Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)
http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/lektorsky/essay_77.htm Having understood reflection as active reflection, having understood cognitive operations as practical actions that have undergone special change (this idea is being increasingly recognised both in the methodology of science and the modern psychology of thought - suffice it to mention the works of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget or the studies by such Soviet psychologists as L. Vygotsky and A. Leontyev and others) Marxist philosophy makes it possible, on the one hand, to show the active role of the subject in the ideal reproduction of the object, the part played in this process by ideal constructions, the devising of patterns, models, abstract objects, etc., and, on the other hand, to understand theory itself as a pattern of potential means of operating With the object. This is not to say that any theoretical operation may be interpreted as a possible form of practical activity because the majority of theoretical operations have no immediate practical significance (their objects-ideal, abstract, etc.-can be presented only in symbolic form). Theory provides possible means of practical activity to the extent to which the ideal operations used in creating it can be linked with direct practical operations, such as operations of experimentation and measurement, which are particularly important for the theories of natural science and endow theoretical concepts with concrete meaning. These practical operations are a special form of practice, a special way of testing and understanding theoretical scientific hypotheses. For modern works on the methodology of the natural sciences it is axiomatic that the evaluation of theoretical concepts presupposes the establishing of certain empirical dependencies by means of situations reproduced by practical experiment and also by the empirically established results of these situations (this was expressed, although in a distorted, subjectivistic form, by operationalism). It is a notable fact that this dialectic of subject and object, though characteristic of modern natural science, is not always given an adequate philosophical interpretation by scientists themselves and sometimes leads to subjectivist interpretations. http://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/works/riddle/riddle2c.htm Consequently the mind is certainly not what happens inside me and to me under the influence of external stimuli, but without them as such. Without them, that is, without correlation at every instant of my life-activity with the objectively existing world, my “inner world” cannot exist. That which happens inside me but has no objective representation outside me is not the mind. It is physiology, biochemistry, anything you like, but not my inner mental world! My “mental world” is above all the world of culture in which I live and act; it is the real existence of nature assimilated by man, every detail of which signifies for me that which it objectively represents. In other words, my mental world is, in fact, the being, the existence of which I am aware. And now let us return to the difficulty that Bertrand Russell experienced in finding a criterion for distinguishing dream from reality. -- Those who even today believe that the riddle of the Self can be solved by treating man as a machine that receives and processes information want simply to feed endless streams of information about the world into the ready-made body of the brain. In these pages I have tried to show that both in the theory and practice of the formation of the human personality things are far more complex. No, it is not a matter of feeding some electronic device complicated enough to resemble the human brain (or the brain itself) with a sufficient quantity of information which is then processed according to the most complex programmes. What has to be done is to guide the body that already possesses such a “device” into real intercourse and activity. This is the road to the making of the human Self, the Ego, all its attributes and particularly its intellect. For intellect is determined by the content of historically developing human culture and not the rapidity of the algorithmised computing of the possible answers to a pre-formulated problem. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)
And then among the non-Marxists, who proved more influential on such issues: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brentano/#Psychology Brentano has often been described as an extraordinarily charismatic teacher. Throughout his life he influenced a great number of students, many of who became important philosophers and psychologists in their own rights, such as Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, Carl Stumpf, Kasimir Twardowski, as well as Sigmund Freud. Many of his students became professors all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Marty and Ehrenfels in Prague, Meinong in Graz, and Twardowski in Lvov, and so spread Brentanianism over the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another of Brentano's students, Tomas Masaryk, was to become founder and first President (from 1918 to 1935) of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, where he created ideal conditions for the study of Brentano's philosophy. These factors explain the central role of Brentano in the philosophical development in central Europe, especially