I avoid using the
Kantian technical expression things-in-themselves,
because these are by definition unknowable.) 

But Kant does give you empirical realism, knowledge of
things as they appear to us -- which are not sense
data. Kant carefully distinguishes between sensation,
which is temporally but not spatially ordered and is
the subject matter of psychology, and scientific
knowledge of external objects like rivers and
planets, which involves knowledge of substantial
things located in space as wella s time and
necessarily independent of us, and whose independent
existence is a condition of our being conscious at
all, otherwise we'd have what James called a booming,
buzzing confusion. He gives Engels what he says he
wants, e.g., scientific knowledge of the hitherto
unknown properties of chemicals and ability to
manipulate them to achieve our ends. 

Unlike Hume and Berkeley, Kant does not require some
sort of inference from sense data to things outside
us, an inference that Berkeley refuses and that Hume
is skeptical about; Kant thinks this is actually
ass-backwards. We start with the things outside us as
given and as object of knowledge and scientific
inquiry, and that allows us to have inner experiences
that are coherent enough to be described as knowledge.


I will say one last time what Kant's idealism consists
in: he is idealist about space and time, which he
regards as forms of intuition, and about causality
and substance, which are regards as categories of
understanding. We somehow get out sensibilities, our
capacity to receive intuitions or sensations,
affected (noncausally) by TII, then our minds
transcendentally organize the sensations
spatiotemporally and put them into causal relations.
This is not a fact about empirical psychology, to be
quite clear; it is not discovered by doing
psychological experiments the way most factsa bout the
way we think are discovered. It is, for Kant, a
necessary condition of experience; it is
transcendental psychology, the operation of our
noumenal selves, the sort of sentient countpart to
TII. This is transcendental idealism - one way to
understand it.  

But all this is very different from holding that we
know only sensations and either have to build the
world from them (Berkeley), or have to infer the
existence of the world from them, but cannot do so
(Hume), or can do so (Russell).  For Kant knowledge is
first and foremost empirical knowledge of the nature,
properties, and relations of causally interacting
substances that are located in time and in space --
and in space means outside us.

In view of all this, it is a mistake to think of TII
as being something like alazarin, a substance that had
properties we didn't know about until we did some work
on it, but having properties we cannot know about
because they are somehow screened off behind a veil of
sensations. Locke might be interpreted to hold a view
like this with his distinction between real and
nominal properties, but not Kant. For Kant, the TII
has no properties to know about, if you take the
necessary conditions of knowledge away, you can't know
anything; if you take away spatio-temporal
organization and the causal structure of substances,
which Kant thinks we transcendentally contribute,
what's there to know?

So if you want to reject Kant's idealism, it does you
no good to reject Berkeley's or Hume's sensationalism.
Kant has already rejected those.  You have to reject
his idealism about space, time, substance, and
causality, and contend that spacetime is something
independent of our minds, that something like
substances are likewise, that causality is a feature
substances and not a transcendental organizing device,
and then you will be able to assert that if we can
know about those things, we can have knowledge of
things are they are in themselves. 

Notice that last if -- you need some argument, if you
reject Kant's, that if all taht is independent of us,
that we can in fact know it, or some argument that we
don't need such an argument. It won't do to say that
scientific research is possible -- even Berkeley can
say that.

You really must stop repeating the words of Engels and
Marx and Lenin as if they were gospel and require no
emendation or correction. None of them were Kant
scholars, and Kant is someone you can specialize in
and spend a lifetime's schilarly work on. I've had
five classes on the CPR _alone_, some with leading
authorities, with a side glance at the moral theory,
and I would not call myself any kind of real expert on
Kant. Engels is brilliant, but he obviously had not
really thought a lot about Kant when he made that
remark, Lenin's comments on Kant in MEC 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Correction: _Unknowable_ thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

 
 ^^^
 CB: The definition of materialism I am using is the
 one Lenin gives in
 _Materialism and EmpCrit_. The existence of
 objective reality.

And objective reality is:


maybe
 realism about the external world, that is, the
 claim
 that there are some things that are independent of
 our
 (or anyone's?) mind that are material, whatever that
 means.
 
 ^
 CB: Yes , that is it.  

* * *

Problems, then: What's material mean? Physical, what
physics, biology, etc. say there is? 

What if, as seems to be the case, our best science
tells us that important features of the world are
mind-dependent in a deep way -- that is where quantum
mechanics seems to lead. 

What about social reality -- all of social reality is
mind-dependent. Class, for example. But we do want to
say that it is objective in some sense. 

What does reality mean? I am not being coy here. I
am happy to say that there are quarks and electrons
and atoms and molecules and chairs and tables and
animals and insects and people and planets and stars
and galaxies, maybe even spacetime. And also classes
and states and genders and societies and cultures and
languages and thoughts. Is reality just whatever
exists, a great big conjunction of the sort I started
on? So talk of reality is a shorthand way including
all that? Or is it something above and beyond or
different from all that? 

If a lot of what we care about that exists, and may
exist in some ense objectively, is also in some sense
mind-dependent, them what is this materialist realism
you are defending? What is the significance of
defending it? As I said, there are practically
speaking no Berkeleyeans or phenomenalists, thesea re
historical positions. Isn't their mere denial, if
that's what materialistic realism is, also merely
historical? 

Talk about the external world seems rather quaint
today, not because no one believes it it, but because
the premises that led people to talk about the world
as external, as if we were trapped inside our own
minds and had to sort of reason ourselves out of them,
like Descartes, seem sort of beside the point. That
was not true in marx and Engel's time, but times have
changed. So it's not clear what's at stake here in
this debate.  

Just for starters . . . .




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Unknowable thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Coincidentally, there's a group here in DC that
 wants to organize an ad hoc 
 study group on Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON and is
 seeking 
 advice.  Perhaps I could solicit your input.

Sure, whatever I can do within my limits and from a
distance, also bearing in mind my Kant scholarship is
not exactly up to date either.

 
 Otherwise, the problem with the schooling in
 Marxism-Leninism we see here 
 is two-fold:
 
 (1) social conditioning by political parties and
 tendencies;
 
 (2) the ambiguities and lapses in the original texts
 and a fortiori their 
 subsequent exploitation by others that allow for
 deployment of Marxist 
 notions via logical vagaries, facilitating unclear
 reasoning motored by 
 provincialism.  There's a historical failure of
 Marxist education of 
 monumental proportions.  The complicated stuff is
 supposed to be for the 
 eggheads and the simple-minded popularizations are
 supposed to be for the 
 average joes, but I say this is deluded thinking
 that produces disastrous 
 results.

Absolutely. And some people think you can dispense
with the complicated stuff altogether.

 
 At 01:03 PM 1/10/2006 -0800, andie nachgeborenen
 wrote:
 You really must stop repeating the words of Engels
 and
 Marx and Lenin as if they were gospel and require
 no
 emendation or correction. None of them were Kant
 scholars, and Kant is someone you can specialize in
 and spend a lifetime's scholarly work on. I've had
 five classes on the CPR _alone_, some with leading
 authorities, with a side glance at the moral
 theory,
 and I would not call myself any kind of real expert
 on
 Kant. Engels is brilliant, but he obviously had not
 really thought a lot about Kant when he made that
 remark, Lenin's comments on Kant in MEC are not
 really well informed either.
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

 ^^
 CB: The reason I say that is that Frank uses the
 term thing-in-itself,
 which is pretty much associated with Kant. And Frank
 criticizes it as an
 idealist concept , which is the same thing that
 Engels and Lenin do.

Although Kant was a transcendental idealist and and
an empirical realist -- his own terms  -- it seems
bizarre to say that the thing-in-itself is an
idealist notion. For Kant the TII is exactly what is
independent of us, what is left over after we remove
from the object all the determinations that we put
into it -- the categories of the understanding (like
subnstance and causality) and the way the affections
of sensibility present themselves (in time and space)
under those categories. 

What Kant denies that we can have _knowledge_ of the
TII, since by definition to know something is to grasp
it as it appears to us with our sensory intuitions
organized under the categories. These, K argues, are
transcendental conditions of experience -- what would
it be to know something without having empirical
experience of spatiotemporally located substances
interacting causally? 

