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From @RandomPoster33, an independent and censored contributor to WSWS.ORG comments section and advocating for a Fourth International Government

Blocked Comment to TJM, Determinism vs. Leninism

Widespread student support for beleaguered professor Peter Boghossian Random Poster TJM 7 days ago Removed The idealism arises in denying the existence of what self-evidently exists. In denying the existence of God, msterialism did not establish itself as denial in philosophy. Materialism affirms the knowable and does not deny the…

Widespread student support for beleaguered professor Peter Boghossian

Random Poster

Removed
The idealism arises in denying the existence of what self-evidently exists. In denying the existence of God, msterialism did not establish itself as denial in philosophy. Materialism affirms the knowable and does not deny the existence of everything as mistaken perception. Will is perceived to exist because it does, because perception is not inherently deceptive or incapable of accurate reflection.

Your philosophy is like Ernst Mach’s or Immanuel Kant’s, which Marxists irrevocably broke from. Necessity is not an unknowable thing in itself, which remains inpenetrable to observation or the force of conscious will. Necessity reasserts itself against subjectivity in the form of a resultant of various individual wills, but this necessity can again be overcome by class consciousness and the united will of a class. Then necessity returns in the form of class conflict, which free will overcomes again in the formation of a classless, purely democratic society based on the power of the revolutionary class.

Subjective idealism does not exist within Marxism. As Lenin wrote:

“Of course, it is the sacred right of every citizen, and particularly of every intellectual, to follow any ideological reactionary he likes. But when people who have radically severed relations with the very foundations of Marxism in philosophy begin to dodge, confuse matters, hedge and assure us that they “too” are Marxists in philosophy, that they are “almost” in agreement with Marx, and have only slightly “supplemented” him—the spectacle is a far from pleasant one.”

You have revealed with your idealist insistence on determinism, the unpleasant spectacle within the ICFI. Lenin describes your argument as Kantian, or Berkelian in its right-wing deviation from Kant. George Berkeley, founder of immaterialism, wrote as follows:

“I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this, there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it.” Principles #35

“The only thing whose existence we deny…”, in your case is “that which philosophers call” not “matter or corporeal substance”, but free will or acts upon the real world grounded in thought, understanding, and self-interest or self-motivation, rather than flowing imperceptibly from determinism. Your denial is suspect.

Lenin quotes at length from Lafarge, of which I will only reproduce a part:

“The workingman who eats sausage and receives a hundred sous a day knows very well that he is robbed by the employer and is nourished by pork meat, that the employer is a robber and that the sausage is pleasant to the taste and nourishing to the body. Not at all, say the bourgeois sophists, whether they are called Pyrrho, Hume or Kant. His opinion is personal, an entirely subjective opinion; he might with equal reason maintain that the employer is his benefactor and that the sausage consists of chopped leather, for he cannot know things-in-themselves.

“The question is not properly put, that is the whole trouble. . . . In order to know an object, man must first verify whether his senses deceive him or not. . . . The chemists have gone still further—they have penetrated into bodies, they have analysed them, decomposed them into their elements, and then performed the reverse procedure, they have recomposed them from their elements. And from the moment that man is able to produce things for his own use from these elements, he may, as Engels says, assert that he knows the things-in-themselves. The God of the Christians, if he existed and if he created the world, could do no more.”

Free will has been broken down by neurologists and psychologists into its elements and reconstructed again within neural networks and within A.I. computers. Free will and subjective reality exist as much as molecules and atoms do, though we cannot observe them directly with our eyes. It can even be imparted to inanimate objects using modern technology, such as with robots. Free will and subjectivity “will not be missed” argue the the party-bureaucratic sophists, whether they be called TJM, Walsh, or London. Marxists and the working class must respond: you can eliminate neither our matter nor our free will, not our substance, our wages, nor our subjective existence, our recognized rights as members of the class or the party.

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