New materialism: dynamic materialism??? - Page 6

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**101** 28th September 2008, 17:25

Trivas:

Quote:

Because Aristotelian logic can't deal with the historical process, HM for you is mysticism.

1) How do you know that Aristotelian Logic cannot "deal with the historical process"?

[No need to answer that, we already know: you read it somewhere, and did not bother to check.]

2) Where do I refer to Aristotelian Logic?

[Answer: nowhere.]

3) And where have I said that Historical Materialism is "mysticism"?

[Again: nowhere.]

So, this word applies far better to you:

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Bullshit.

*Bob The Builder* · #**102** 28th September 2008, 17:53

R:

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But, you are the one who is being dishonest, for you assert things like this:

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It's one of your key explanations for why otherwise first rate revolutionaries like Engels, Lenin and Trotsky hold on to the dialectic. If their class background distorts their thinking, then how much does it affect Callinicos who, rather than being a professional revolutionary, is a professorial academic?

Really? How about this, from your own site:

Quote:

Once more, all this is not the least bit surprising since, as we have just seen, these ideas originated in the ruling-class tradition outlined above --, and without exception, every DM-classicist was a non-worker.3 http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/...se%20DM.htm#N3

Am I lying now?

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**103** 28th September 2008, 19:51

Bob-the-there's-little-point-continuing-Builder:

Quote:

Really? How about this, from your own site

Oh dear, are you alright? I mean, you had to venture, unaided, with no one to hold your tiny hand, into the Temple of Doom, my site! Were you not kitted-out with the standard issue Dialectical Garlic Cloves, like everyone else? And, were you not given Dialectical Holy Water to help protect you?

And all for what? For this, you risked your mystical soul?

Quote:

Once more, all this is not the least bit surprising since, as we have just seen, these ideas originated in the ruling-class tradition outlined above --, and without exception, every DM-classicist was a non-worker

Yes, so?

*Bob The Builder* · #**104** 28th September 2008, 20:30

So it proves you don't even understand your own arguments.

Jacob Richter · #**105** 28th September 2008, 22:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Led Zeppelin

First of all, why are so obsessed with Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's not correct and it's flawed at its basis.

If you look at my "hierarchy of needs" it will be different from your "hierarchy of needs", it is a deterministic inane theory

Upon further reconsideration I have concluded that Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a useful tool. However, to rely exclusively on it would be tantamount to at least broad economism or even narrow economism, for that matter: the notion that "grander" political struggles grow out of daily economic struggles.

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**106** 28th September 2008, 23:09

Bob-the-there's-little-point-continuing-Builder:

Quote:

So it proves you don't even understand your own arguments.

On the contrary, it shows that instead of explaining this to you several times already, I'd have been better off explaining it to the cat.

*Bob The Builder* · #**107** 29th September 2008, 07:58

It's an explanation only a cat would swallow.

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**108** 29th September 2008, 11:30

Bob-the-there's-little-point-continuing-Builder:

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It's an explanation only a cat would swallow.

Yes, they are more intelligent than you.

PRC-UTE · #**109** 29th September 2008, 11:39

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Originally Posted by Bob The Builder

So it proves you don't even understand your own arguments.

well done, bob, there was no response to that.

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**110** 29th September 2008, 13:28

PRC-UTE:

Quote:

well done, bob, there was no response to that.

Not so; BTB made the same lame attempt to 'uncover' this alleged inconsistency back in 2006. He has either forgotten my explanation then, or it went over his head.

Now, since you have not had this explained to you, if you want to know my response, you only have to ask.

trivas7 · #**111** 29th September 2008, 15:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by K.Marx

I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker... The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.

-- K. Marx, Capital Vol 1

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rosa Lichtenstein

Marx was clearly being ironic here.

Such is the extent to which some distort the plain meaning of the text. The use of pure logic to analyze a phenomenon is a long tradition going back to the Greeks. Clearly Marx is following in that tradition.

Rosa Lichtenstein · #**112** 29th September 2008, 16:15

Trivas (quoting Marx):

Quote:

I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker... The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.

Is this in the past tense: "avowed myself"?

Did Marx not tell us that 'his method' contained not one atom of Hegel?

Indeed, you have had this explained to you many times; as I said, it might take a hundred goes before it sinks in -- here's another attempt:

Quote:

"After a quotation from the preface to my 'Criticism of Political Economy,' Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:*

'The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has.'

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?" [Marx (1976), pp.101-02. Bold emphases added.]

You will note that Marx calls this the 'dialectic method', and 'his method', but it is also clear that it bears no relation to the sort of dialectics you have had forced down your throat, for in it there is not one ounce of Hegel -- no quantity turning into quality, no contradictions, no negation of the negation, no unities of opposites, no totality...

So, Marx's method has had Hegel totally extirpated. For Marx, putting Hegel on 'his feet' is to crush his head.

And of the few terms Marx uses of Hegel's in Das Kapital, he tells us this:

Quote:

"and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him."

So, the 'rational core' of the dialectic has not one atom of Hegel in it, and Marx merely 'coquetted' with a few bits of Hegelian jargon in Das Kapital.

That is hardly a ringing endorsement of this mystical theory.

And it is little use you telling me he called Hegel a 'mighty thinker', since he pointedly put that in the past tense:

Quote:

"I criticised the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when is was still the fashion. But just when I was working on the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely as a 'dead dog'. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Ibid., pp.102-03. Bold emphasis added.]

Moreover, one can call a theorist a 'mighty thinker' and totally disagree with him or her. [For instance, I think Plato was a 'mighty thinker' but I disagree with 99% of what he said.]

Still less is there any use in your referring to the Grundrisse -- Marx saw fit not to publish that work, but he did publish the above comments.

So, Marx and I agree that 'his method' contains no Hegel whatsoever; only I go even further and ditch the jargon with which Marx 'coquetted'.

Now, we have been over this many times here, as I told you, in numerous threads.

May I suggest you bother to read a few threads before making a fool of yourself here in future.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...4&postcount=73

Hence, this is pure fantasy:

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Such is the extent to which some distort the plain meaning of the text. The use of pure logic to analyze a phenomenon is a long tradition going back to the Greeks. Clearly Marx is following in that tradition.

As Marx said: the ruling ideas are always those of the ruling-class. So, no wonder you think highly of the class-compromised method of the Greeks -- whose logic you do not understand anyway!

Marx, in the above, was waving all this goodbye.

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