in what was later called the Austrian Tradition in philosophy. . When Brentano's students took up his notion of intentionality to develop more systematic accounts, they often criticized it for its unclarity regarding the ontological status of the intentional object: if the intentional object is part of the act, it was argued, we are faced with a duplication of the object. Next to the real, physical object, which is perceived, remembered, thought of, etc., we have a mental, intentional object, towards which the act is actually directed. Thus, when I think about the city of Paris, I am actually thinking of a mental object that is part of my act of thinking, and not about the actual city. This view leads to obvious difficulties, the most disastrous of which is that two persons can never be directed towards one and the same object. If we try to resolve the problem by taking the intentional object to be identical with the real object, on the other hand, we face the difficulty of explaining how we can have mental phenomena that are directed towards non-existing objects such as Hamlet, the golden mountain, or a round square. Like my thinking about the city of Paris, all these acts are intentionally directed towards an object, with the difference, however, that their objects do not really exist. Brentano's initial formulation of the intentionality-thesis does not address these problems concerning the ontological status of the intentional object. The first attempt of Brentano's students to overcome these difficulties was made by Twardowski, who distinguished between content and object of the act, the former of which is immanent to the act, the latter not. This distinction strongly influenced other members of the Brentano School, mainly the two students for who the notion of intentionality had the most central place, Meinong and Husserl. Meinong's theory of objects can best be understood as a reaction to the ontological difficulties in Brentano's account. Rather than accepting the notion of an immanent content, Meinong argues that the intentional relation is always a relation between the mental act and an object. In some cases the intentional object does not exist, but even in these cases there is an object external to the mental act towards which we are directed. According to Meinong, even non-existent objects are in some sense real. Since we can be intentionally directed towards them, they must subsist (bestehen). Not all subsisting objects exist; some of them cannot even exist for they are logically impossible, such as round squares. The notion of intentionality played a central role also in Husserlian phenomenology. Applying his method of the phenomenological reduction, however, Husserl addresses the problem of directedness by introducing the notion of ‘noema,’ which plays a role similar to Frege's notion of ‘sense.’ Brentano was not very fond of his students' attempts to resolve these difficulties, mainly because he rejected their underlying ontological assumptions. He was quick to point out that he never intended the intentional object to be immanent to the act. Brentano thought that this interpretation of his position was obviously absurd, for it would be “paradoxical to the extreme to say that a man promises to marry an ens rationis and fulfills his promise by marrying a real person” (Psychology, 385). In later texts, he therefore suggested to see intentionality as an exceptional form of relation. A mental act does not stand in an ordinary relation to an object, but in a quasi-relation (Relativliches). For a relation to exist, both relata have to exist. A person a is taller than another person b, for example, only if both a and b exist (and a is, in fact, taller than b). This does not hold for the intentional quasi-relation, Brentano suggests. A mental phenomenon can stand in a quasi-relation to an object independent of whether it exists or not. Mental acts, thus, can stand
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)
One interesting thing to note is that people later took up the idea of natural dialectics, so , as I always say, never count Engels out. Interestingly, perhaps by ingenious intuition and sheer luck, Hegel hit upon an image as metaphor for 'negation of negation' that later resounded in biology--the helix. I traced this concept of negation of negation, or positive negation or assertive negation up until I hit the golden 'horse manure' pile. Hey, horse shit, I think you can eat it even. It makes grass digestible even if you only have one stomach. If you accept a logic with content that is empirically and pragmatically grounded, you find the whole dialectic imagistically, metaphorically, logically enlightening. The way a Christian might hope to see the face of God. If you reject such a logic, the dialectic will always be nonsense. Or did I over-generalize? At any rate, 1. Engels, including the 'nonsense'. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm But what role does the negation of the negation play in Marx? On page 791 and the following pages he sets out the final conclusions which he draws from the preceding fifty pages of economic and historical investigation into the so-called primitive accumulation of capital. [62] Before the capitalist era, petty industry existed, at least in England, on the basis o/ the private property of the labourer in his means of production. The so-called primitive accumulation of capital consisted there in the expropriation of these immediate producers, that is, in the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. This became possible because the petty industry referred to above is compatible only with narrow and primitive bounds of production and society and at a certain stage brings forth the material agencies for its own annihilation. This annihilation, the transformation of the individual and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, forms the prehistory of capital. As soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their conditions of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production, and therefore the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the concentration of capitals. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical collective cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the jointly owned means of production of combined, socialised labour. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. Capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Concentration of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. And now I ask the reader: where are the dialectical frills and mazes and conceptual arabesques; where the mixed and misconceived ideas according to which everything is all one and the same thing in the end; where the dialectical miracles for his faithful followers; where the mysterious dialectical rubbish and the maze in accordance with the Hegelian Logos doctrine, without which Marx, according to Herr Dühring, is unable to put his exposition into shape? Marx merely shows from history, and here states in a summarised form, that just as formerly petty industry by its very development necessarily created the conditions of its own annihilation, i.e., of the expropriation of the small proprietors, so now the capitalist mode of production has likewise itself created the material conditions from which it must perish. The process is a historical one, and if it is at the same time a dialectical process, this is not Marx's fault, however annoying it may be to Herr Dühring. It is only at this point, after Marx has
[Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
Objective Subjective (object and subject):: object refers to everything outside the human mind or the subject as human. Reality, say a tree, an automobile or the sun has an objective existence outside the human mind or the life of the human mind, not requiring or owning its existence to the mind. Marxism contends that social system - capitalism, and things existing outside the mind have an objective existence and contains objective laws of operations. Things exist in reality as objects unto themselves, interwoven into the fabric of reality, but independent of the ‘observer’ or subject and their subjective understanding at a given moment. In recognition of the inherent subjective limitations of the individual human mind, we say keep an open mind. None of this is meant to imply we do not react upon things in our environment as they in turn react upon us. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
On 3/23/10, waistli...@aol.com waistli...@aol.com wrote: Objective Subjective (object and subject):: object refers to everything outside the human mind or the subject as human. Reality, say a tree, an automobile or the sun has an objective existence outside the human mind or the life of the human mind, not requiring or owning its existence to the mind. Marxism contends that social system - capitalism, and things existing outside the mind have an objective existence and contains objective laws of operations. Things exist in reality as objects unto themselves, interwoven into the fabric of reality, but independent of the ‘observer’ or subject and their subjective understanding at a given moment. In recognition of the inherent subjective limitations of the individual human mind, we say keep an open mind. None of this is meant to imply we do not react upon things in our environment as they in turn react upon us. ^^^ CB: Lenin defines materialism as the belief in the existence of objective reality, objective reality being defined as you do above. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
In a message dated 3/23/2010 1:01:54 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB: Lenin defines materialism as the belief in the existence of objective reality, objective reality being defined as you do above. Reply This mans go. This glossary is being produced under the name Retried Workers Educational Forum, but this could change based solely on what is marketable. Everyone's contribution is going to be noted without question. Have not touched base with you since coming back in October because I have been on jam. Looks like Mack I and Mack Ii engine plant will be closed. :Less than 200 workers in both plants. Expansion at Jefferson planned. Sterling Assembly got a new lease on life. Ford is of course making money. The Ford workers rejected their contract and things are to come. UAW Constitutional Convention in June. New President to be elected. CBTU Convention coming up. Not for me but my brother will attend. Maybe some new life can be breathed into TULC; they just remodeled the joint. Lots of thangs happening including closing 44 schools in Detroit! 27,000 energy cut off. New deaths every week. A new section of workers entering the struggle. We have to tell the truth and something more than black and white unite and fight. We are class brothers ands sisters. I love this shit. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