Now to say that time and space and substance and
causality are wholly the contributions of the mind is
to be idealist about _those_ things, which is why Kant
is right to call himself a transcendental idealist, if
being an idealist about something means to say that it
is in some way dependent on the mind.  (A tricky claim
though, since everything social, like class, is in
some way dependent on the mind!) But to say that the
TII is an idealist notion when it what is NOT
dependent on the mind is very peculiar.

Maybe Engels and Lenin think it is idealist to say
that we cannot _know_ the TII, but idealism or
non-idealism -- realism, materialism, whatever the
opposite of idealism is -- should not be a matter of
what we know or can know but what there is.. To say
the the TII is an idealist notion because it a notion
of something unknowable in principle confuses
epistemology with metaphysics and ontology. 

I'm not defending Kant here, just explaning how a
certain criticism of his view makes no sense.


 Frank is applying it to interpretations of the
 Uncertainty Principle which
 was not discovered at the time Lenin and Engels
 wrote in this area
 
 ^
 
 One often reads the following formulation: It is
 impossible to measure the
 position and the velocity of a moving particle
 simultaneously. The world,
 therefore, 

oops, this does not follow

just as it is according to classical
 mechanics, is filled with
 particles having definite positions and velocities;
 unfortunately, we can
 never attain a knowledge of them.

As explained in porevious emails, this is a complete
misunderstanding of the uncertainty principle.

QM totally redefines our notion of a particle, not
just in depriving it of an intrinsic definite
observation-idendeoent spatiotemporal location and
volocity, but also in treating it as wavelike for
somepurposes and particle like for others -- the
notionsa re connected. The world is not just as in CM,
it is very different indeed. As the notorious James
Jeans (notorious for what?) said -- or was Bernal? --
The world is not only queerer than we conceive, it is
queerer than we can conceive. That has to be Jeans,
right? The notorious one.

 This presentation,
 in which the states of
 the particles play the role of the thing in itself
 in idealistic
 philosophy, leads to innumerable pseudo problems.

Worse than that -- it leads to logical contradictions.

jks





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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Correction: _Unknowable_ thing-in-itself

[andie nachgeborenen]

 
 Engels terms Kant a angnostic

Clearly wrong, Kant is no agnostic about either the
empirical  world we know or about the TII we can't
know. _Hume_ might be an agnostic, but Kant considers
himself to have answered Hume and Berkeley -- see his
secion in the CPR on the Refutation of Idealsim.

 or a shamefaced
 materialist.

Well, I still don't know what materialism in this
context. Presumably it doesn't mean that there is
nothing but matter, because the denial of that view is
not idealism but dualism or nonreductionism or the
claim that there are emergent properties -- any of
which Berkeley might accept. Indeed, Berkeley could be
(though he isn't) a materialist in this sense, since
he thinks that there is matter, but what that means is
ideas of material things -- Berkley could say that any
statements about ideas of nonmaterisl things are
false.  If materialism is opposed to idealism, it
probably means something more like realism, maybe
realism about the external world, that is, the claim
that there are some things that are independent of our
(or anyone's?) mind that are material, whatever that
means.

Now, Kant certainly thinks that there are, indeed
there have to be, in order for us to know anything,
material things independent of our minds in the sense
that chairs and rivers and such are not ideas in our
minds or God's. That's his empirical realism. But he
thinks that we transcendentally contribute the
spatiotemporality, the causal relations and
substantiality of those things,s o he's idealist about
those things. That's his transcendental idealism. But,
one further step back, he thinks we need somnething to
organize spatiotemporally and order causally, etc.,
and this is contributed by our being (noncausally)
affected by TII that are independent of our minds,
though not in space or time or having causal
interactions with anything. So he's absolutely a
realist about TII, they wouldn't be TII if they were
not independent of our minds. They aren't material in
the sense of being made of matter, of course, nor
arethey mental, ideas in the head -- those are
empirical notions. the TII is transcendental.

 The unknowable
 part fits with agnosticism.  The shamefaced part it
 Kant saying, well there
 is a thing-in-itself. We just can't know it.

No, 'agnosticism would mean that one withholds
judgment, as with people who say there might bea God,
there might not, who can tell. This is not Kant's
position about tables and chairs or about TII.

I don't understandwhat is shame-faced about saying
that we cannot know something if the conditions for
knowledge are lacking, and surely it is plausible that
we cannot have experience of things that are not
located in space and time, causally ordered, and so
forth. (Kant has to treat logical and mathematical
knowledge and generally knowledge of abstract entities
as analytical truths or something like that, unless
he wanted, which he didn't, to treat them as somehow
empirical, as Mill did.) So if you takethose
conditions away, how can we have knowledge? 

Kant may be wrong, and indeed I think he is, that we
contribute spatiotemporal and causal organization --
that's what he is really idealistic about, and I think
that's a mistake. I believe that spacetime is
something out there, not a feature of the way we
experience things, that there are real causal
propensities that are not just features of our
categorial organization of sensory intuition so we can
make sense of it. But to say that Kant is mistaken is
not to say that he shamefaced, that is a
mischaracterization. He's actually quite proud that he
has (he thinks) solved the problems of philosophy that
Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume could not, and
shown the scope of knowledge and its limits.

 
 Lenin criticized Mach as a Neo-Kantian. 
 

There are elements of Kant in Mach (who would not take
this asa  criticism), but I think that Mach's
understanding of Kant was quite imperfect.

 Basically, Kant is an idealist because, ultimately,
 if consciousness cannot
 know being, then that is substantially the same
 thing as being not existing.

Knowing is being? That is a genuinely idealist notion!
Kant thinks he's explained what consciousness is, that
is consciousness/experience/knowledge of empirical
things. But these are causally related substances that
located in space and time, all which are contributed
by us. However, Kant thinks that we would not have
anything to  work on if there were not something
independent of us, the TII, that affected us. So,
given that we have experiences, he thinks the TII
_necessarily_ exists, which is the farthest remove
from not existing.

Bear in mind that Kant doesn't think of the TII as
something that has hidden properties that we can't
grasp. I think that is the mistake that Engels and
Lenin and lots of people make. The TII is what's left
when you take away (for analytical purposes, you can't
actually do it) all the conditions of knowledge that
permit us to speak of properties at all. It's

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Philipp Frank on the mystification of physics

[andie nachgeborenen]

.
 
 ^
 CB: It sems possible that Heisenberg may have had
 some rightwing political
 conscoiusness, I believe. 

Heisenberg was fairly right wing. In his autobiography
he recalls serving in the militai that helped put down
the Spartakus rebellion, and of course, though no
Nazi, he later stayed in Nazi Germany at more or less
nominally, depending on who you believe, headed up the
Nazi atomic weapons project (which never went
anywhere).

All of this is totally irrelevant to the truth of H's
contributions to quantum physics, notably the
uncertainty principle, but not just that, his other
work too. Right wingers can do great science -- von
Neumann and Teller are others who come to mind. 


It is possible that he was
 aware of the political
 aspects of the struggle between materialism and
 idealism. 

I don't think that would have interested H. Btw,
Lenin's explanation of the rationale behind that
struggle is uncharcteristically dumb -- he argues that
idealism implies fideism (theism), which is right
wing. 

 Perhaps
 Heisenberg framed his
 scientific discovery  in terms of indeterminancy
 with a certain intent to
 fight Leninist theory of knowledge.

Well, if he did, which I doubt -- I know no reason to
think he knew that Lenin had writen on theory of
knowledge -- he was nonetheless demonstrably right. If
the Leninist theory of knowledge -- and MEC was
writen almost 20 years before H framed the uncertainty
principle -- is inconsistent with that principle, then
it is refuted by science.  The uncertainty principle
is mathematically provable -- you get contradiction if
you deny it.  I don't know if the Leninist theory of
knowledge is consistent with quantum uncertainty, but
if it is worth anything, it better be. 

