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*See us discuss Redstar's idealist method in the context of our defense of Stalin
I'm going to take some quotes from Internet persynality Redstar2000 and discuss the thing Marx wanted us not to discuss and just be done with--philosophy.
--"In science, the burden of proof generally rests on the person who makes the positive assertion...not on the person who is skeptical."--
--"Listen to the worm of doubt, for it speaks truth."
--"[With regard to whether Hegel's triad actually occurs in life] And things often work out that way in objective social reality...but not always. Sometimes the three (or more!) sides will all persist in fighting all of their enemies at once. True, this is often a ruinous strategy...but it has nevertheless happened.If 'dialectics' were some kind of 'universal social law,' then that should never happen."
Mousnonya said: "We take the best opinions of the best scientists and compare them to each other to obtain the most complete picture possible."
Redstar2000: "So you redefine 'dialectics' just to mean what every sensible person does without ever reading Hegel or Marx or even Aristotle. Processes are just as subject to empirical verification, just as 'real,' as facts."
One of the most common mistakes made by Western intellectuals is to substitute their wishes for what materialism is. In particular, we have to say that in the case of B.A., Redstar2000 and the vast majority of Amerikan intellectuals, Kant really still rules. "The end does not justify the means" and absolute ethical imperatives are the order of the day for these people. Those that falsely claim they know what materialism is nonetheless doggedly refuse to surrender Kant or assume it is unnecessary to surrender Kant. This is usually accompanied by some cant about how we are beyond just the difference between materialism and idealism. Typical are Redstar2000's comment opposing MIM that we somehow support "might makes right." Likewise is B.A.'s comment that he wants to remove "justification" from history as if Marxist materialism were guilty of justifying "might makes right" as Redstar2000 says. If I report that protease inhibitors turned out much more useful in dealing with AIDS than chicken soup, these idealists are going to say I "justify" protease inhibitors or the corporate process of their production. So as soon as we take their formulations and use them in any other scientific context where there is active experimentation (excluding astronomy and Newtonian physics as understood in Marx's day), we can see how ridiculous they are.
The bottom line problem here is that for these intellectuals materialism is something roped off into an intellectual reservation, the place for "is," while they maintain a place for "ought." As long as "ought" still exists in contrast with "is," (or what intellectuals sometimes refer to as normative concerns instead of positive ones) the possibility exists of criticizing materialism for "justifying" history of "might makes right" and lacking "something new." Despite claiming opposition to religion, and cults of leadership, Redstar claims that his control of the "ought" enables him to call forth something truly "new." All of this is only possible because idealists are still stuck in dealing with "ought" or even worse, "should have" as apart from what exists or has existed. (At least "ought" could refer to the future and might be translated by a dialectical materialist into something useful.)
Redstar2000 and B.A. are only too typical in what this means practically. Redstar2000 claims Marx was a "genius"; yet Redstar disapproves of the labor theory of value and dialectics while maintaining an idealist separation of is and ought. We need to ask ourselves who benefits from this? Who goes among radical youth and claims that Marx was a genius and Lenin was wrong? Is it not again the separation of is and ought that causes a separation of Marx and Lenin in this fashion, with Lenin the activist and Marx the master of "is"? Is it not social- democrats who benefit from the attack on the practitioners of Marxism? Does Redstar2000 even pretend that there is a successful Redstarist movement to point to? And is not the demand for "something new" exactly what Hitler took advantage of with his "national socialism" and "third way," even while Redstar2000 condemns academic Nazis? Redstar2000 delivers the first blow for social-democracy. He hopes no one will notice that like Chomsky he stands on a secular stairway to Heaven while criticizing Leninism. The glimmers of materialism in Redstar are what make Redstarism all the more dangerous and misleading but also typical of intellectuals today.
Just look at these quotes. The first one says there is no burden of proof on the skeptic. What is this but nihilism that Chomsky also takes up? And what is nihilism in the hands of Chomsky and Redstar2000 but a means of being unaccountable, of advancing hierarchy without being accountable? And who benefits from this? Again, if everything is regarded skeptically, then the existing powers-that-be benefit as all possible movements cross-cancel. It's a reason that firing squads do not usually form in circles but straight lines. So we need to be clear that this sort of nihilist skepticism is good for knocking down absolute monarchs and benefitting the bourgeoisie that already has economic power. Nihilist skepticism has nothing to do with uniting the proletariat for a goal. With Redstar2000's circular firing squad line, we can be sure that the ones left standing will be the bourgeoisie.
The next quote is that same Enlightenment era Liberalism about doubt. Again, there is nothing Marxist about it. It's even doubtful whether Voltaire would have backed it. Criticism of the "best of all possible worlds" conservatism is not the same thing exactly as nihilist skepticism. And who benefits from passing off Marx as the right-wing of the Enlightenment? Is it not the social-democrats again? If Redstar2000 came out as an open social- democrat, the Che worship circles might not let him pass. But come in and say Marx was a genius but Lenin was wrong and Marx got the main things wrong--that is all for the benefit of social-democracy. The social-democrats need not appear in revolutionaryleft.com or MIM-oriented boards. They benefit after Redstar2000 is done with the youth considering Marxism.
