Re: Book notice - Creaven, Marxism and Realism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 01/03/01 02:03PM >>>

Yoshie has asked me to post a review of:
Sean Creaven, Marxism and Realism: a materialistic application of
realism in the social sciences. Routledge Studies in Critical Realism,
Routledge 2000. London and New York. November. hbk. 325pp, 0 425 23622 3
65 pounds sterling.

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CB: The essay in this post seems very interesting and in many ways an authentic 
and
creative extension of Marxist materialism.  Critical realism as I have learned 
about
seems to be Marxism by another name up to a certain point. This limiting "point"
became emphasized by the recent discussion of Bhaskar's conversion to a deist.

Further on the point of limit or divergence between critical realism and 
Marxism in
the following,

"Concerning Engels' dialectical materialism: with Callinicos, Creaven
interprets Engels' dialectical 'laws' as 'a broad philosophical
conception of nature rather than a set of general laws' (p. 40). Such an
outlook is of course no more incompatible with philosophical idealism
than Hegel's dialectical outlook was.  One can hold, with Creaven (p.
13), that 'reality itself is dialectical' without holding that it is
ultimately 'material'."

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CB: Surely you understand that the reason that we Marxists are "dogmatic" about 
this
point of ontological materialism is because Marx, Engels and Lenin explicitly 
place
emphasizing arguments on  it. Lenin's  ( or maybe Engels') argument regarding 
the
existence of the material and biological world before the human race and the 
origin of
 ideas in humans is one of the most straight forward on this issue.

((((
CB: I believe the following statement is inaccurate:

"Einstein was a Marxist ..."

or at least this is the first I have heard of it. It is usually said that 
Einstein was
a social democrat. Why did he never announce he was a Marxist ? Love to have 
him as a
Marxist, but , you know, with Cabral, claim no easy victories, whatever, or is 
this
ruthlessly pursue the truth.

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CB: When it is said:

Bhaskar defines ontological materialism as the doctrine which 'asserts
the unilateral dependence of social upon biological (and thence
physical) being and the emergence of the former from the latter' (*Plato
Etc.* , p. 101). (This is broadly similar to a definition given by
Creaven at pp. 19, 29). Here 'physical' carries the connotation of
exclusive materiality - at bottom reality is 'matter'; such materialism
is therefore atheist. Ontological idealism (of the emergentist or
stratified kind advocated by the later Bhaskar) in my view goes along
with the same definition but holds that the 'physical' is ultimately
'ideal' (or 'consciousness' or 'information', as in the position of Bohm
on quantum phenomena in the paper posted by Sid)

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CB: Information and the existence of information in conjunction with matter is  
not
the same thing as human consciousness or ideas as the ultimate form of the 
physical.
Ideas as in philosophical "idealism" refer to the process in human individual 
brain.
Marx differentiated his dialectic from that of the dialectical objective 
idealist
Hegel as follows:

"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct
opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of
thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an 
independent
subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the 
external,
phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing 
else
than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms 
of
thought"

This is an assertion, not a proof, but it makes it clear that Marx is an 
ontological
materialist. It also gives us a hint as to how we Marxists can critically 
pursue (
other than Lenin's/Engels argument above) the proof of the warrant you require 
of
ontological materialism, and that is that it is not accurate to refer to the 
processes
in matter in motion that are reflectable in the human brain as having all the
characteristics of a human brain process. Like a reflection in a mirror, the
reflection in the human brain which is an idea is not identical with that which 
it
reflects in the material world.

What you would have to claim is that the idea in the human brain  is a 
duplication of
processes in material reality in order for the external reality itself to BE an 
idea.
Human thought and ideas are reflection and "translation",  not a duplication,  
of the
material world.