Whether quantum uncertainty is in some sense
idealist is a tricky question. Earlier this week I
posed a challenge to explain what was meant by
materialism and what was at stake in the debate, no
one took this up.  That was a mistake, these terms are
slippery and cannot be taken for granted. 

Q-uncertainty does make facts about the physical world
observer dependent -- we choose whether a particle has
a determinate velocity or a determinate position by
our decicion about which to measure. Q uncertainty
says it cannot have both. (Note: not that we cannot
_know_ both, it cannot _have_ both.) This is true
whether or it is idealist. 

It is important to distinguish between the hard core
of the theory, the mathematics, predictions, and
confirmable observations, and the philosophical
interpretions that the theory seems to call for. It is
not obvious that if q-uncertainty is idealist in some
sense that it therefore right wing. All modern
physicists, including Marxists, Communists,
socialists, and anarchist physicists, accept it.
Certaintly nothing about q physics is particularly
theistic,a lthough there are Christian physicists who
have tried to make the connection. 

 



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

My point was just that this was a task that 2d and 3d
Int'l Marxism set for itself -- contrary to what Shane
says, it wasn't created by  von B who in fact offered
a solution that works based on certain abastract and
unrealistic conditions. (That solution was adopted by
Sweezy in his Theory of Capitalist development.)  The
2d International offered a prize for the solution in
the 1890s. The 3d Int'l claimed to have one.  The
position Shane maintains is a  creditable reply and
one subsequently urged in some form or another by a
number of writers, like the cantakerous Jerry Levy,
but it was not that of Marxism Leninism, and my point
was just that M-L failed to solve the tasks it set for
itself, including that one.

--- Shane Mage [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Justin wrote:
 
 
 
   ...The Marxist-Leninists claimed to have a new
 discipline, but...it
 was unable to solve the theoretical and
 practicaltasks it set for 
 itself (e.g., a meaningful solution to the
 transformation problem...
 
 The so-called transformation problem is a pseudo
 problem. It
 is based on a misunderstanding of Marxian capital
 theory by a
 German critic named von Bortkiewicz.  According to
 vB, the sum
 of labor-value prices of the product for  a given
 period cannot be 
 equivalent to the sum of prices of production of
 that period's 
 product because the capital stocks depreciated in a
 given period, as 
 well as the individual capitals that are the
 denominators for the 
 average rate of profit determining prices of
 production, are measured 
 by
 the prices of production in prior periods rather
 than the labor-value prices
 of the capital goods composing the capital stock. 
 vB's misunderstanding
 is to treat the capital stock as a quantity of
 capital goods valued
 by their physical labor content, rather than as a
 fund of accumulated
 surplus value--even though Marx (for instance in
 distinguishing 
 physical, value, and organic compositions of
 capital) is 
 explicit that capital, a quantitatively determined
 social 
 relationship, is measured as consisting of
 capitalized surplus value 
 and absolutely not as a mass of things.  Once
 this misunderstanding is disposed of it is easy to
 demonstrate that the
 sum of prices of production must equal the sum of
 labor-value prices
 in any period.  In my view, the hallmark of all
 vulgar economics
 (including the huge amount of it masquerading as
 Marxist) is the
 treatment of capital as a mass of things rather than
 as an amount
 of capitalized (ie., accumulated) surplus value.
 
 Shane Mage
 
 When we read on a printed page the doctrine of
 Pythagoras that all 
 things are made of numbers, it seems mystical,
 mystifying, even 
 downright silly.
 
 When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of
 Pythagoras that all 
 things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently
 true.  (N. 
 Weiner)
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

Charles, M E did not have, nor prestend to have, all
the answers. Circumstances have changed, new analysis
are needed of the changed circumstances, old ideas
were left half-developed and in any case need testing
and extension -- this is totally obvious,unless you
are a fundamentalist who thinks, Marx said it, I
believe it, and that settles it. It is called
thinking.

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Ralph Dumain
 
 ^^^
 CB;  Creative development was not the main thing
 that Marxism needed after
 Marx, Engels and Lenin.  Your focus on creativity
 is off, it belies a
 professional intellectual's needs. Afterall, if
 there isn't that much new to
 be discovered philosophically, then philosophers are
 not that much in
 demand. What exact creative developments were so
 necessary for Marxist
 philosophy in the 1920's, 30's, 40's and beyond ?
 
 Creativity is not the sole or main criterion of wise
 thought.
 
 
 
 DUMAIN: That you could make such a statement is
 alone sufficient to
 discredit and condemn you.
 
 ^^
 
 CB: On the contrary, that you would say what you
 just did discredits  and
 condemns YOU.
 
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] end of philosophy? (2) -- Marx

[andie nachgeborenen]

So far as this goes I don't have much disagreement if
any. Marx thought that his turn away from Hegelian
philosophy. which he regardrd as the pinnacle of
philosophy up to that point, was the natural next
step, Hegelian philosophy having accomplished what it
could within the realm of thought and having pointed
beyond it to action.  Howver, unless we buy the idea
that Hegelian philosophy was the completion of
philosophy all Marx is really saying is that the
Hegelian philosophy has gone as far as it could. So
the claim of the end of philosophy is really quite
limited. Also, I thought part if the difference
between Ralph and me was he thought that Marx
continued to do philosophy and I thought he's
abandoned it for the critique of political economy,
theory of history, and the like.  Maybe I
misunderstood Ralph earlier position, but in any case
we seem to be in agreement now.  

 The old point is that philosophy for Marx means
 Hegelian 
 philosophy.   Now here's the kicker: I said that
Marx's whole
 conception of the 
 realization and abolition of philosophy is part and
 parcel of the Left 
 Hegelian schematic logic of concepts, even as it
 attempts to break out of 
 its closed circle.  Once the breakout is completed,
 the very concept of the 
 abolition of philosophy cannot have the same
 meaning, although its 
 methodological insights become a permanent
 acquisition.  The abolition of 
 philosophy is a schematic logical position.  Its
 concrete embodiment 
 implies a cognitive and a social transformation. 
 But the concrete content 
 of that cognitive transformation involves a
 concrete--not a 
 schematic--transfiguration of all knowledge.  Marx's
 transfiguration of 
 knowledge is the development of historical
 materialism and the critique of 
 political economy.
 
 But for thinkers of a later generation, what does
 the abolition of 
 philosophy mean, and for us?  Is it possible to
 reiterate such a claim--in 
 the manner of Marx, mind you, not Marxism--without
 confining oneself 
 within the logic of Left Hegelianism?  The question
 applies to all who 
 would continue a Hegelian Marxist perspective on
 philosophy, from Adorno to 
 
=== message truncated ===


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] end of philosophy? (2) -- Marx

[andie nachgeborenen]

Nothing here I disagree with, except to note that one
man's semantic hair-splitting is another man's
cvareful distinctions. 

Meta-science won't do as a term for the philosophy of
the future because there's a not more to think about
than science. Philosophy is a good old word, I see
no reasons to let it be hijacked by someone with a
specialized agenda.

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 At 07:10 AM 12/10/2005 -0800, andie nachgeborenen
 wrote:
 So far as this goes I don't have much disagreement
 if
 any. Marx thought that his turn away from Hegelian
 philosophy. which he regardrd as the pinnacle of
 philosophy up to that point, was the natural next
 step, Hegelian philosophy having accomplished what
 it
 could within the realm of thought and having
 pointed
 beyond it to action.
 
 But this is only half the story.  The other half of
 the path beyond 
 philosophy is the theoretical development of
 historical materialism, the 
 critique of political economy, scientific method, in
 connection with the 
 conception (along with the practice!) of
 revolutionary praxis.  This is a 
 revolutionary  projection/sublation also of Hegelian
 method, in which forms 
 of consciousness are reflections of social
 conditions which change with 
 them.  The Hegelian notion that philosophy is a
 product of its time should 
 not be swallowed whole as a schematic historicist
 shibboleth; it must be 
 filled out concretely surveying the entire swath of
 human knowledge.
 
Howver, unless we buy the idea
 that Hegelian philosophy was the completion of
 philosophy all Marx is really saying is that the
 Hegelian philosophy has gone as far as it could. So
 the claim of the end of philosophy is really quite
 limited.
 