The third quote from Redstar is another dead give-away of what the point is here--what Mao called "empiricism." This is where the one fact out of many justifies throwing out a theory. The key word that gives it all away above is "never" in "never happen." This is an example of pre-scientific or pre- stochastic thinking. If people could come up with social theories that were 100% correct, they would already be gods. Yet again, I tend to believe that given Redstar2000's self-reported age, Redstar2000 has been around the block and knows very well that throwing out every theory without 100% confirmation means no theory. Again, who benefits from that when it occurs in circles considering Marxism? The bourgeoisie and social-democracy benefit. It is the proletariat that needs theory to unite and change the status quo. The status quo is what laughs to the bank as all theories face equal skepticism.
That's to leave aside that Redstar's whole argument against dialectics is a straw dog. Dialectics is not a theory. It is something we absorb methodologically and forget, sort of like learning to brush one's teeth and then doing it every day. It doesn't have to be raised every day. We get into a good habit and forget it.
The reason for dialectics, one of them, is this separation of is and ought that Redstar and B.A. maintain along with a whole school of idealism called Critical Theory. With materialism as it was understood in Marx's day, it was more than likely that B.A.'s contemplative materialism and Redstar's Liberal nihilist skepticism would be the results. To be done with the equivalent of academic Nazis in Marx's day, Marx closed the is/ought gap permanently. In other words, Marx conceded that contemplative materialism, mechanical materialism were in fact some kind of advance. Marx did not find himself in a political position where he could dispense with Feuerbach as idealist. Marx gave credit to partial materialisms. However, to close the is/ought gap he had no other tool than dialectics. This again has to do with MIM's contention that Marx always saw himself as building out of the past, not making up things off the top of his head.
MIM has addressed repeatedly how political experiment is as much a part of knowledge as vaccine testing or automobile crash-testing. Such an idea is a little different than just observing the stars or the moon, over which people in Marx's day did not fancy they had much control. (Perhaps B.A.'s followers like that astrology so much they believe he can alter the path of stars and planets.) We need to recall in Marx's day people like Copernicus and Newton and what they knew. Newtonian mechanics could have been the paradigm example for everything, but Marx did not want that. That's what dialectics means in the first place, in historical context for intellectuals--not exactly copying astronomy. If we are to copy some science, it should be the science of evolution. That's how we should interpret the addition of dialectics into materialism as it was discovered.
So, in the second place, why is not Darwin the first dialectical materialist? Patriarchy especially at certain stages of history is a form of humyn organization that survived in competition among tribes. The mode of production at any given time is the survival of a species of exploitation. Various economic interactions occur and various classes arise. Which ones survive the struggle? There is nothing in materialism as it was understood in Marx's day that particularly enables this question.
Today, some biologists believe there is mistaken linear emphasis in how some people teach the theory of evolution, one which attributes survival say to the function of an opposable thumb that arose in a species. It is an idealist shorthand to say, "we (or other species) developed opposable thumbs to survive." We could do a linear analysis of opposable thumbs. "Does it help a species to survive to have opposable thumbs?" How many millions of years over what percentage of land mass can a species survive without thumbs compared with thumbs? But what unit would we choose? Should it not be all species? Would we include bacteria for example, and then conclude that thumbs don't "predict" anything as Redstar says of dialectics? No, that's not interesting, that bacteria have no thumbs. But if we adopt a linear, empiricist non-Marxism we have no reason to exclude that question of the bacteria's lack of thumbs. More justly than we can set up dialectical materialism as a straw dog sort of general theory, we can say that linear empiricism gives us no reason not to ask why bacteria can't store mammal fat and how come it was not an advantage to bacteria. So the point is that using a factor to predict the future, as some kind of variable, is already a form of idealism, breaking something down into parts arbitrarily. Redstar would claim that he does not do analytical breakdown that arbitrarily, but he would not be able to explain why dialectics is vacuous but his method is not indiscriminate. The questions that Redstar asks about dialectics need to be asked about linear empiricism as well. How did you choose that factor or set of factors and what units did you decide to use, what range of phenomenon to include in your evaluation of the facts? If dialectics is vacuous, then linear empiricism is indiscriminate and when it is not indiscriminate it is religious in a choosy sort of way. It is very clear that questions should not go in the direction I ask about bacteria to begin with, that we need a winnowing process. The fact we have to say that at all shows what happens when people confuse method and theory in order to set up dialectics as a straw man argument to shoot down.
Here I cannot help inserting how we know something about a casino slot machine. We can assert that the mechanism inside is such and such, thereby guaranteeing a certain percentage of outcomes a certain way. In other words, we could break it down into pieces. I find it more likely that the proletariat would gather in a room and play the machine, perhaps till it could play no more, and then record and tabulate the results. I find it more likely that a unity of scientific result and subsequent advance would arise from that than from smashing the machine into bits to look at them individually. One method is analytical, the other experimental. As an intellectual, I will only admit that I might find it more interesting to smash the machine to bits and that I might complain against centralism if I have to wait around till the machine can't play anymore or be guilty of copping out on the process of observation and being one less witness to the final scientific result. I would probably try to convince the proletariat that after a certain number of pulls on the lever, we actually did know what was going on with the slot machine. However, if I did leave before the proletariat finished counting, or found scientific unity otherwise, it would be my fault as intellectual and an example of how the proletariat is different.
