27 March, 2020

Dialectical Materialism vs. Pluralist Science


Marx's work was never finished


In watching David Harvey's excellent series of lectures upon Grundrisse by Karl Marx, the vast differences in efficacy, between these two approaches, were laid out very clearly, enabling us to seriously address the vastly overdue, and absolutely essential Critique of the current Theoretical Bases within all the Sciences in General, and, for this physicist, of Sub Atomic Physics in particular.

For, ever since the wholly illegitimate transfer of pure Mathematical Rationality to both General Reasoning and the Sciences, there also has become established, as the primary goal of all Investigative Experiments and Explanatory Theories, to exclusively seek-out the supposed-to-exist "Eternal Natural Laws", which are considered (according to that unavoidably-involved Principle of Plurality) to be the sole causes of all known phenomena, acting as constantly-unchanging and forever-existing Laws determining everything.

Now, if there is a paramount purpose in Marx's founding of Dialectical Materialism, it was to break all Reasoning free from that incorrect restriction.

Yet, of course, the idea behind its then wholesale transfer to other Disciplines, was to also endow these important intellectual activities too, with the very same powers and facilities delivered to Mathematics, in these important areas also. But Mathematics, regards only the properties and relationships between the whole range of Pure Forms, which certainly DO NOT, and indeed CANNOT, change qualitatively - only quantitatively.

So, they have to be fixed in quality for the whole consequent set of mathematical processes to actually work.

But, of course, Mathematics does NOT evolve, as both Reasoning and Science certainly do, so Plurality is a perfectly legitimate characteriser of the Contents involved there, and nowhere else!

For, everywhere else, the relations between concepts are NEVER FIXED forever.

Mankind was originally faced with a completely unsolveable set of problems when addressing just such areas, precisely because of the unavoidable mutual effects between ALL the always both conceptually-simplified and purposely-physically-restricted relations, that we had only been able to extract in very different and necessary circumstances. And literally NONE of them, outside of those special naturally pluralist circumstances, were ever Eternal and Unchanging!

In fact, the main approach that Mankind had discovered, in order to deliver such conclusions, was only ever possible if the Context was artificially achieved and firmly maintained to only deliver a distorted reflection of the real World, which had thereby been forcibly endowed with just those relations alone.

Such a situation wasn't ever evident in Reasoning, as this was a purely cerebral activity: but in the Sciences, there had developed a means of Experimental investigation to reveal and extract just such artificially-Fixed Laws - but, of course, they would ONLY be legitimate for USE within the precise contexts from which they had been extracted. They couldn't be generally true.

Nevertheless, Pluralistic Science did indeed enable a consequent Technology which created an effective illusion of this being the case, making a whole range of successful Productive Activities both possible and successfully achieved.

But, Mankind, along with their hominid predecessors, had successfully made some progress over vast periods of time, primarily through a pragmatic approach to reality, which offered many practical solutions but little deep understanding.

And, since the Greek Intellectual Revolution, the transfer of Mathematical Rationality, nevertheless vastly increased what they could do - so why would it be questioned?

At the same time, the apparent Stability of the Heavens gave them a perfect arena for successfully employing such means to their view of the entire Universe.

But, to achieve a result via such methods, even in arranged-for circumstances, meant a separate experiment for each and every-single-Law presumed to be involved: and a whole series of production processes, one for each such Law, to, overall, deliver something like the expected result! So, an actual all-laws-present-simultaneously type real situation, as could, and mostly did, happen in Reality-as-is, would never be possible, because those many individually achieved laws don't just add-up like Lego bricks, they actually qualitatively-affect-one-another, in currently unknown ways.

So, the usually-trusted "Scientific Methods" could never replicate the natural effects going on in Reality-as-is situations! Clearly, what was needed to be able to tackle any complex events in Reality-as-is, could never be replicated by such usual purely technological means. And, even more important, the situations, in which outcomes qualitatively changed couldn't be replicated.

As Hegel (for Reasoning), and Marx (for Science), had found out, the pluralist approach was totally incapable of ever tackling qualitative complexity anywhere.

And they began to investigate Dialectics, which deliberately included such mutual effects, and that also involved tracing complex trajectories to many such mutual effects, also taking into account the always changing, and continuously-produced Contexts, as the resulting sequence of Phases, at varying tempos aequentially-occurred, and had to be both identified, time-located, and then appropriately dealt with.