 It's limited from our perspective because we can
 draw a circle around that 
 historical time and place and factor in other
 issues.  For example, in his 
 implicit philosophy of science Marx was ahead of his
 time; there was 
 nothing comparable anywhere else that I'm aware of. 
 But Marx (his amateur 
 excursions into the calculus excepted) left it to
 Engels to intervene in 
 scientific matters which were encroaching and
 warping the perspective of 
 historical materialism, and then of course following
 there are whole 
 revolutions in mathematics, logic, and the physical
 sciences, and the 
 genesis of what became known analytical philosophy,
 all of which lies 
 behind the debates we're still autopsying here.  But
 in all this there's an 
 issue of uneven development.
 
 We have to understand what Marx could and could not
 have meant by the 'end 
 of philosophy' in order to properly compare it to
 our own 
 situation.  Remember, I said that the 'end of
 philosophy' had to be brought 
 about concretely, in every dept. of knowledge, not
 merely 
 schematically.  We know what the issues were for the
 Young Hegelians, and 
 we should also know what they were not.  Hence, what
 concerns survive for 
 philosophy, whether we choose such a label or find a
 more palatable one 
 (meta-science?), are to be determined by the actual
 development of 
 knowledge and conceptual tools, and not via an
 apriori schematism, not even 
 a Left Hegelian one.  I'll say more about this when
 I get to CLR James.
 
 Also, I thought part if the difference
 between Ralph and me was he thought that Marx
 continued to do philosophy and I thought he's
 abandoned it for the critique of political economy,
 theory of history, and the like.  Maybe I
 misunderstood Ralph earlier position, but in any
 case
 we seem to be in agreement now.
 
 Note that articulation of this difference involves a
 lot of semantic 
 hair-splitting.
 
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

 andie nachgeborenen 
  
 
 Settled? 
 
 ^^^
 CB: From the standpoint of Marxism, settled, or
 obsolete. Marxism holds that
 there is progress in human knowledge.

I dond't disagree. It seem to me, though, that
philosophy is defined by the big questions (not
eternal, relative to an era) on which there is no
agreement. Progress in philosophy consists in mapping
out the alternatives so you know what the field looks
like.

 I think Rorty is right, issues don't get
 settled, people just get tired of talking about them
 and move on to others. What the debate does is map
 the
 field of possible positions, not settle anything
 except in the minds of advocates. 
 
 ^
 CB: The Engels-Lenin approach on this is that truth
 derives from correction
 of errors, trial and error.

As you know, I have written on this, specifically in
regard to Marx. The question here is whether there is
the sort of objective reality about these questions
where error would harm you in a way that would lead
you to correct your views. I think in some cases there
may be, I have argued elsewhere that this is the case
with different class views of justice, where ruling
class interest in domination will lead to unstable
societies but subordinate group interest in
emancipation will not. However is there a comprable
pressure taht would lead to the adoption of true views
about, say personal identity over time, even if there
is a truth of the matter? Or about whether language is
compositional, ir indeed whether materialism is true
as opposed to, say, Kantian transcendral idealism? 

 For example, materialism wins over idealism,
 from the standpoint of
 Marxist advocates.

Begs the question. Marxists believe this -- some of
them -- but there is in fact disagreement that doesn't
seem go goi away, and no overwhelmingly decisive
argument. 

 There arise new questions, but many old questions
 are answered.   
 

Yes, there arise new questyions. So philosophy will be
different,a s modern philosophy is different from
ancient of medieval or early modern philosophy. But
your claim was that all there would to philosophy was
history, that it would be over. Rorty seems to think
this too, but I don't see any reason to think that it
will be oveeras opposed to different.



 ^
 CB: Well, he does say there remains formal logic and
 dialectics. Dialectics
 deals with the parts and the whole, the
 interconnectedness of everything,
 and presumably therefore, presumably, the whole of
 knowledge and the
 interconnectedness of the separate sciences.

It's conceivable that philosophy wil get renamed
dialectics, a term that doesn't have a lot of
concrete content, but that is sort of a hollow victory
for the end of philosophy thesis, if it just goes on
under a new name.

 
 What counts as a system? Philosophers sre still
 producing large, comprehensove, and fairly
 integrated
 bodies of work that cover a lot of territory.
 
 ^^^
 
 CB: Are they producing something that they consider
 metaphysics, or did the
 anti-metaphysicians win the day on that ? Are they
 really producing ideas
 that are new, or old ideas in new forms ?

Well, they are teaching classes called metaphysics
in philosophy grad schools, and people are certainly
producing what they consider to be metaphysics. 
Whether it's anything new you'd have to decide for
yourself by reading a lot of it.

  You don't know that if Marxism were
 geberally accepted most people would not feel it
 necessary or important to ask philosophical
 questions.
 
 ^
 
 CB: Right. You don't either. That would be
 speculation to speak on that
 since that condition does not obtain in empirical
 reality. I'm just
 commenting on what obtains empirically. But I didn't
 say that nobody would
 raise philosophical questions in communism, just as
 they might study ancient
 religions in history in communism. 

But that's speculation. You assume that some science
or other will resolve all the question people have
discussed under the rubric of philosophy and settle
those questions, which is a pretty bold claim, and
very plausible. Will science tell us what to do?
Indeed, even to say that science will tell us what
there is raises a philosophical question -- whether
scientific realism is true and complete. (I think it
is true but not complete. There are, for example,
tables and chairs, but no science of tables and
chairs.)



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

Is quoting Rorty per se expressing oneself badly,
Ralph?

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 JKS expressed himself rather badly for a
 professional philosopher, esp. quoting Rorty, 

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 
 On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 18:01:01 -0500 (GMT-05:00) Ralph
 Dumain
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  JKS expressed himself rather badly for a
 professional philosopher,

Excuse _me_, Jim. Don't be a typical philosophical
snob. (Ralph is just being himself, so I don't hold it
against him.) I'm _still_ a practicing and publishing
philosopher, and being an attorney has taught me to
express myself better, not worse.

I do agree with Ralph that Marxism-Leninism is an
intellectual mess which has done incalculable harm to
thinking about what philosophy (among other things)
might be. Also that it's absurd to think of Marxism as
a seperate body of knowledge ratherthan a collection
of tools, insights, theories, and perspectives that to
some extent operate within other bodies of knowledge
)economics, sociciology, history, politics), to some
extent across whatever lines exist between them, and
which is not unitary. One cannot says Marxism says,
unless one is speaking merely persuasively about what
one think Marxists _should_ say. (Rorty talks like
this about pragmatism all the time, to my considerable
annoyance, since my pragmatism differs a lot from his.)

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted)

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Charles Brown :
 I have to admit that I speak about 1/5 tongue in
 cheek on the end of philo, but I do think that
 Engels is correct in the long run, and that much of
 those doing philo now are going over old issues that
 were settled a while ago. 

Settled? I think Rorty is right, issues don't get
settled, people just get tired of talking about them
and move on to others. What the debate does is map the
field of possible positions, not settle anything
except in the minds of advocates. 

And Rorty is also right that a lot of philosophy is
spinning wheels, but that doesn't meanb that all
philosophy is spinning wheels. People aren't going to
stop facing high level abstracts questions about what
to do, what we know, what there is -- questions beyond
the range of scientific answers in many cases.

  
 Modern materialism, wrote Engels in
 Anti‑Dühring (1878), no longer needs any
 philosophy standing above the other sciences. 

Rorty would agree with that too. So would Locke for
that matter.

As
 soon as each separate science is required to get
 clarity as to its position in the great totality of
 things and of our knowledge of things, a special
 science dealing with this totality is superfluous.

There I think Engels errs. Philosophy may not be a
science, but people will want to think about the
totality, how things relate, and how the sciences
relate to other things that aren't sciences, like arts
and morals.

 What still independently survives of all former
 philosophy is the science of thought and its
 laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else
 is merged in the positive science of nature and
 history. [4]

That's just naive old-time positivism.