On 3/23/10, waistli...@aol.com waistli...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 3/23/2010 1:01:54 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB: Lenin defines materialism as the belief in the existence of objective reality, objective reality being defined as you do above. Reply This mans go. This glossary is being produced under the name Retried Workers Educational Forum, but this could change based solely on what is marketable. Everyone's contribution is going to be noted without question. Have not touched base with you since coming back in October because I have been on jam. Looks like Mack I and Mack Ii engine plant will be closed. :Less than 200 workers in both plants. Expansion at Jefferson planned. Sterling Assembly got a new lease on life. Ford is of course making money. The Ford workers rejected their contract and things are to come. UAW Constitutional Convention in June. New President to be elected. ^^^ CB: My buddy, Bob King. ^ CBTU Convention coming up. Not for me but my brother will attend. Maybe some new life can be breathed into TULC; they just remodeled the joint. ^^^ CB: Yeah. I went to a Christmas Party Lots of thangs happening including closing 44 schools in Detroit! CB: Emergency financial manager, financial dictator. Bing wants to shrink the City services, abandon sections. No emergency financial manager for Detroit ^^^ 27,000 energy cut off. New deaths every week. A new section of workers entering the struggle. We have to tell the truth and something more than black and white unite and fight. ^^^ CB: See Danny Rubin on strategy and tactics (smile) Read the Michigan Citizen ^ We are class brothers ands sisters. I love this shit. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
CB: Lenin defines materialism as the belief in the existence of objective reality, objective reality being defined as you do above. Reply This mans go. ^ CB: I don't understand these words (smile) ^^^ This glossary is being produced under the name Retried Workers Educational Forum, but this could change based solely on what is marketable. Everyone's contribution is going to be noted without question. Have not touched base with you since coming back in October because I have been on jam. Looks like Mack I and Mack Ii engine plant will be closed. :Less than 200 workers in both plants. Expansion at Jefferson planned. Sterling Assembly got a new lease on life. Ford is of course making money. The Ford workers rejected their contract and things are to come. UAW Constitutional Convention in June. New President to be elected. CBTU Convention coming up. Not for me but my brother will attend. Maybe some new life can be breathed into TULC; they just remodeled the joint. Lots of thangs happening including closing 44 schools in Detroit! ^^^ No to a financial dictator on the City by Shields Green The unelected emergency financial manager at the Detroit Public Schools system has demonstrated dictatorial characteristics. We must preempt the threat of a financial dictator over the City of Detroit. A financial manager usurps the powers of democratically elected officials, in order to give priority to financial and Wall street interests over the interests of city workers and citizens' city services. But are city officials to blame for Detroit's financial and economic crisis, such that their powers should be handed to a financial dictator who represents private power ? We live in a private enterprise system. This means that private business leaders, not public officials, make the decisions that determine the ups and downs of our economy. Detroit's financial crisis is rooted in the problems of the city's auto-dependent economy. The news media ignores this fact. Most recently, it has successfully promoted a big lie in much of the public's minds: that City Council members' alleged dishonesty and incompetence are the cause of the city's deficit. This finally had a significant effect in this November's election. The canard that the City Council is or was largely unfit caught on with more voters than in the past. The result was five new Council members, and a new mayor. But they are facing exactly the same problem as their predecessors. And so will any financial manager. Where should the money come from to fix Detroit's deficit? The federal government. I say that without any hesitation. If Wall Street could be bailed out to the tune of $11 trillion (as reported by the Financial Times several months ago; the amount is probably more than that by now), Detroit can be bailed out for $300 million or $400 million, or more. Let me see if I can get the math precisely; check my decimal points. I get that $400 million is around one 20,000th of $11 trillion. Uh, can you spare one 20,000th of what you gave the rich bankers? And you gave it to them, so we want it as a gift, not a loan. Bail out Detroit as Wall Street was bailed out! Notice that the biggest boys in the private sector were more broke than Detroit, and they were bailed out by the mythically inefficient public sector, Big Gov'ment. Some of that federal money (that they gave the Wall Street banks) is our tax money, money from the people of Detroit. On another aspect of this mess, the main adverse effect of an emergency financial manager in Detroit will be mass firing and wage and benefit reductions for Detroit city workers. If I might be allowed a little poetic license I'd channel former Mayor Coleman A. Young: Bump that! If they can give the motherscratchers who bankrupted Wall Street