Now, this might validly seem to be wholly impossible!

As the tempos of such Phases are often too swift to catch, or too slow to observe in their totality!

So, Marx in transferring Dialectics also to the Concretely Existing World, had History and Geology as informative partial records, and realised that those perfect examples of such "Interludes of Dramatic Qualitative Changes" - in Social Revolutions, which occurred at a tempo discernible by suitably trained observers, who would always be available in such tumultuous times.


Jules Michelet

And, in Marx's time, The French Revolution had only recently finished, and had been recorded in great detail by the excellent French Historian, Michelet. So Marx set about attempting to elicit the various Phases taking place over that tumultuous 25 years of Revolution. Instead of being swamped by everything affecting everything else incessantly, he found that he was able to discern the gradual establishments and dissolutions of the separate phases, due to their ripening causes, as they developed, and then as they were consumed and redirected in subsequently maturing new dominant phases. He could often, in fact, discern the overall trajectory of the interlude, and begin to reveal Qualitative Changes, their causes and effects, AND their transformations of the underlying, turbulent Context too.

Marx, brilliantly, began to construct a means of carrying out a Dialectical Analysis of an Interlude in History, that would throw light, for the first time ever, upon large scale Qualitative Change at ALL Levels in Mankind's studies of Reality-as-is, as well as what it certainly was within real Qualitative Episodes of revolutionary Changes!

A wholly New Level of  Dynamic Qualitative Changes was coming into focus for the first time!

But, he also, and comprehensively, brought his new techniques, to a remarkable level of explanatory power (outside of Revolutions), in his brilliant 40 year-long dialectical analysis of Capitalist Economics in his major work Das Kapital.

For, in that 3-volume work, he not only used what he had learned from his studies of prior Revolutions, but also by literally evolving wholly new aspects of his methods, as-he-went: and thereby demonstrated the only proper way of developing such a Critique in any and indeed every new area of study!

Unfortunately for us all, he died before he could take things further beyond Das Kapital, and, thereafter, nobody tackled the most important area of Dialectical Science, until the work of this theorist some 125 years later.

And, as with the key experiences of Marx in addressing Economics, the trajectory and content of that work could NOT be merely transferred formally solely from the methods developed by Marx: for the Essence of the products of Dialectics, is that none of such processes can ever be predicted in advance, as can always be achieved with "single eternal Natural Laws" within pluralist situations and methodology.

For, Dialectics addresses simultaneous multi-law situations, with diverse outcomes, as the component laws actually affect-and-change one another, are contingent upon one another - and the situations involved necessarily bringing-about an overall restructuring that can seem unpredictable and chaotic.

Each Subject Area will require its own Dialectical detailed studies, and will produce its own characteristic developments! Indeed, instead of idealistic simplifications delivering what seem (erroneously) to be Universal Purely Formal Generalities, any generalities across different disciplines will only become evident only after such necessary studies, and absolutely never before them!

Dialectics doesn't deliver "formal generalities" to be applied everywhere, but, on the contrary, it delivers methods of study arising from the very different Holist view of Qualitative Changes and a resulting Evolution.

One thing that arose out of subsequent initial dialectical investigations, across-the-board, in diverse Disciplines, was the actual trajectory of a Transforming Interlude of Change (a revolution?), which indicated dynamic forms that had to arise to both dismantle old systems, as well as construct the New in such Interludes (though differing markedly at different Levels, were still necessary to articulate such radical and innovatory changes)!


Diagram of a Trajectory of an Emergence


POSTSCRIPT:

The general deterioration of the Sciences, and particularly Physics, was brought about by the universal adoption of Plurality (and all its consequences) originally due to the transfer of Mathematical Rationality to Science, but accelerated by the increasing demands to use its gains in Production and Technology: so Physics was the first to be facing-both-ways as insisted upon by Poincaré and Mach, and composed of both causal Explanations, along with useable Equations, but ultimately impelled by the contradictions and impasses in explanation caused by Plurality, finally transferred wholesale to a uniformly pluralist stance by the abandonment of Explanation for Mathematics!