 
 
 Classical German philosophy was the pinnacle of all
 philo for Marx and Engels ( German philo, French
 politics and British politcal economy) ,so the end
 of Classical German philo is the end of philo. 
 What still independently survives of _all_ former

Well, no doubt they thought so. 
 
 No doubt people are still asking metaphysical
 questions, especially people new to such questions,
 but is anybody building metaphysical systems like
 Duhring or whomever ? 

What counts as a system? Philosophers sre still
producing large, comprehensove, and fairly integrated
bodies of work that cover a lot of territory.

Afterall, Marxism has not come
 to predominate in thinking , and so the old
 bourgeois and class divided society thinking is
 reproduced constantly today; so pre-Marxist
 philosophical issues resurface.

Begs the question. You don't know that if Marxism were
geberally accepted most people would not feel it
necessary or important to ask philosophical questions.
I find the claim implausible.  Anyway, Marx  Engel's
Feuerbachian point, which is not that acceptance of
their doctrrine will end philosophy, but that the new
way the postrevolutioinary working class lives will
make those questions seem beside the point,
manifestation of alienation.

 Metaphysics and
 philosophy are the expression of the ancient
 antagonism between predominantly mental and
 predominantly physical labor.

OK, so that is a way of puting the Geuerbachian point,
but is it plausible? So if thinkers psend a lot of
time digging ditches or fixing cars or assembling
electronics they won't feel the need to meditate on
whetherf the mind is the same as the brain? Why's
that?

 With the end of this
 antagonism and the advent of communism, Old
 philo/metaphysics will fade but not thinking; that's
 the Marxist idea I'm pretty sure. 

Yes, but that's very speculative.


In other words,
 Engels idea sort of goes that philo will end with
 the success of revolutionary practice, which may be
 what you mean by replaced by revolutionary practice.

Yes, you put it better.

 
 
 Good for Kant. The main point is that the Lpers and
 others who accuse Marxism of system building 

The LPers don't do that, who are you thinking of?

don't
 seem to realize that Marxism has an explicit
 anti-metaphysical tenet ,and Marxist dialectics is
 not metaphysics as they claim. It is not system
 building.  The reason Marxism isn't metaphysics is
 that it declares explicitly as a first principle
 that nothing is eternal, that everything changes,
 that there is no God, no eternal Rock of Ages.

So metaphysics is by definition a commitment to the
eternal and the unchangeable? Sez who? I thought it
was just abstract meditation on What There Is.

 The
 only constant is change. Of course there have been
 ancients who thought that, too.

Heraklitosm for some, panta rhei, everything changes.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Critique of pragmatism

[andie nachgeborenen]

 
 The Science of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois By Dr. Anthony
 Monteiro
 
 MONTEIRO: Pragmatism as articulated by James
 and later John Dewey held that human knowledge was
 severely
 limited to immediate experience. 

Totally false. Ridiculously ignorant. Only an
illiterate or someone who had never bother to read
these writers would say such nonsense. 

 As such the
 possibilities
 for changing the world were restricted to the
 limitations of
 human knowledge. 

A view pragmatism shares with Marxism.


Human beings had to, more or less,
 make due
 with minor reforms in existing societies.
 Capitalism, racism
 and colonialism, in this rendering, were, therefore,
 immutable and even expressions of human nature. This
 was the
 reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a
 consequence, no revolutionary alternatives to
 poverty,
 exploitation and racism. 

A lie. James of course took DuBois as his PhD student,
the first African-American to get a Harvard PhD --
racist of him indeed.  Dewey supported economic
democracy and worker's control.  James at leasrt
decline the vices of a commercilaized a nd commodified
culture. I know of no place where he supports
capitalism. (Political philosophy and economics did
not interest James taht much.) Neither were
revolutionary, but that's a different point. Dewey
supported WWI as a war for democracy -- a mistake and
his pramtist disciple Randolphe Bourne broke with him
on this -- but James and Dewy never supported
colonialism. And pragmatism violently rejected (and
rejects) any notion on an immutable human nature. That
is a totally anti-pragmatsts idea. This critic is an
idiot.


 
 RALPH: For a popular exposition of the politics of
 pragmatism, see Louis Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL
 CLUB. 

A decent books

  While Monteiro is not wrong, exactly,

Except that nothimng he says is true and his errors
are not arguable but gross, stupid, and elementary,
simply beyond dispute.  Disgraceful.

 the
 actual genesis of pragmatism involved a class as
 well as philosophical compromise.  I think, though,
 the opposition to revolution came a bit later.

That is true, but not all pragmatists opposed
revolution, notably the young Sidney Hook.

 
 MONTEIRO: Pragmatism's roots must be traced
 to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of
 its
 subjective idealist substance shares a similar
 philosophical
 zone with logical positivism.

Monteiro has at least an interesting possible point
here that the pragmatists may have been indirectly
influenced by Mill in particular (through Chauncy
Wright). James, anyway. Not Dewey, however, whose
first and foremost debt is to Hegel. Or Pierce, whose
debts are to Kant, Hegel, and medeival philosophy. 

It is, however, moronic to say that pragmatism is
subjective idealist, even if James and Dewey were
doubtful that the notion of truth could do a lot of
interesting work. Pierce did not share this view.)
None of the prags -- NONE -- were ever phenomenalists
like Mill. None of them doubted the reality of the
external world or thought that that was an interesting
question to discuss. 

It si also ignorant, though common, to treat LP as
phenomenalistic, but classical LP is at best neutral
on the question. Most sharply it takes the stand that
the reality or nonreality of the external world is a
cognitively meaningless question because no evidence
could tend to verify it. (See Ayer's LTL).  Less
radically, in Carnap's Logical Construction of the
World, Carnap observes that the neutral elements from
which he starts might be taken to be mental or
physical, as convenience dictated; it was not a
metaphysical position.


 Both positivism and
 pragmatism
 were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to
 dialectical and historical materialism.

Not by the young Sidney Hook they weren't. Or by Otto
Neurath.  Or indeed Carnap, etc. -- all Marxsit
leaving socialists.

 
 RALPH: I don't think this is quite so, at first.  Of
 course, once Marxism is seen as serious competition,
 such things are bound to happen.  The logical
 positivists' history is a bit more complex; cf. e.g.
 Phillip Frank, but basically, the L.P. position
 would have been that diamat is metaphysics, hence
 useless, however politically sympathetic L.P.-ers
 amy have been to socialism.

The diam,at is quite useless, but the LPers would say
that wasn't because it was metpahysics.  Being
metaphysics just makes it not science, not cognitively
meaningful. If it had emotive meaning, however, it
might be uiseful in rallying and inspiring the troops.
 

Crankily

jks



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Critique of pragmatism

[andie nachgeborenen]

--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I agree that it is important to be accurate in one's
 criticisms.  'Pragmatism' became a generic whipping
 boy--one I love to whip, too--torn loose from the
 specifics of the specific ideas of specific
 philosophers. 


Right. It becomes boring to refute misconceptions of
illiterates rather than to engage with real problems
of one's position.

 
 I'm puzzled on one count, though:  I'm pretty sure
 that the LP-ers--Carnap surely, and even
 Neurath--would object to diamat on the basis that it
 is metaphysics, thus cognitively meaningless.

They would say it was cognitively meaningless, and I
didn't mean to say otherwise, I may have gotten
tangled up in my syntax.  But somethat that is CM is
just not science, it's not therefore objectionable.
Carnap says somewhere that poety is CM but has emotive
content. 

I.A. Richards developed a whole LP literary theory
based in the the merits of EM writing. I wrote a paper
on this in college. 

Now most if not all Diamat writing is anything but
poetic, but it could perform other useful functions as
long as one did not mistake it for something that was
CM and therefore potentially scientific and (after
Tarski) subject to truth valuation.

 
 Various Marxists of the time--e.g. British
 scientists such as Bernal, Haldane, Needham,
 etc.--defended diamat.  They didn't see it as
 useless.  However, given the dogmatic acculturation
 of Communists at that time to Soviet Marxism, they
 also were intolerant--I'm thinking of Bernal,
 specifically--of constructive criticisms aimed at
 clarification and refinement of the ambiguities and
 flaws of diamat as it was expressed in that time. 
 As tortuously boring as it is re-reading all that
 literature, there is still an historical purpose to
 be served in examining the intellectual dynamics of
 these arguments.

