And Rob replied:
> Well, we're obviously talking the post-1857, Althusser-approved Marx here,
> so I'd ask you to accept that there is at least sustenance for the humanist
> in that section on Alienated Labour in The Grundrisse. Beaut stuff about
> how the exchange relation can only frame human labour as a negative - has
> value only in its negativity, in a world where inactivity is the presumed
> natural state of us all. So he reprimands Adam Smith for forgetting that
> "the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill,
> and efficiency', might also require a normal portion of work, and of
> cessation from rest," indeed, that this would "constitute an exercise in
> liberty ... the self-realisation and objectification of the subject,
> therefore real freedom, whose activity is precisely labour." There's a
> human essence implicit in that proposition, for mine - and 'creativity' is
> not a bad word for it.
Good point, Rob. The labor being alienated (more than mere labor power under capitalism) is by no means peripheral to the individual. Surely few marxists disagree with Marx when he says that "the individual in his normal state...requires", has a basic need for, work, i.e., labor. (If there are any who disagree, I will bet Ange is *not* among them.) If the human being has any essence that separates it from other life forms, surely part of that is the drive to create and produce its means of life.
Just as surely, capitalism has set out to destroy this basic human drive. It commodifies labor power and alienates labor from the individual. It turns labor into a disutility, in the language of the neoclassicals, to be traded whenever possible for the utility of rest (leisure). A primary benefit of getting rid of capitalism, is the elimination of the alienation it imposes, and restoring the creative impulse of people to work.
Having said that, I'm going to leave it to you two to thrash out what this means for the more general topic of humanism.
Btw, there is that passage in the Wealth of Nations where Smith laments what the division of labor in capitalist factories does to the character of the individual:
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even ordinary duties of private life." (p. 724,5 Modern Lib. edition)