[Marxism] NPA 'down under'? [was Emulating the NPA in Victoria?]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi It's a pity this thread got sidetracked - and no one from Oz has stepped in. It started with the loopy WSWS piece which is really too wrong to respond to. With the caveat that I am in Mackay QLD and these events are in Melbourne VIC (that's about the distance from Dallas to New York) I'll try and start a conversation. The Socialist Party (SP) candidate Steve Jolly won his position of leadership as a union delegate for the CFMEU and in defending the closure of public schools in Victoria. This was enough to win him a position on the local council where he has staked out a position well to the left of the Green councillors and been an advocate for local issues like public housing. There is no doubt lots to be learned from what he and his comrades have been doing. He is currently standing in the state elections. There is a website http://www.yarrasocialists.net/ and some of his comments are on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L5yTCSKETU. Hopefully others can add their experience on the ground there. Ignoring the WSWS boilerplate stuff about 'middle class' protests and 'independent movements of working class' etc. The idea that the SP is supportive of the Greens (let alone the ALP) is stupid. I will make a few quick comments - to my knowledge the Socialist Party has shown no particular interest in any of the left regroupment processes. At present its seems like the Labour Party vote is breaking to the left so the fact the CFMEU (for its own reasons) is supporting his campaign (and that of some Greens) is a sign of that change (not as WSWS would have it of Steve's 'opportunism'. I guess if you see the Socialist Party as right wing then that puts you in some pretty strange political territory. He has received coverage - along with other candidates in Green Left Weekly whose supporters are generally more interesting in NPA-style regroupment processes but not SP to my recollection. With the Greens gaining ground and the ALP primary vote in decline there seems to be real shifts in voting in Australia - of course WSWS isn't interested in any analysis of that kind - some brief thoughts here at http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2010/11/taken-at-face-value-labor-is-in-lot-of.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] evolutionary psychology and socialism?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi Not sure if you really get his point. You seem to ask the questions he's addressing in the lecture. His examples show that while the SAME (genetic) roses manifested differently in different environments. So what 'gross behavioural tendencies' do these roses demonstrate thats explains the results. There are 2 reasons why leftists are suspucious of these arguments. One is that we think they are not scientific at all - and that its bad science to explain social outcomes by relation to the genes (for the reasons that Lewontin explains). Also there is a LONG history of using these 'scientific' arguments to explain social inequalities, its a powerful ideological argument because it naturalises inequality. ie it was said that it was no-ones fault that other races or genders were 'inferior' and there was no point in trying to change it. We may now reject (some of) these arguments but at the time there was plenty of 'scientific evidence' to 'explain' them. In general Marxists want a politics guided by science but we don't want to separate them since science is also guided by a politics which is often denied. Cheers Shane Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] FW: On the British election - anything?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi Just came across this details on the far-left that someone has tracked down http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2010/04/far-left-and-2010-uk-general-election.html Otherwise its been stuff on Crikey for me. Shane Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] RE Guy Robinson
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Rosa! Your essay is nearly 5 words long and Anti-dialectics for beginners on your website (which you say is a short basic introduction) is 25000 words. I don't have that much time. I don't have that big an investment in the term 'dialectics' which I have always taken to mean that we should approach the world as a set of processes or relationships rather than a collection of things. Its why the common understanding of capital as wealth or machines is different from ours because we think of capital as set of human relationships - so a tractor driven by a farmer on his own land is not the same 'thing' as a tractor driven by a wage-labourer employed by the farmer (ie it's not capital) Terms like dialectical materialism or historical materialism don't appear in Marx but the latter I guess is a fair shorthand for Marx's 'materialist conception of history' in which he argues that all clarification has it roots in understanding it as human practice (as opposed to ideas-in-motion as in metaphysics or mechanist reductionism in positivist science like biological determinism) You claim dialectical philosophy depend(s) on a fetishisation similar to that found in religious belief and metaphysics So amidst the millions of words on your site you want to claim that dialectics is a fetish like a religion. Well this would be the case if the claim was that something called a 'Dialectic' causes things to happen - and some Soviet philosophy expresses it things way (just the same as saying something is demanded by a Natural Law or iron laws of economics) - but that's a pretty crude example of reification surely. I don't see how why we should abandon the notion that we should understand the world as a process of which humanity is a part because some people want to say that processes operate 'over the heads' of humanity ie make a fetish of it. Shane Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Guy Robinson
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Well I'm not sure how much to go into here. Perhaps I am labouring a point. I suppose first up that most people do not regard Truths as something recognised by humans. Most people think of the truth as a product of statements when those statements accurately describe the world as it exists independently of any observer. However I think Loren's point is an important one. Typical athiests like Dawkins argue that religion is an illusion just like say the optical illusion of there being water on the road ahead on a hot day. With experience we realise that its an effect of the way our eyes interact with the atmosphere and we know that there isn't really water on the road. Dawkins (for eg) sees religion in the same way - all people should be athiests because once science has shown that there is no God on the road ahead anyone who continues to believe in God is simply stupid or duped by wicked priests. I think most Marxists take Marx to be saying much the same thing - they read 'religion as the opium of the masses' as meaning religion is a drug fed to the masses by elites of one kind or another. Marx's critique though is different. He uses the analogy of religion as being the flowers in the chain which binds and oppresses people. People out these flowers in to make life bearable (they administer the opium to themselves to continue the analogy). Most critics want to pluck out the flowers (ie explain to the masses that they are stupid for