8 responses to “Blocked Comments Since October 17th, 2018”

1. 

   TJM

   February 22, 2019 at 11:56 pm

   I see you tried to continue our exchange on determinism. I don’t understand at all how anyone can call materialist determinism a kind of idealism. I say the opposite. Also I have compiled some quotes on the matter of “free will” from esteemed Marxists https://whatwayforward.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/marxists-on-free-will/ . It is as if you don’t understand. There is will, but the will is determined totally by material development. There is nothing outside of material developments. Comparing me to Kant is bizarre. Kant was an idealist. I don’t believe in the idea at all. The idea is a superficial aspect of determined history. You need to ask yourself why a “free” will is necessary. You are indulging in voluntarism by clinging to it. I notice you quote the bible in some places. Are you very religious and are trying to justify it? Even Hegel did not really believe in a really “free” will like his contemporaries and idealist predecessors did. The danger is you might get away from materialism and start advocating obscure psychological and philosophical formulas instead of focusing on the class struggle as a criteria. Look how Steiner and Brenner got to talking about libido theories and rejecting science and the enlightenment instead of really analyzing events correctly, meanwhile crooning impetuously about the importance of the dialectic at every turn.

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. 

   randomposter33

   February 23, 2019 at 4:47 am

   I’m glad I was able to get the message to you, because some other conversations have been cut off by moderators without any hope of continuing them.

   What I cannot comprehend is why it is necessary to turn on well-known Marxist leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky. None of them felt it necessary to abandon dialectical materialism in favor of some other philosophy, whether it be subjective idealism, immaterialism, or materialist determinism. Dialectical materialism oppposes all such philosophical trends, and Marxists always place dialectical materialism over any other variation of philosophical perspective.

   This new concoction may serve to temporarily elucidate a certain thought process, but if only for the inertia given to dialectical materialism by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other top revolutionary leaders of the 20th century, that should serve as the philosophical basis for an agreement by revolutionaries in order to progress beyond philosophical argument and into conscious organizational activity.

   It is precisely that conscious organizational activity that your philosophy seems to oppose in Marxism. Dialectical materialism is a qualification of materialism, a break from the old materialism based on the subjective activity of the philosopher and his movement. Your materialistic determinism seems in line with the determinism of religion but qualified by materialism, rejecting not ossified authority but instead the subjective activity of the individual.

   “There is nothing outside of material development.” There is material development the idea, and there is material development in the objective world. You seem to be saying that there is nothing outside of the idea of material development, which is not true. The material development in the objective world is outside of the idea, in that it is specific rather than general and contains many details that do not enter into the idea.

   Neither can material development in the objective world contain everything, because there are various conflicting material developments. Out of this arise processes and abstract laws which govern the outcome of various developments. For instance, the sun shines down on the ground, so the ground should be hot. Yesterday, however, there was a snow storm leaving 6 inches of snow, and despite the direct sunlight, the ground is cold. So does the hot sun always create create a hot ground? If not, there is no determinism.

   You will argue that all factors go into evey determination. The dialectical materialist will argue that your subjective choice of factors to consider has brought you to the conclusion that the ground must be cold. The ground, however, of the sauna the observer may be in, may be hot. So your determinism will have failed again.

   Kant believed exactly as you do of a middle ground between idealism and materialism. He sided with idealism, but made some serious concessions to materialism. Those concessions bear the same content as yours. Determinism, the idea that events occur in a chain of causality going back to the origin of the universe and all history, with all choice or will effectively being an illusion, in fact comes from the religious idealist concept of predestination. God created the world and all its physical laws, and since then everything that transpired did so according to his will.

   Your idealism, however, you qualify with the word materialist. The cause behind the determinism, rather than God, must be some materialist thing-in-itself. (More on the thing-in-itself below) Therefore, the theory must be materialist. However a universal cause of everything is an idealist concept, which may itself only have your will as its own cause. In all seriousness, the materialism of something that inherently cannot exist in reality, like the quotient of any number divided by 0, is non-existent. A non-existent materialism is not materialism at all even if you name it materialism. It may seem funny to some, like a Hubbardian materialist creationism.

   The materialist thing-in-itself, the cause of all determinism, has no possibility of entering our senses, or if it did every mind would respond in the exact same way, concluding immediately that the cause of everything has already determined material reality for all time, and it, one and every mind, cannot determine for itself anything besides what the holy cause has determined for it. Almost immediately, a mind must respond: I would determine something different, not bow down to the universal will, for I am an individual. Though, and this could only be conjecture, in order to remain the only cause behind all events, would it not hide its influence, remain invisible and unknowable? Or would that cause cause itself to have a will and make that will known and universally accepted by every other will under its influence?

