[LANMaster]

A Marxist might contend that during Marx's time the goods manufactured were priced at a high level which only the capitalists could afford. Such an assertion would be factually wrong, however; describing the results of the same Industrial Revolution in which Marx perceived increasing poverty leading to starvation, Jacob Bronowski writes:

Of course, that standard has kept rising, in the Capitalist and semi-Capitalist countries, through the present, with it's previously undreamed-of standard of living for everyone, including of course the working class.

In another example of historic, political, economic, and logical self-contradiction, Marx writes that, "National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to… freedom of commerce…" Then, writing of end of "exploitation" to be brought about by the introduction of Communism, Marx writes that, "In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility between one nation to another will come to an end." Again, in logic, one is led to ask: if freedom of commerce leads to harmony among nations, why would the opposite policy, the abolition of freedom of commerce, now solve the already solved, now nonexistent problem of international antagonisms, rather than, logically, lead to the opposite result? To understand why economic freedom historically led to harmony among nations, and what effect the abolition of economic freedom would cause (and, in fact, later did cause) among nations, however, requires an analysis which Marx wisely avoids in the Manifesto.

Liberals will never understand.
Bronowski was just another egotistical, liberal twit who, when forced to confront the fact that he was utterly wrong about how prosperity benefits the poor FAR, FAR more than Marxist, Socialism, carries on picking dandilions, skipping through the field, sated by his own delusional, envious, self-loathing.

I am not surprised that xico uses one of his quotes in his signature. How appropriate.

[xico]

This is a very nice introduction to the Ascent of Man. It runs 2 min 28 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA&NR=1

I always found Bronowski very human.

[xico]

This is the ending of The Ascent of Man. It runs 4 min. 25 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2p9By0qXms

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

Liberals will never understand.
Bronowski was just another egotistical, liberal twit who, when forced to confront the fact that he was utterly wrong about how prosperity benefits the poor FAR, FAR more than Marxist, Socialism, carries on picking dandilions, skipping through the field, sated by his own delusional, envious, self-loathing.

I am not surprised that xico uses one of his quotes in his signature. How appropriate.

You do realize that the body of the text you quoted was not by Bronowski?

This was all of the Bronowski quote>>

"The new inventions were for everyday use. The canals were arteries of communication: they were not made to carry pleasure boats, but barges. And the barges were not made to carry luxuries, but pots and pans and bales of cloth, boxes of ribbon, and all the common things that people buy by the pennyworth." "It is comic to think that cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. Yet these simple things—coal in an iron range, glass in the windows, a choice of food—were a wonderful rise in the standard of life and health…"

How did you derive this>

Bronowski was just another egotistical, liberal twit who, when forced to confront the fact that he was utterly wrong about how prosperity benefits the poor FAR, FAR more than Marxist, Socialism, carries on picking dandilions, skipping through the field, sated by his own delusional, envious, self-loathing.

[Stoner]

Furthermore....here is a more complete text of what Bronowski wrote:

http://www.sisins.zju.edu.cn/iol/don...wn/history.htm

England Before the Industrial Revolution
The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark, and the labourer lived not in the sun, but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labour were immemorial, like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer's time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines; the millwrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self-made career in I733 by working at mill wheels, at the age of seventeen, having been born poor in a village.

Brindley's improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. It was the first multi-purpose machine for the new industries. Brindley worked, for example, to improve the grinding of flints, which were used in the rising pottery industry.

Yet there was a bigger movement in the air by I750. Water had become the engineers' element, and men like Brindley were possessed by it. Water was gushing and fanning out all over the countryside. It was not simply a source of power, it was a new wave of movement. James Brindley was a pioneer in the art of building canals or as it was then called, 'navigation'.

Brindley had begun on his own account, out of interest, to survey the waterways that he travelled as he went about his engineering projects for mills and mines. The Duke of Bridgewater then got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Duke's pits at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester. ... Brindley went on to connect Manchester with Liverpool in an even bolder manner, and in all laid out almost four hundred miles of canals in a network all over England.

Two things were outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. Like Brindley, they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.

The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use. The canals were arteries of communication: They were not made to carry pleasure boats, but barges. And the barges were not made to carry luxuries, but pots and pans and bales of cloth, boxes of ribbon, and all the common things that people buy by the pennyworth. These things had been manufactured in villages which were growing into towns now, away from London; it was a country-wide trade.