thinking that flowers make things bearable) rather than what Marxists want and that is to remove the chains (after which the flowers will fall be themselves). So when one say's religion is an illusion it isn't the same as saying that its simple like an illusion that can be dispelled by proper explanation. Its wrong objectively as far as we Marxists are all concerned but it can't be dispelled subjectively by simply pointing out the error. So the aim is to show the 'human trust' (as opposed to some supposed 'objective truth' that exists independent of any observer). Thus we seek not to dispel religious illusions by critique but to break the chain and then pluck the living flowers. [I am assuming we are all familair with Marx's critique of Hegel 'Philosophy of Right' at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm The reason this is the beginning of all critique is that this method is common throughout Marx. Marx's 'Capital' begins with talking about the way commodities come to be seen as having a life of their own. The key theme (and why it is a *critique* of political economy) is demonstrating that while it appears that commodities and markets rule over us (like a god) they are, in fact, the product of a very specific set of social relations. So, for a marxist we might as shorthand say that it is an illusion that capitalist society is ruled by markets but thats not the sort of illusion that can be dispelled simply by experience because all of us experience capitalism in precisely this way - in the same way that religious believers experience the reality of God. The human truth is the God or markets are human products but under alienated social relations we don't experience them that way. We, on this list who have read 'Capital' and so on, may *know* that markets are not *objectively* real (ie they are a product of particular human practices unlike the earth going around the sun) but we still experience them that way because they are part of the objective practices of the capitalist class. The 'illusion' that markets (or gods) exist in the same way that the solar system does is part of the ideology but its not dispensed by intellectual critique. If religion is an illusion how can it not be wrong? What can a human truth possibly be except a truth known and recognized by humans? Shane Mage On Feb 19, 2010, at 8:59 PM, Shane Hopkinson wrote: This is Loren's summary from a Review of Ernst Bloch: Marx and Bloch do not criticize religion as wrong... the project of Marx and Bloch -is to show the human truth of religion (as one of several products of the human imagination in society) and to prepare for the realization of that truth in social conditions that would no longer require the illusion of religion. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Lindsey German?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Rosa I knew I'd regret it. Ok so let's say she was 'forced to resign' because we know that despite 35 of service to a revolutionary socialist organisation she has unexpectedly become a pro-capitalist renegade whose differences can no longer be tolerated by her former comrades. Its all pretty familiar stuff. BTW I like the Guy Robinson stuff you posted - hope you can get more of it up. Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Guy Robinson
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi How odd. I thought that was one of his key themes. there can be no legitimate clash between science and religion any more than there can be between science and the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear. I guess - but that's not how Marx saw it. It leaves you in the same position as Dawkins - whose work I admire in many ways - but I always get the impression he's a oxford don explaining to the benighted masses that religion is just, well, stupid and they should all know better. And his reductionist materialism a la the selfish gene is similar. Cheers Shane Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Guy Robinson
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Its two sides of a coin. This is Loren's summary from a Review of Ernst Bloch: In doing this [Bloch] is merely generalizing the Marxian critique of religion to a much broader array of such creations than most Marxists would care to take on. Indeed, most Marxists, and a fortiori most commentators of Marx, rather badly misconstrue Marx's critique of religion, the presupposition of all possible critique as he put it, and its role in Marx's work. Marx and Bloch do not criticize religion as wrong from the vantage point of some reductionist science that possesses the truth; the project of Marx and Bloch is to show the human truth of religion (as one of several products of the human imagination in society) and to prepare for the realization of that truth in social conditions that would no longer require the illusion of religion. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] (no subject)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I know its bad form to personalise things but one wonders what outsiders would make of a boss who sacked a worker after 35 years of loyal service on some pretext. To make matters worse we are claiming that we can build a better world than the capitalists but if I was a person in the street looking at this behaviour I don't think I'd be looking to sign up for this sort of treatment - and as yet they have no real power. And I mean these are how they treat people with whom they are politically close and have worked for years. Very sad. Shane Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Workers Liberty on Rees et all SWP/UK resignations
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I know its bad form to personalise things but one wonders what outsiders would make of a boss who sacked a worker after 35 years of loyal service on some pretext. To make matters worse we are claiming that we can build a better world than the capitalists but if I was a person in the street looking at this behaviour I don't think I'd be looking to sign up for this sort of treatment - and as yet they have no real power. And I mean this are how they treat people with whom they are politically close and have worked for years. Very sad. __ Yahoo!7: Catch-up on your favourite Channel 7 TV shows easily, legally, and for free at PLUS7. www.tv.yahoo.com.au/plus7 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The past and future of the [Oz] Left
This analysis by Guy Rundle from on-line paper 'Crikey' is in response to a recent series of articles run by the mainstream conservative print newspaper 'The Australian' about thinkers on the Left. I thought it provided a good summary. Shane ...The global Left looked at its lowest ebb in the 1990s. In fact it a globally unified Left had died in the 1970s, the victim of failure on every front. The USSR had failed to liberalise and develop after Khruschev, and was a stagnant and seemingly permanent monolith. By the later 70s, Maos cultural revolution had come to be seen as less a triumph of proletarian culture than a process of chaos and destruction. The Western experiments in counterculture had largely collapsed, into heroin and hippie entrepreneurship. Finally, the social democratic parties in the West had retreated from such plans as they had to extend the transformation of the market economy... http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/09/28/rundle-the-slow-death-of-the-unified-left/?source=cmailer YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