   Either way, we should already have accepted that such a cause of all things, the prerequisite for determinism, cannot exist. No cause, then, can take the place of the development of revolutionary consciousness, which Marxism believes must develop in the masses to break the chains of determinism. Thus, the conscious and unconscious will of each and all can grow and express themselves fully in the material world.

   To quote or reference the bible is to continue the tradition of Marxism and all human culture. An amoral erasure of biblical references from culture would be a catastrophic step backwards in human history. This opposition to bible-inspired thought appears linked to a primitivism, a worship of naked tribesman, mixed with a dystopian lab-grown culture divorced from all human history, designed by a mad scientist. You must step back into the real world and see what progressive influences really exist in your surroundings and culture and which exist only in the recesses of your mind.

   Focusing only on the class struggle and ignoring theoritical questions resembles the aproach of the OCI, which broke from the ICFI, taking with it many national sections. They eventually joined the reformist PS socialist party of France, putting former OCI member Lionel Jospin into the presidency. Your approach led to the restabilization of capitalism by putting every matter through a simple test of its relevance to the workers in the class struggle. In this way, the revolutionary content of the struggle is replaced with any reformist policy agreement that may have some temporary benefit to some part of the workers, rather than the permanent and universal benefits reaped from revolutionary struggle.

   Your leaving the dialectic to Steiner and Brennan, your assumption that that is their territory, reflects on the current problems of the ICFI. The revolutionary movement must not concede any territory willingly, as this weakness will be exploited automatically by its opponents. The theoritical struggle for a pointedly dialectical materialism, the fight against police brutality, and the fight against sexually or otherwise abusive and demeaning working conditions all belong on ICFI territory. We should welcome these struggles even on our territory, rather than push them off onto pseudo-left groups that would murder any such movement in its infancy.

   Please reconsider your stances. I appreciate your critical responses to various wsws.org mistakes, and I hope such criticism will deepen if it is itself the subject of criticism.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   1. 

      randomposter33

      February 24, 2019 at 5:49 am

      Changes to edit in: P.5, That the idea relates to the objective material development only constitutes one small detail about the specific development.

      P. 9 Hubbardian or Scientologist

      LikeLike

      Reply
   2. 

      randomposter33

      February 24, 2019 at 6:05 am

      P. 4 movement -> social movement

      LikeLike

      Reply
3. 

   TJM

   February 23, 2019 at 3:38 pm

   Thanks for your attempt to explain to me, but I do not understand. It is like we are talking about two different things. I subscribe to the orthodox view that (material, objective) being determines (willful, subjective) consciousness and that materialism does not equal fatalism. What more is there to say? To me this is the ABCs of Marxism.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   1. 

      randomposter33

      February 24, 2019 at 6:13 am

      I only want to point you to one quote from Marx, from Theses on Feuerbach:
      “III. The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
      The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

      Human activity determines circumstances. That is Marxism. Materialism “…forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.” Where do the ABCs of Marxism come from, if not Marx himself? Changing Marx is not revolutionary practice, self-change is.

      LikeLike

      Reply
      1. 

         TJM

         February 24, 2019 at 12:36 pm

         I see in no way how this prevents materialism from being the true method of appraising social developments. Earlier he speaks of Hitherto-Existing Materialism. For example you may take:

         Circumstances Determine Human Activity
         Human Activity Determines Circumstances
         = Human Activity Determines Circumstances As Activity Determined By Circumstances.

         That is, the unity of freedom and necessity, being and consciousness, sets itself certain objective limits and objective tendencies out of its development.

         This feature I call determinism, as against the subjective idealism which prevails everywhere. Primitive versions of determinism are hardly held up by anyone in the 21st century, and in their time were largely progressive, if not always so.

         So I do not find any conflict between Marx and determinism here.

         LikeLike

         Reply
4. 

   TJM

   February 24, 2019 at 9:07 pm

   Also, I have to note the complete vindication of my views in Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Chapter: Freedom and Necessity. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/three6.htm

   I have compiled other quotes on my blog in regards to “Free Will” under Resources. In the good years of the Second International, you have both Plekhanov and Kautsky clearly agreeing with me (this is noted also in the reference work A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983) Harvard University Press Entry: Determinism. That work is permeated with “Western Marxist” and Frankfurt School thought. Also, in the Third International, early on in 1921 Bukharin wrote a work called “Historical Materialism” where there is a chapter called Determinism and Indeterminism. Suffice to say no one came out and criticized him for describing Marxism as Determinism, as Lenin, Kautsky, Plekhanov et al. had done before him.

   I am certain it is I who am orthodox in this exchange.

   LikeLike

   Reply