So another reason for dialectics is to account for stochastic processes. We did not have God in Heaven tell us to develop thumbs to survive, especially not thumbs in isolation. Nor did He stick them on us one day to help us out. Rather historical accidents occurred and then a struggle occurred and what was left standing was what we are now. Asking about opposable thumbs in bacteria is meaningless, though I can certainly ask the question, "did lacking opposable thumbs help bacteria to survive?" Is there anything unscientific about the question if we are in the realm of cheap shots being taken at dialectics? Hume, Karl Popper, empiricists: how can you object to my question on bacteria and thumbs? I'd say you should be rather impossibly busy with such questions if we take you by your words seriously.
So then we start to see an interconnected, organic whole in order to even ask a fruitful question: the question is not "did lacking opposable thumbs help cucumbers spread?" Shall we collect up all the species of vegetables and ask the question and try to run a prediction? No, the ONLY interesting questions are interconnected ones. Did having opposable thumbs help our ancestors deal with tigers? Was there ever a situation where roughly equivalent sub-populations differed only in having or not having the "right" kind of thumbs? That could be getting onto the right track--a struggle with the relevant habitat. In the conflict between tigers and our various ancestors, which ones survived? Were some totally wiped out? Redstar is free to say I cannot predict the next evolution of the humyn species or its nearest relative, but unlike Redstar, I'm still going to hold that Darwin's theory of evolution is scientific. I'll leave it to the creationists and Redstar to be "skeptical" about evolution. And yes, that is a paradigm example for all of Redstar's and nihilism's general skepticism. It results when we adopt the Liberal belief that there is such a thing as neutral skepticism, connected up very much with the idea that talk (as opposed to experiment and determined observation) is a panacea for what ails the humyn. So it is now that we suffer through the skeptics of "intelligent design" throwing back in our faces the words of the Liberal wing of the Enlightenment and talking about "anomalies" etc. in Darwin's theory of evolution. We can thank the Redstars out there who lack in dialectics for that, for making science into something so crude as an all-crushing skepticism instead of something that has to selectively ask questions or be guilty of the equivalent of deep-sea fishing with a baseball bat.
"Did having a particular mode of exploitation help a class vanquish another exploiting class and then rule?" What is there in linear empiricism's methodology (Redstar's "Marxism without the crap") that would help me generate that question? "If I look across the world, can I see a pattern where a certain mode of exploitation conquers others?" The examination of struggle and survival was called dialectics. Sure, "unity of opposites" and Taoism can easily arise from the rhetoric, and it is absolutely murdering dialectics to include B.A.'s chauvinist vacillate-everything-both-ways so-called dialectics ((something Redstar ironically shares in regard to the "potential" of the white working class (and why not include the "potential" of the capitalist class itself to be ruined and turned into proletariat then?) considering his supposed opposition to vacuous dialectics that allows anything)), but Marx and Darwin arose simultaneously to prove that something else could be produced if we consistently looked for struggles and the results of those struggles. Sorry, there is still no better word than synthesis for that winnowing and we have to give that credit to Marx and Hegel, or if you'd rather not, then at least Darwin. Perhaps intellectual history could have happened another way, but it didn't in the West. I can't say if you read Indian scriptures if maybe they had other scientific discoveries thousands of years before Newton that spurred philosophical patterns of thought similar to dialectical materialism. Even chaos theory is not about origins, struggles and winnowing. Without dialectics and the consideration of the whole apart from its discernible parts, we are stuck forever asking silly questions about the parts. Taken alone, in idealist isolation as if floating in deep space or what metaphysicians called the "ether," meaning in isolation from the humyn's environment, the humyn may look one way, but once we account for tigers and cheetahs, things start to look differently and pointed questions start to arise. Redstar has admitted that someone making pins alone is not the same as the same persyn inserted into a division of labor, but claiming that is just economic materialism misses that the same phenomenon also occurs in biology and countless other circumstances.
In conclusion, dialectics is about struggle and survival, a method of truth generation, not a theory itself. It should be almost forgotten as the nature of reality once we have adopted a proper means of truth production. Dialectics is also a reminder not to over-copy from 18th century astronomy, before we had particle accelerators to do at least a little experimentation trying to actually change some aspect of astronomy to see how it works. Those of us who have accepted vaccine-testing, car-crash testing-- truth that arises from trying to change something in scientific practice--do not have trouble with dialectical materialism's elimination of the difference between is and ought. It is those of us who do not accept science as it is in many fields and who want to leave open the door to creationism and other idealisms that do not realize dialectics is what makes materialism fully 100% materialist. We certainly want to keep math and allow for Newton-like scientific endeavors, but humyn endeavors deserve a study much akin to study of evolution, vaccines and auto engineering.