>>> "Dace" <edace at flinthills.com> 02/23/00 02:00PM >>>
That capitalism is opposed to human nature is revealed by the fact that labor no longer means "to produce with imagination." Capitalism attempts to remove imagination from labor as much as possible. This has proven particularly true in the 20th century with the advent of Taylorism. What we have now is a mechanistic form of labor. While this is certainly compatible with ant nature, bee nature, and termite nature, it's a warping of human nature.
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CB: What about the producer's use and control of the product ? Isn't loss of use and control of the fruits of one's labor unnatural ?
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I can't agree with either Ken Hanley-- that the transformation of nature through labor is at the essence of human nature-- or with Rob and Charles that the will to freedom is at the essence of humanity.
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CB: I don't recall saying that the essence of humanity is the will to freedom. I thought I said Engels and Marx seem to think that it is human nature to want to use and control the fruits of one's labor.
Whom do you think Engels and Marx agree with ?
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Rather, what defines us is consciousness, i.e. perception of mentality. Since the mind is where judgments and decisions are made, perception of our own minds opened up the possibility of freely directing our actions, as opposed to merely following instinct. Freedom follows from consciousness, and transforming our environments follows from freedom, but they're not essential to us. That they're not essential is illustrated by early human history. What's curious about our early history is that nothing whatsoever changed in our way of life for a very long time. The prefrontal lobe was fully developed 200,000 years ago, meaning that we were consciously engaged in abstract thought at that time. Yet it took another 100,000 years before there was even the slightest sign of alteration in our interaction with nature, and it was another 40,000 years after that before we finally got around to updating our toolkit, which had been established 1.5 million years ago by our African predecessor, Homo ergaster. Talk about lazy!
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CB: The point I would agree with here is that preclass society was marked by slow and no change in comparison with class society. And that is because there is no exploitation and class struggle in the stone age. Class struggle is the motive for the rapid and extensive change in class society. History if a history of class struggles. An odd thing about what I am saying is that this human "nature' of struggling and fighting to use and control the fruits of one's labor must be hypothetically LATENT for those 200,000 ( 193,000 ) years until exploitation arises.
Also, the implication of what you say is that stone age labor was not very imaginative, in the sense of inventing new tools and techniques. The main thing would be it was planned ahead of time and that it was not instinct but passed on from generation to generation through culture, language , symbols, imagination in that sense.
>Engels and Marx are not absolute or radical historical particularists. With
respect to capitalism they say not only is bourgeois "nature" not human
nature, but proletarian struggle IS human nature, given a bourgeois or other
private property regime. The Revolution is natural.
>
>Maybe ?
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CB
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Whereas the bourgeois conception of human nature is more fitting for insects, the Marxist conception follows directly from human nature. Freedom and imaginative labor are not at our essence, but they follow directly from that essence.
Ted