Agreed. It's no worse than working your way through
Renaissance neoPlatinism (Ficino, etc.)
 
 I would say that the diamat perspective proved most
 useful in criticizing bourgeois philosophy and
 social theory,

Hmm. I see that for Marxism as reflected in Marx,
Engels, Kautsky, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Korsch,
Lukacs -- even in the errant Soviet philosopher,
Ileyenkov, for example. But the Diamat?

 not so much in coming up with
 constructive ideas.  You can see that for example in
 Cornforth's works.  The criticisms of positivism and
 pragmatism are incisive, but the positive exposition
 of diamat is horrendous.

If you say so. I never got anything out of Cornforth.
Maybe I should make another pass at him.

Maybe the reason that the exposition of the diamat is
awful i=has to do with the subject matter . . . .

jks

 
 -Original Message-
 From: andie nachgeborenen
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sent: Dec 5, 2005 12:30 PM
 To: Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED], Forum for the
 discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
 and the thinkers he inspired
 marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Critique of pragmatism
 
 ..
 
 The diamat is quite useless, but the LPers would say
 that wasn't because it was metpahysics.  Being
 metaphysics just makes it not science, not
 cognitively
 meaningful. If it had emotive meaning, however, it
 might be uiseful in rallying and inspiring the
 troops.
 
 
 Ralph Dumain's The Autodidact Project
 http://www.autodidactproject.org
 The C.L.R. James Institute
 http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org
 
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Useful new edition og the Manifesto with commentary

[andie nachgeborenen]

Phil Gasper's an old friend of mind, very smart. This
is worth buying. jks

New from Haymarket Books
http://haymarketbooks.org/


THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
A Road Map to History's Most Important Political
Document
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
edited by Phil Gasper


Here, at last, is an authoritative introduction to
history's most
important political document, with the full text of
The Communist
Manifesto by Marx and Engels. This beautifully
organized and presented
edition of The Communist Manifesto is fully annotated,
with clear
historical references and explication, additional
related texts, and a
glossary that brings the text to life for students, as
well as the general
reader.


Since it was first written in 1848, the Manifesto has
been translated into
more languages than any other modern text. It has been
banned, censored,
burned, and declared dead. But year after year, the
text only grows more
influential, remaining required reading in courses on
philosophy,
politics, sociology, economics, and history. The New
Yorker recently
described Karl Marx as The Next Thinker for our era.
This book shows
readers why.


Phil Gasper's new edition of The Communist Manifesto
comes at a critical
moment in world history, when a global capitalism
which Marx described
with amazing accuracy a hundred and fifty years ago
shows all the signs of
disarray that he predicted. What Gasper does is to
remind us how relevant
the Manifesto is to our world today. His Introduction
and Afterword are
useful guides to the Manifesto and to its importance
in our time. His
notes give us fascinating tidbits of information which
a thoughtful reader
of the Manifesto will find extremely valuable. Gasper
brings alive one of
the great classics of modern political thought, an
indispensable addition
to anyone's library.
-Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the
United States


The more those in power reject and ignore Marx and
his ideas, the more
the world comes to resemble the barbaric social system
Marx predicted
capitalism was in the process of becoming. Therefore,
Marx's ideas are
becoming more and more relevant to understanding what
we see before us.
This new edition of The Communist Manifesto, with its
excellent
informative notes and commentaries, enables the reader
to appreciate this
document both historically and theoretically, both in
relation to its own time
and in relation to the realities around us.
-Allen Wood, Stanford University


PHIL GASPER, editor of The Communist Manifesto, is a
professor of
Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University in
California. He writes
extensively on politics and the philosophy of science,
and is a frequent
contributor to CounterPunch.


ISBN 1-931859-25-6 paper
$12
180 pages
October 25, 2005


Contact:  Julie Fain
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
Phone: 773-583-7884
http://www.haymarketbooks.org


Bulk discounts available.


Fax desk/exam copy requests to 773-583-6144


Bookstores call Consortium, 800-283-3572.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Galileo Legend

[andie nachgeborenen]

This is, or was, an area of semi-expertise of mine
(ignorant as I am of the relevant languages) -- I
actually studied History and Phil of Science and
worked on the Galileo case. (a) Bellarmine was a
brilliant inquisitor and an able scientifiuc (as we'd
say) analyst; he had plausible criticism of Galileo;
(b) Galileo's stuff was a lot less obviosu, natural,
and right-seeming then than now -- that is why it was
revolutionary. (c) Feyerabend, who uses this case in
Against Method as an exemplar of his own theory, is
right to underline how full of holes and sheer
rhetoric G's arguments were.  Of course he was right.
Nothing wrong with the Myth of Galileo either -- I
like Brecht's version -- but it's not history of
science. 

--- Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 
 On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:36:58 +0100 Paddy Hackett
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 writes:
  
  
  The Galileo LegendTHOMAS LESSL
  
  
  The extent to which people are mislead
 by the Galileo 
  legend 
  first
  began to dawn on me several years ago
 when I was 
  teaching a 
  doctoral
  seminar in the history of rhetoric -
 my own academic 
  field.
  
  
  
 
 
 Paddy,
 
 What point are you attempting to make by posting
 this
 apologetic for the Catholic Church.  Certainly,
 most of us here don't look to Steve Hawking
 for in depth studies of the history of science.
 And I don't think that Hawking pretends to
 be an authority on that subject.  Most of us
 here I think are smart enough to understand
 that there are complexities in the Galileo
 case that are not ordinarily going to find
 their way into elementary science textbooks,
 which are written with the purpose of teaching
 science rather than the history of science, as
 such.  I am a bit surprised that Lessl makes
 no mention of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine,
 who actually had some sophisticated criticisms
 to make of Galileo from the standpoint of the
 philosophy of science.  (See the Stanford
 Encyclopedia article on Galieo
 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galileo/
 
 http://www.galilean-library.org/hps.html
 
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] In Defense of Philosophy

[andie nachgeborenen]

Charles, I think you do not have to be a Stalinist,
Trotkyist, or Maoist to differ with the position you
attribute to Ralph. Or eveb, necessaryy, a Marxist.  I
say attribute to because I don't think Ralph
believes that philosophy should (is is be insulated
from politics in the way that Jim says (I think also
mistakenly) that Kuhn thought science should be
insultated from from philosophy. 

I think you, Charles, are right, about thw interest of
the bourgeoise in natural science being related to 
their practical interest in profits and secondarily,
though relatedly, to their practical interest in
imperial power. This is a sociological/political
thesis about the theory of knowledge, abstractly that
reliale knowledge about a subject matter depends on an
in==interest in thed truth about that subject matter,
as the bourgeoisie had an interest in the truth about
steam engines and indirecly, in wnhancing state power
through military means.

 Note, however, that the first great breakthoughs in
modern science were in astronomy and physics --
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton --
areas with no immediate practical utility. (Despite
Galileo's employment as the resident natural
philosopher at Padua, and the potential use of the
telescope, which he did not invent, for military
purposes -- one doesn't need the Copernican hypothesis
to use the telescope to gathe intelligence or even for
navigation! It's more like, knowledge arises where it
will wnd where enough smart peopler have attained a
critical mass in thinking about something, the
bourgeoisie and the state will, however, fund work tht
practicallly interests them, and fund other stuff
mainly on the hope that it will lead to results that
practically does, and this becomes nore important as
science comes to depends on outside funding rathe than
being, as it was for Copernicus, et al, something one
could do in one's house or college if one had a very
small sourse of independent funds, such as a job with
the church (Copernicus, a cleric), a nobleman (Kepler
-- the nobleleman, Tycho Brahe, also had a hobby of
collecting execellent naked eye astronomical
observations, and a tin nose, acquired in a due)), a
soldier's pension Descartes, or a university professor
(Newton). 