Indeed, considering the efforts of this Researcher (a physicist) over the last decade: he was initially incapable of making comprehensive inroads into an intended Critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, due, in no small measure, to certain philosophical tricks and fudges instituted originally by Werner Heisenberg, and consolidated wholly pluralistically, by the consequent Mathematically-orientated so-called Theoretical Physicists, whose welcoming milieu was now completely Pluralistic - because it is entirely mathematically driven, with what is left of "explanation" shrinking to a mere commentary upon the "Mathematical Theory" which determines everything.

And, it was unchallegeably re-directed by certain theoretical moves - like the total abandonment of any kind of Universe-Wide propagating Medium - that left whole areas of the subject based solely upon Pluralist Mathematical Equations, and literally NO physical causes whatsoever.

The initial direction, in attempting to find a solution, was therefore, and perhaps surprisingly re-directed towatds studying the methods of Abstraction, that had been involved, and where they were illegitimate!

And this revealed, very clearly, that the foundations of Mathematics had always been based, NOT upon Concrete Reality, but upon Simplified Relateable Abstractions ONLY, so placing that Discipline wholly within the Realm of Idealism and NOT materialist concrete Reality.


Diagram of the Processes and Productions of Abstraction


And, even then, a really effective start could not yet be made, unless a sound basis was established for both Propagation and Action-at-a-Distance, in so-called Totally Empty Space was adequately explained.

A Purely Theoretical Investigation, involving a currently undetectable, but materially-existing Universal Substrate, was assumed, and an attempt made to define its properties, in order to explain all the anomalies of the Full Set of Double Slit Experiments, that had precipitated The Copemhagen Stance, which was carried through to delivering a completely materialistic set of Explanations for physical phenomena.

And this was indeed achieved by temporarily considering-and-using a mutually-orbiting pair consisting of a Negatively-charged, ordinary matter Electron, and a Positively-charged, antimatter Positron, which had briefly been observed in the Accelerator at Fermilab, and named the Positronium, where it was dismissed as an unstable ephemeral, but instead was here considered, in this Theoretical Experiment, as Stable-within-the-Suabstrate, and renamed (for the theoretical Experiment) as a Neutritron - a wholly neutral joint particle, undetectable by current means, and a Unit of the proposed Universal Substrate (supporting evidence lies in unexplained pair production / annihilation which produce these very component particles, seemingly out of 'nothing', Double Slit experiment outcomes and Yves Couder's experiments using Quantum analogs).

Remarkably, this theoretical entity, devised through a dialectical re-evaluation of Physics, was able to deliver everything that was needed to make the assumptions of Copenhagen in all the Double Slit Experiments totally unnecessary - the Neutritron explained them all!

08 March, 2020

Special Issue 68: Redefining Philosophy





Redefining Philosophy? 


You would think after two and a half millennia that a Universally-Agreed-Basis for Philosophy would by now be well established, but that is not only far from being the case, it is also inevitably so!

So, let us reveal the unavoidable trajectory of Mankind’s Intellectual Development into a real perspective. Rational Thinking of any developable kind is at most 2,500 years old, in an overall hominid historical Trajectory of several million years. Man began to try to think rationally in the last 0.0005% of that time, leaving 99.9995% when they didn’t, and indeed couldn’t think rationally at all.

And, of course, the actually-occurring tempos of that development have certainly not been embodied in a constant upwards climb: for sometimes progress was at zero for long periods. Sometimes things went backwards.

For 2,300 years after the Greek Intellectual Revolution it was fatally damaged by an assumption that few philosphers recognise - the hidden assumption of Plurality. This assumed that all relations, properties and Laws are fixed qualitatively and separable from one another.

Only in the early 19th century did Hegel, the German Idealist Philosopher, attempt for the first time to integrate Qualitative Change into General Reasoning.

But even that was not universally accepted.

Indeed, it couldn’t be, whilever Philosophy remained idealist: for the solution could not come from Thinking itself, but in the our understanding of Concrete Reality. Only with the extension and vast further development of those ideas, which Hegel termed as Dialectics, was the possibility of a breakthrough even possible.

And, when it was attempted by Marx in the limited area of Capitalist Economics, it took him the rest of his life to address that single discipline, And in doing so, he was developing the stance as much as applying it.

Qualitative development was in everything, and every significant area of study, such as Science, would have to not only receive the same sort of attention as Economics, but would also be as much another voyage of discovery, very much more complex and unknown than Economics had been for Marx.

And in the the 140 years since Marx’s death, this task wasn’r even attempted. It has taken this Theorist and Philosopher over 10 years to lay the most basic of foundations.