mega-bonuses, they can continue to pay basic wages and benefits to Detroit workers, who provide average Americans with services at least as important as financial services. City worker jobs, government jobs, public jobs are real jobs. Detroiters need jobs especially right now, decent jobs with good benefits. Detroit workers losing jobs will add to the city's deficit because of lost taxes from income and property. It will, of course, put more Detroiters into economic dire straights. The Reaganite story that government is big and bad, and free enterprise is lean and mean has been exposed as a big lie by the bankruptcy of the private sector's largest corporations in the last years. The system threatening bankruptcies of Wall Street and General Motors should put an end to the notion of private enterprise's superiority to public enterprise. The trouble is that the Press (oh ye, of Bill of Rights fame) is privatized. Speaking of privatized, a big portion of the City of Detroit's work is done in privatized contracts, a whole other can of worms by which a larger percentage of taxpayers' money goes to private profits rather to than workers'
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
In a message dated 3/23/2010 1:28:37 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB: My buddy, Bob King. Comment Bob's cool and at this point see himself as a one time president. He has invited all and anyone to come forth with new proposition on what to do in the fight for the life of the trade union movement. This includes the Reds and especially the Reds because no one else is in motion. Life is funny. Life is funny and the connections are historical for the working class. Bob King did his apprenticeship under my dad. Yep. We have watched his career from day one. Brother retired with 40 years seniority and 15 as an International Representative of the UAW, so as a collective you and I know everyone. The inexorable loop of life asserts itself. it is our time, right now. And our fight for the unity of a real class in real time is going to rewrite our history. This shits more exiting than a one man band. The fear of Bob King is this: Will he be to intellectual to lead the union along another path. This is a real fear not to be belittled. The only reason the historically reactionary mutherfuckers - I don't reason books but know everyone in my district and what they want and need can be defeated is the depths of the economic crisis at this defining moment - as Obama puts things. We are roughly at 1920 at a higher lever. What is different is that the communists forces are not predominately foreign born as was the case in 1919. This is in the context of 343,000 auto workers of whom 70 - 75% were native born. Yet, by 1923 the first auto workers union had been formed. What did they do and how did they do this? This was under conditions of the Palmer Raids ad witch hunts. I reject the specific Leninist form and not political Leninism. Now is the time to be bold. Let us march on til victory is won Proletarians Unite. WL ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject):: correction
In a message dated 3/23/2010 1:44:07 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, waistli...@aol.com writes: Let us march on til victory is won Proletarians Unite. Correction Let us march on til victory is one! Proletarians Unite. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
CB: My buddy, Bob King. Comment Bob's cool and at this point see himself as a one time president. He has invited all and anyone to come forth with new proposition on what to do in the fight for the life of the trade union movement. This includes the Reds and especially the Reds because no one else is in motion. Life is funny. Life is funny and the connections are historical for the working class. Bob King did his apprenticeship under my dad. Yep. We have watched his career from day one. Brother retired with 40 years seniority and 15 as an International Representative of the UAW, so as a collective you and I know everyone. CB: You definitely know the UAW better than I. From my limited knowledge, I'd say King has the potential for moving the union to more of a struggle position, especially in these objective conditions. ^ The inexorable loop of life asserts itself. it is our time, right now. And our fight for the unity of a real class in real time is going to rewrite our history. This shits more exiting than a one man band. The fear of Bob King is this: Will he be to intellectual to lead the union along another path. CB: Yeah, He's a lawyer (smile). He sure was at a lot of demonstrations in the past. That's how he got to know me. ^^^ This is a real fear not to be belittled. The only reason the historically reactionary mutherfuckers - I don't reason books but know everyone in my district and what they want and need can be defeated is the depths of the economic crisis at this defining moment - as Obama puts things. ^^^ CB: Yeah, the objective conditions might push King to the left , and his relatively left background might mean he doesn't resist the push. He's from Detroit. The past couple of Presidents were from Grand Rapids and somewhere else, no ? ^ We are roughly at 1920 at a higher lever. What is different is that the communists forces are not predominately foreign born as was the case in 1919. This is in the context of 343,000 auto workers of whom 70 - 75% were native born. Yet, by 1923 the first auto workers union had been formed. What did they do and how did they do