>Reading through the CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, it's obvious that Marx's
>positive ethical principles are pretty abstract. My feeling is that he saw
>utopian schemes as something that others could develop, so he didn't go
>into it in detail. His political principles were that the liberation of the
>proletariat could only be done by the proletariat itself, so he hoped that
>workers would figure all the details out themselves (as they began to do in
>the Paris Commune).
>
>BTW, Marx seemed to develop his views of what communism consisted of from
>the actual working-class struggle. I'm pretty sure that Marx didn't coin
>the "from each according to ability, to each according to needs!" slogan.
>It was in circulation before he wrote GOTHA. Similarly, his description of
>how communism would be governed was based on the Paris Commune's actual
>practice. He was a materialist, trying to base his theories on the real
>world, not on his own ethical conceptions.
In the passage I quoted the starting point for an elaboration of Marx's ethical and aesthetic principles (which would include giving content to the distribution rule) is the association of "a higher phase of communist society:" with the vanishing of "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor" and, with this, of the "antithesis between mental and physical labor;" with labour becoming "not only a means of life but life's prime want;" and "with the all-around development of the individual."
These ideas are given a great deal of concrete content in Marx's other writings, e.g. in the passages in Capital and the Grundrisse on the "universally developed individual" and on the labor of such an individual as "life's prime want;" in his account in "Comments on James Mill" of how we would produce if we produced as "human beings"; in his distinction of the "realm of freedom" from "the realm of necessity" (e.g in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and in vol. 3 of Capital) and his identification of production in the former realm with "really free working" which he in turn identifies with artistic production, e.g. "composing," done "in accordance with the laws of beauty."
As I said in some posts in the Marx/Darwin thread, it seems to me that Marx's "materialism" appropriates much from the idealism of Kant and Hegel. This is particularly true of his aesthetic and ethical philosophy. For instance, the idea of "fully free working" as art is an appropriation of Kant's idea of art as "production through freedom."
I think it can be shown that it is just this idealist aspect of Marx's philosophy of history and ethics that makes a certain kind (namely the conventional "materialist" kind criticized in the Theses on Feuerbach, a kind that, as the third thesis points out, has no logical room for the idea of the proletariat liberating itself through revolutionary practice) of "blueprint" approach to the future inappropriate on his premises and that provides the basis for his critique of "utopian" socialists.
Ted Winslow
Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. North York, Ont. CANADA M3J 1P3