we're not really talking about anarchism anymore... maybe i should have done something with the subject line. anyways,
rob wrote:
>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.<
there's a lot of reference points in marx for lots of divergent claims, as you've noted before. i wasn't so much thinking of althusser, but of the chapter in _capital v3_ on the trinity formula: "a mere ghost -- 'the' Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all"; and the derision marx heaps on the political economist's depiction of "the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not only of every social form and well-defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independant of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still non-social man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social." (p.795)
as i wrote in the previous post, "i disagree with your presumption that the contradiction is that between a hidden or denied human nature and social reality. as in the above [the dimensions of labour], the contradictions are immanent, not transhistorical." that is, as postone (rather than althusser) argues: "The difference between an analysis based on the notion of 'labour', as in classical political economy, and one based on the concept of the double character of concrete and abstract labour in capitalism is crucial: it is, in Marx's phrase, 'the whole secret of the critical conception'. It delineates the difference between a social critique that proceeds from the standpoint of 'labour', a standpoint that itself remains unexamined, and one in which _the form of labour itself_ is the object of critical investigation." (TLSD, pp. 56-7)
> All I actually thought I said was that sexuality is part of the human
essence, and that any denial of its expression might therefore constitute a
denial of something importantly human. I can think
of more conservative approaches to sexuality than that. Can't you?<
no, i'm having a hard time thinking of any that are more conservative -- not in the sense of 'right-wing', but in the literal sense of 'conserving what is'. specifically what forms of sexuality, desire, etc would you regard as a natural expression of what it means to be human? and, by implication, what forms aren't?
roger wrote:
> 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.<
but what does this imply for the form that this creation and production take? in many ways, the constant tension between aesthetic (creative) and economic (production) conceptions of labour (as well as the desire to meld that contradiction, allow labour to become creation, etc) indicates a certain historical specificity already, right? it's already a position taken with respect to a certain historically-specific form of labour, a statement that would be unintelligible in another epoch. that doesn't mean we can escape these references (they're necessary to any statement; without them, any critique would be unintelligible for us), but it does mean we should notice the mechanisms by which historical specificity is re-asserted as human nature, naturalised through the figure of the "non-social man".
we had some of this discussion as i recall some time back on whether or not marx had a physiological definition of labour. i think that discussion is related to this discussion about labour, and indeed the discussion about sex and gender. maybe we're all recycling...
Angela _________