(from J Bronowski, The Ascent of Man) (from J Bronowski, The Ascent of Man)

To show how silly your accusation was>
From>
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:...ient=firefox-a

However, the time came when the brain of some men consciously or subconsciously mutinied against this belief. Men with practical goals took up the task to turn scientific achievements into practical applications. Men like James Brindley, Josiah Wedgwood, John Wilkinson, Matthew Houlton and dozens more took advantage of the greater freedom existing in England to become "money makers" by changing the life of the poor, an existence thwarted in pigsties of horrendous poverty and hopelessness. "It is comic to think that cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor," wrote the brilliant Jacob Bronowski in his book "The Ascent of Man" (Chapter 8). "Yet these simple things - coal in an iron range, glass in the windows, a choice of food - were a wonderful rise in the standard of life and health. By our standards, the industrial towns were slums, but to the people who had come from a cottage, a house in a terrace was a liberation from hunger, from dirt, and from disease; it offered a new wealth of choice."

furthermore>

The men that bet their money to the confidence that both poor and wealthy would buy the new products they were presenting on the market, were the businessmen. Businessmen, social benefactors of colossal dimensions, created mass markets so that every product could reach any social level, even the lowest conceivable.

Do you actually understand this?

Marx and Frederic Engels themselves confirmed their monstrous purpose of wanting to send men back to the prehistorical ages of ignorance, plagues and the intellectual and physical bondage of communism when they recognized, in the "Communist Manifesto", that "The bourgeoisie (the term used at their time for capitalists), by their rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most backward nations into civilization.

Bronowski was arguing against socialism.................

[Stoner]

Last edited by iltos; 1 Minute Ago . Reason: removed duplicate sentences in long quote

Actually, I beat you to it by a minute or two

[iltos]

Originally Posted by Stoner

Actually, I beat you to it by a minute or two

if LAN responds, i'll change the title of this puppy and move it to CD
it would be an interesting topic....i think "the ascent of man" was one of the finest TV productions ever made.

good post, btw

[iltos]

actually, i'll just do it now
le't see what develops

[Stoner]

My local library has The Ascent of Man on a series of DVDs.
Soon as they are available, I think I'll take a look.

[iltos]

Originally Posted by Stoner

My local library has The Ascent of Man on a series of DVDs.
Soon as they are available, I think I'll take a look.

it's scope is huge
this thread seems mostly concerned about volume 8: the Drive for Power
here's the 50 min vid covering LAN's premise and your rebuttal
fwiw, the whole series looks like it's there.

[xico]

Originally Posted by iltos

if LAN responds, i'll change the title of this puppy and move it to CD
it would be an interesting topic....i think "the ascent of man" was one of the finest TV productions ever made.
good post, btw

That's what I thought, but a Marxist friend of mine poo pooed Bronowski. Unfortunately I've forgotten what his criticisms of Bronowski was. Nice posts Stoner.

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by iltos

it's scope is huge
this thread seems mostly concerned about volume 8: the Drive for Power
here's the 50 min vid covering LAN's premise and your rebuttal
fwiw, the whole series looks like it's there.

Watching it right now.....thanks for the link

[iltos]

Originally Posted by xico

That's what I thought, but a Marxist friend of mine poo pooed Bronowski. Unfortunately I've forgotten what his criticisms of Bronowski was. Nice posts Stoner.

only Bronowski could take Mozart's struggle against the status quo of 18th century French aristocracy to produce "the marriage of figaro" and relate it's sarcasm to the discontent that led to the french revolution, and then go on to point out how that same discontent was evident in people who led the way through scientific/industrial revolution, and the social dreams carried to america....realized in the Declaration of Independance, and put into practice by the Constitution

it is that discontent against "authority" (including the authority of "instinct" ) which has driven us as a species: it is THE point of the entire series, imo

Bronowski wrote in his 1951 book The Commonsense of Science: "It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man

how anybody can call this discontent "marxist" is beyond me

[iltos]

this image is just a static screen shot: it loses something without the movement -the little boat slowly slapping along against the little waves, and the big steam-driven crane chugging rapidly backwards along the massive pier- but the words spoken a few frames earlier linger thru it "for the first time it's our world....everybody's world"

it is, imo, representative of the counterpoint that marxists might take issue with: the separation of the "powerful" from the "little guy", and the fact that Bronowski doesn't draw a significant ECONOMIC distinction between the two.

but they're missing the point, i believe....the ascent of man can be seen as the consistency of the "revolution" against the status quo created by the "economies of power" thru time....that's one of the things Bronowski is saying. imo

[Stoner]

Impressive video......