this? This was under conditions of the Palmer Raids ad witch hunts. Phil Raymond, Party organizer in Detroit in the 20's. Carl Winter organizer of the Ford Hunger March THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE AUTO WORKERS UNIONS. By Roger Keeran ...by W Licht - 1981 Communist influence in the automobile industry, 1920-1933: Paving the way for an industrial union http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a794722520db=all ^^^ I reject the specific Leninist form and not political Leninism. ^^^ CB: I don't know (Rather Ralph doesn't know;smile) Seems to me democratic centralism is common sense. What sense does it make to say nobody has to abide by the decisions of the majority ? Why make any decisions ? How can anything be done without that unity in action ? You might as well not all be in the same party . Bourgeois parties operate on democratic centralism. The US Dems and Reps have democratic centralism. Russia didn't have or just got political parties at the time Lenin wrote WITBD, because it was an _absolute_ monarchy. All Lenin was doing was teaching the Russian working class the rudiments of a party in a democracy. The characterization of his democratic centralism as something unique to the Bolsheviks is not accurate. What specifically do you reject in the Leninist form.? ^^^ Now is the time to be bold. Let us march on til victory is won Proletarians Unite. WL ^^^ CB: Dave Moore: Carry on ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)::
In a message dated 3/23/2010 2:11:41 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB: Dave Moore: Carry on Reply Yep, that the flavor. You know more than you think. We simply have a different place in a division of labor. The things I cannot do I go on line and ask for help. What is needed is a federation of revolutionaries. No one has to surrender their particular ideological and theory bent. Fuck calling things a Popular Front or a united Front. If you do not do work in the electoral arena, then shut the fuck up. Accept the reports of comrade who are involved in this work and then form an opinion. In Detroit we have always discovered the means and ways to flow together and this includes the Trotskyist crew. I never hated on Debs Hall or the SWP work. I do have a very strong opinion, but it is not relevant in real work. Adhere to your group. So what! That is the point of a federation. We take Lenin the wrong way, although he has been dead for a very long time. And yes, Dave Moore is part of a production line of literature in progress. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Objective Subjective (object and subject)
Objective Subjective (object and subject):: object refers to everything outside the human mind or the subject as human. Reality, say a tree, an automobile or the sun has an objective existence outside the human mind or the life of the human mind, not requiring or owning its existence to the mind. Marxism contends that social system - capitalism, and things existing outside the mind have an objective existence and contains objective laws of operations. 1. So what then does the 'mind' contain? 2. What is the basis of the existence or subsistence of the mind and its contents? 3. Aren't you missing out here on the Marxist tradition's insistence on the 'relationship' between subject-object? 4. What is the basis of the existence or subsistence of such a 'relationship'? 5. What is the basis of our knowing all this to hold? Marx seems to combine a form of realism and a form of pragmatism in his rejection of idealism, but at this point in my life I'm not sure I remember a very satisfactory working out of the issues in anything Marx wrote. It seems more likely my understanding comes from Engels and from Lenin (which makes me think 'deja vu' since we seem to discuss a lot of the same philosophical issues over and over again). Final point, for now anyway, about that feeling of going around and around. Some of us go around in order to secure a better or at least re-newed understanding of source material like Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. This leads to arguments over interpretation of their texts. This also leads into arguments and discussions about how this or that stream of Marxism was led astray and led others astray in its errancy from said source texts. On the other hand, some of us like such issues because not only do we want to show our knowledge (or lack of , or lapses in memory of) of source texts, we want to work out in some original or at least underappreciated way fresh philosophical insights about the issues. If we can't go as far backward or as far forward (depending on your perspective) as Althusser on something like 'objective vs. subjective', aren't we going to be a bit stale -- if not obtuse and ignorant? Or did the fact that Althusser suffered from depression and even psychosis and murdered his wife-- and then also said things like when he was doing his peak work he was actually just bullshitting and stealing ideas from his students--does that negate the potential of discussing his work? Or is it absurd to say that the reason we should take statements like that seriously is because we never could take anything he ever said or wrote seriously in the first place? Sometimes the sentiments and goals get all mixed together and confused. I feel a new insight about Althusser's misreading of Lenin's misreading of Marx's misreading of Hegelcoming on. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