I don't think this is really a good objection to the
idea that scientific knowledge depends on class and
state interest, it just shows that what knowledge is
developed, however it arises, depends on those
interests because if what gets funded,

The thesis also becomes very important because the
bourgeousie and the state will deny and suppress
knowledge that is inconvenient to its practical
interest in profit and power -- a point noted by
Hobbes about geometry -- such as knowledge about 
global warming.

I think Marx understood this, and long ago I wrote a
paper arguing that thsi was his view, but Hobbes
understood the point too, as have lots of other
non-Marxist thinkers.

At the risk of speaking for someone who is more than
capable of speaking for himself, I will say that I
think that Ralph wants philosophy to be political, and
thinks that philosophy is political in a similar if
looser way. That is part iof his interest in the
de-politicization of logical positivism in America,
despite the personal views of its founders. Ralph,
from what I gather), also wants philosophy to be
rigfht or deep or interesting regardless of the
political views of its exponents (which seems
completely correct to me), and is disappointed in the
results of 20th century philosophy on perhaps both
grounds. That is, he thinks most of it is trivial and
irrelevant, and he is unpappy that is not politically
useful to left wing aims. Am I right about your ideas,
Ralph? 

For myself, I think that it is more important that
philosophy be interesting and productive -- correct
would be nice too, but what's right is a difficult
question in an araa where, unlike natural science,
objective tests are hard to come by if possible at
all.  Being useful to (working) class interests would
be good, but that depends, as with science, on having
a critical mass of people with the appropriate
interests and inclinations and time to do it. The
bourgeoisie are hardly likely to fund radical
philosophy if they can help it amnd unless they are
forced to by circumstances, as I have learned in the
most personal way. 

I personally think better of 20th century philosophy
than Ralph does, maybe this is a product of training
in it, although things have been fairly dismal for say
the last two decades. I mean, dull, unimportant,
technical wheel-spinning, normal science of the
worst sort.  I don't keep up with much new philosophy
nowadays, ans my friends who are still in the biz say
I haven't missed much. Philosophy is in a similar
situation to the art discussed by Ralph in referring
to the piece on the avant garde. That was not true in
the 20th centuiry, when things were hopping on lots of
fronts. Why this is might be important to understand.

Btw, I 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] George Resich's *How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science*

[andie nachgeborenen]

As Reisch describes it, the Unity of Science
 movement was
 committed to demonstrating the fundamental unity of
 the sciences
 including the natural sciences, the behavioral
 sciences and the social
 sciences, and the Unity of Science movement was
 interested in using
 social science to explore how economic, political
 and cultural factors
 have shaped the development of science. As Reisch
 points out, the Unity
 of Science movement drew upon Marxist ideas while
 eschewing the dogmatism
 of dialectical materialism, which it dismissed as
 metaphysics. Its
 leading figures like Neurath and Frank were
 democratic socialists who
 were committed to using the methods of science to
 help create a fairer,
 more just society. But in the end, it seems that
 instead of transforming
 American society, the Unity of Science movement
 withered and died, and
 logical empiricism, itself, became shriveled in its
 concerns, abandoning
 its former political commitments in the name of
 scientific neutrality.


Just for what it's worth, my dissertation, in a nod to
this old tradition, was entitled Materialism and The
Unity Of Science. Btw, I don't think the old LPs ever
changed their stripes -- it's just that their first
generation students (1930s-50s) were not Marxists and
social democrats raised in Red Vienna, but in places
like Akron, Ohio (Quine).  ANd not of the LPs were
reds. Schlick was not. It was the third or fourth
generations of their students, post-positivists, like
Hilary Putnam (briefly in PL), Peter Railton (a diss
adviser of mine), Michael Devitt, Richard Miller,
Richard Boyd, Andrew Levine, Elliot Sober, etc. who
turned back to Marxism at least fora  whiler. Of this
lot, Railton still on the left, Boyd's still a
Amrxists last I heard, Andy Levine is still holding up
the torch. But there are few and they produced a
shrinking and less distinguished generation of
successors. Like me -- I studied with both Hempel;
(one of the original LPs) and Railton.




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

[andie nachgeborenen]

 
 In the case of Mach, he was insistent that
 scientific concepts must be definable in
 observational terms.  By doing so, he maintained
 that physics could be purged of all extraneous
 metaphysical and theological notions.
 Thus, in his *The Science of Mechanics*,
 he delivered his famous critique of the
 concept of force, and he also challenged
 the absolutes (of space and time) that
 were foundational for Newtonian physics.
 

But he thought that talk of AS made sense even if it
was not shown by Newton's bucket experiment, he just
made the point that there was another reading of the
bucket experiment that had not occurred to Newton. So
he was bo=t narrow-minded about theoretical entities,
just wanted themto have observational cash value. jhks

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

[andie nachgeborenen]

CB: One thinks of Marx's comments about the need for
abstraction to 
make up
for inability to directly observe in certain aspects
of science. 

Empiricists, hard-boiled phenomenalists, Berkleyean
idealists, etc., don't object to the use of sbatrction
in science. They wouldn't do science any differently
(more the most part). (Mach, fore example, was a very
distinguished scientist.) It's just the interpretation
they put on those abstractions. After decades oif
arguing this in philoshophy I amn wondering why the
debate matters.

 
Mach was 
stuck 
in the rut of phenomenalism.  Dodging the materialist
position, Mach 
attempted to redefine matter as permanent
possibilities of sensation.

He says he doiesn't do this. He is quite explicit that
his elements are not sensastions and could bt
physical. Carnap and later Nelson Goodman took the
same line. Part of what mach was about as a proto
logical positivist (and this is crystalline in Carnap,
who was an LP), is that taking old metaphysical
positions is pointless because they can't be sdoved by
anything with an empirical consequence. So why not
take Mach at his word that he is not a phenomenalist?

Lenin 
defines
materlialism as belief in objective reality outside
of our thoughts, 
not
belief in absolute space and time.

I usedto to that. Now Ia gree with Rorty that the
materialist position so defined is meaningless,
unintelligible, and pointless. Some things are real
and independent of our minds -- spacetime, atoms. Some
things are real and not independent of our minds --
classes. Some things are realand independent of our
minds and not material -- numberrs. God, if she
exists.  Some things are real but not independent of
our minds -- our minds, for one. The issue is really
to be decided entirely on a case by case basis. What
does it add to the list of all the things we think are
real because we have scientific or other reasons to
think they are real, whether or not they are
indeoendent of our minds or are material, to say,a nd
the World Is Real And Independent Of Out Minds? What
is at stake in this claim or its denial?

In fact, the 
point
to be made here is that Einstein's arriving at a
materialist ( your
realist) position based on, as you say, the
dictation of science, 

Not the samething. Can be realistic about nonmaterial
things.

is
pretty powerful independent corroboration of the
Engels-Lenin 
philosophy of
science positions. Without starting out thinking as
Engels and Lenin, 
the
great thinker and scientist ,Einstein ,arrives at the
same conclusions 
as
Engels and Lenin,

He must be right then.

 
CB: What scientific theory does Lenin dismiss on
philosophical grounds 
in
MEC ?  None. He criticizes empirio-criticism, a
philosophical theory. 

Have to look this but, been years, but i am sure there
is more than one.


He
doesn't criticize any physical theories, Mach's or
others, in MEC. He 
only
says the new physical theories of that period are not
a basis for 
ditching
materialism ( your realism), as Mach does.

I believe you are correct here.


Justin: As for
  Einstein's realims it was case by case. Einstein
  took no position on materialism, the idea that
  everything in the world is in some sense material.

Charles: Lenin's definition of materialism in MEC is
belief in the
existence of objective reality. Einstein believes in
the objective 
reality
of atoms, which he specifically disputed with Mach,
who coincidently 
was the
main target of Lenin's book on the general issue that
the atoms issue 
is a
specific example of.

Einstein made some statements that evince belief in
God. That would be
non-materialism.

Depends on what you mean by GHod. I think he somewhere
said he acceptedthe God of Spinoza, Deus sive
natura, God or nature. Now whether that is
materialist depends on what you think nature includes.