But they have been remarkable!

To even begin the process, a wholly new approach had to be researched which produced the wholly new. For all Qualitative Change must produce the wholly new.

In all reasoning previously established using Fixed Laws and Pluralist Logic, the rationality involved, when it could be used, produced actual results - and the same ones every time it was used, and whoever used it! But Qualitative Changes are Dialectical, produced in what used to be seen as impossible developments, for which they were termed Emergences.

To grasp what an Emergence actually is, we must compare it to one of the previous pluralistic Laws, all of which have predictable outcomes.

The outcome from an Emergence, on the other hand, is NEVER predictable prior to its commencement, Indeed, you have to be an exceptional Dialectician to even predict the next phase of such a transformation, and only when the final result is imminent, can the culmination of a completed Emergence be guessed at.

So clearly the revolution in Premises and Bases required here will be very different from the prior Pluralist Methods.

The classical Qualitative changes involved in an Emergence start with a Stability, the destruction of which originally appears to be totally impossible, but which is then threatened by a whole series of crises, which usually, but ultimately, would cascade down into a total dissolution of the Stability, towards what seemed to be impending doom, but could, and often did, begin via series of crises attempt to build towards a new, and finally achieved self-sustaining Stability!

The new philosophical approach would have to reflect all of that too, in order to deliver an understanding of Real Development.

06 March, 2020

Has David Harvey abandoned real Marxism?




Is A New Approach Needed?

If the traditional Organisations
of the Working Classhave been dismantled,
how will they be replaced?


David Harvey is one of the leading Marxist scholars in the world, and his analyses of Marx's key works are invaluable for any current Marxist theorist or activist. In one of his Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, he not only bemoaned the loss of the traditional Political and Industrial Organisations of the World Working Class, but also admitted that all the present day alternatives were both usually entirely disparate in their mobilising-motivations, as well as always being short-lived in the Mass actions they organised and participated in.

And, even though he also saw absolutely no-way-out of Capitalism's ever multiplying crises either, he could not conceive of what he called "A Revolutionary Solution".

Yet, without such a demolishing of the current Capitalist Structures of Provision, Distribution, and Enforcement being so eliminated, the Working Class (in no position to be self-supporting in these regards) would as a result suffer the most!

It was, as Harvey saw it, more like the terminations of many prior Economic Systems via unavoidable demolishing cataclysms, that could never, for truly long periods of time, remedy the collapse, delivering only a Dark Age, which took a considerable amount of time to slowly-find working alternatives, especially in what would now be the most highly developed Ex-Capitalist States.

Indeed, no matter what means he considered, he concluded that a Social Democratic transformation of Capitalism was the only way forward, and that within which, wholly new pro-Working Class facilities, as well as appropriate Social Services and access to Education, which could possibly be constructed FIRST, to equip the Class for Revolution.

But that did happen in the UK, following the Second World War! I know because I benefited from it directly, as a Working Class boy from a very deprived background, who got an Education and ended up a Professor in a University. Yet Education at all levels was still staffed by the old Middle Class. I was educated to join those colleagues instead, and never to appropriately equip my Class!

But, how on earth did a majorly Peasant State like Tsarist Russia, ever manage to do it? Harvey doesn't answer this question.

Also, Harvey does not consider that the Working Class-in-Arms could take over Capitalist enterprises, Trading Firms, Banks, and the rest, Pay No Compensation, and from the outset re-organise them Democratically as Worker-Owned and Run enterprises. For, after all, they had always staffed such firms under Capitalism. It would be the ex-Ruling Class who would not even be able to feed themselves, or work the complex machines of Industry. 

They were tasks always carried out by the Working Class!


Amazon Warehouse by Andreas Gursky

Globalisation and neoliberalism may have completely changed the way industrial capitalism works, but the computer-controlled warehousing and distributive arrangements are still ALL staffed by ex-workers, who had lost their well paid jobs and unions, and got their current posts wherever they could find them - thereafter kept totally isolated from one another (in roles such as delivery drivers).

They could, after the Revolution, come together collectively to organise what they now OWNED. And, once-skilled workers could get together and forcibly take over premises, machines and facilities, as well as transport to construct and run all ex-capitalist service companies, and transform them into Real Social Services.

Come on David, we are talking about a Revolution!


Read it again Dave ;)