Lenin terms Mach a Kantian , i.e. dualist, shamefaced
materialist, 
agnostic.

Mack acknowledges the influence of Kant. I don't think
there is anything shamefaced ot agnostic about
Kant's views on (to be precise) the realisity of the
exteernal world. Kant is an empirical realist -- he
thinks that there are planets and chairs, etc. They
are not collections of Berkleyian ideas. He has an
express refitation of Berkeley.  AT the same time is
is a transcendental idealist. What this means is
unclera, but one thing it does NOt mean is that he is
agnostic about whether there are things outside our
minds.  Kant's basic thoufght is that there are things
in themselves, i.e., outside our minds. Space and time
are not amongthese, thesea re forms of intuition
contributed by our minds. Kant does not think we can
know anything about things in themselves because to
know something about something is to have organized
perceptions or theoretical ideas of it, what he calls
intutions that are spatially and temporally structured
and then conceptually organized. We also contribute,
he thinks, concepts of such causality is the most
important. So things as they are in 

Re: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does G�del Matter?

[andie nachgeborenen]

  
   VFR Was thinking of Hegel, not Gödel. From his
 biography, Gödel sounds
  like he belongs to the same cloud-9, right-wing,
 mathematician category as
  Nash.

I think just apolitical

 
  ^
 
  CB: Heisenberg was on good terms with the Nazis.

Good enough, though there's a big debate about how
good.

 
  From what I can tell, Goedel was not progressive
 , but sort of
 apolitical. I
  think the article I posted here on Goedel and
 Einstein as buddies at
  Princeton said that some Nazis beatup Goedel at
 one point. Also, for what
  its worth, would Einstein hangout with a
 rightwinger ?

Sure. Teller. Lots of guys. They talked physics.

jks



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does G�del Matter?

[andie nachgeborenen]

The life of the law has not been logic, it has been
experience -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common
Law

No shit. 

--- Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ralph Dumain 
 I'm not aware that he was a social critic, but
 according to Rebecca
 Goldstein, he was a first class metaphysical control
 freak, leaving nothing
 to ambiguity or contingency.  I don't know whether
 Godel would say anything
 about law, but surely it hardly holds up to the
 standards of formal
 mathematics, and no one would be follish enough to
 think it does.
 
 ^
 CB: I think Victor was referring to the below from
 the article:
 
 
 So naïve and otherworldly was the great logician
 that Einstein felt obliged
 to help look after the practical aspects of his
 life. One much retailed
 story concerns Gödel’s decision after the war to
 become an American citizen.
 The character witnesses at his hearing were to be
 Einstein and Oskar
 Morgenstern, one of the founders of game theory.
 Gödel took the matter of
 citizenship with great solemnity, preparing for the
 exam by making a close
 study of the United States Constitution. On the eve
 of the hearing, he
 called Morgenstern in an agitated state, saying he
 had found an
 “inconsistency” in the Constitution, one that could
 allow a dictatorship to
 arise. Morgenstern was amused, but he realized that
 Gödel was serious and
 urged him not to mention it to the judge, fearing
 that it would jeopardize
 Gödel’s citizenship bid. On the short drive to
 Trenton the next day, with
 Morgenstern serving as chauffeur, Einstein tried to
 distract Gödel with
 jokes. When they arrived at the courthouse, the
 judge was impressed by
 Gödel’s eminent witnesses, and he invited the trio
 into his chambers. After
 some small talk, he said to Gödel, “Up to now you
 have held German
 citizenship.”
 
 No, Gödel corrected, Austrian.
 
 “In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship,”
 the judge continued.
 “Fortunately that’s not possible in America.”
 
 “On the contrary, I can prove it is possible!” Gödel
 exclaimed, and he began
 describing the constitutional loophole he had
 descried. But the judge told
 the examinee that “he needn’t go into that,” and
 Einstein and Morgenstern
 succeeded in quieting him down. A few months later,
 Gödel took his oath of
 citizenship.
 

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[andie nachgeborenen]

I have always wondered about the fruitfulness of
abstract consideration of dialectics, particularly
where they are (it is?) discussed as a method.  Here
Jim F seems to suggest the SJG thought that dialectics
was a method or at least a heuristic for producing
hypotheses. I have never seen any evidence that there
was ever any method for producing hypotheses,
dialectical or other. 

To use SJG's contrast of Soviet (dialectical)-Western
(not dialectical -- mechanical? gradualist?
evolutionary?) scientific training, one would expect
to be able to test whether this supposed difference in
training made any difference in the kind of hypotheses
scientists from Soviet and non-Soviet backgrounds put
forward. 

I have not done any such study, but I am very
skeptical that it would turn up any systematic
differences in the way science was done in the USSR vs
the US, or in the kinds of hypotheses created by
Soviet and American scientists. I expect that this is
so in part because scientists (in my experience) don't
pay a lot of mind of methodological broughaha that is
not immediately relevant to work they are doing. The
transformation of quantity into quality (for
example),a t that level of abstraction, is not
something with obvious application to just about
anything in practical scientific wirk, so is likely to
be ignored by practicing scientists.

This is what we would expect if we buy into the
broadly Kuhnian picture of science as involving
periods of normal science punctauted by episodic
revolutionary transformations that give scientists a
new paradigm to work out by normal scientific
methods. This picture of scientific activity -- which,
incidentally, sounds dialectical even though it was
developed by a nice liberal in Cold-War America (first
ed. of Kuhn's Structure of Sciebtofic Revolutions
published in 1960) -- suggests that most science is
going to be normal, incremental, evolutionary working
out of accepted big hypotheses until the general
framework cracks -- and this does not depend on the
particular training of scientists in doalectics (or
not). 

In fact all the standard examples of scientific
revolutions come from science done by
non-dialectically trained thinkers -- Lavoisier's
discovery of oxygen, Einstein's theory of relativity,
Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohr's development of quantum
theory, etc. 

Anytway, I tink taht the meaning of diaklectics in,
for example, Hegel or (to a lesser extent) Marx is a
valid topic for inquiry, there has been less than no
payoff in the idea that there is something called the
dialectical method which can be grasp in advance of
and apart from one's scientific work in concreto and
used to adavance thatw ork.

jks

--- Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
 
 Here is what Stephen Jay Gould had to say about
 punctuationism
 and dialectics in his book, *The Panda's Thumb.
 
 There, in the essay Episodic Evolutionary Change,
 he wrote:
 --
 If gradualism is more a product of Western thought
 than a fact of nature,
 then we should consider alternate philosophies of
 change to enlarge our
 realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet
 Union, for example, for
 example, scientists are trained with a very
 different philosophy of
 change - the so-called dialectical laws,
 reformulated by Engels from
 Hegel's philosophy. The dialectical laws are
 explicitly punctuational.
 They speak, for example, of the transformation of
 quantity into
 quality. This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it
 suggests that change
 occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation
 of stresses that a
 system resists until it reaches the breaking point.
 Heat water and it
 eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more
 and bring on the
 revolution. Eldredge and I were fascinated to learn
 that many Russian
 paleontologists support a model very similar to our
 punctuated
 equilibria.
 
 I emphatically do not assert the general truth of
 this philosophy of
 punctuational change. Any attempt to support the
 exclusive validity of
 such a grandiose notion would border on the
 nonsensical. Gradualism
 sometimes works well. (I often fly over the folded
 Appalachians and
 marvel at the striking parallel ridges left standing
 by gradual erosion
 of the softer rocks surrounding them). I make a
 simple plea for pluralism
 in guiding philosophies, and for the recognition of
 such philosophies,
 however hidden and unarticulated, constrain all our
 thought. The
 dialectical laws express an ideology quite openly;
 our Western preference
 for gradualism does the same more subtly.
 
 Nonetheless, I will confess to a personal belief
 that a punctuational
 view may prove to map tempos of biological and
 geologic change more
 accurately and more often than any of its
 competitors - if only because
 complex systems in steady state are both common and
 highly resistant to
 change.
 -
 
 I think a careful reading of Gould's words will
 indicate that he viewed