punishment

Kelley Walker kelley at interpactinc.com
Thu Apr 26 10:33:18 PDT 2001



>I have yet to see a usage of the term (even as
>an ideological term) that doesn't confuse the text in which it appears.

i use the term in exactly the way that Marx used different terms to identify different segments of the working class and the bourgeoisie. as i pointed out in that portion of my diss i sent to the list: the mistake that is made is to Marx's prescriptive, normative social theory regarding the realization of the working class AS a class with his empirical social science.

Marx and Engels wrote: "the division of labor implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity--enjoyment and labor, production and consumption--devolve on different individuals..." The paradigmatic d.o.l is in the family "where wife and children are the slaves of the husband...Division of labor and private property are, moreover, identical expressions" They go on to describe how the division of labor and the ideologies associated w/ it obfuscate the social, cooperative, communal characteristic of productive labor in which the products of one's labor appear as alien to us: "For as soon as the division of labor in society comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood"

The point here is that the division of labor--between mental and material production-- was already advanced by M&E. There was the general d.o.l. manifesting itself as workers v. owners, production v consumption. There was another level of a d.o.l that existed within the bourgeoisie, that between the intellectuals (ideologists, the capitalists who invested capital, and the rentiers who owned the land and/or machinery (see the 18th Brumaire)

to speak, empirically, of intellectuals--the professionals, the managers, etc. is not at all incoherent wrt M&E's own writings.

I'd provide more textual evidence, but you say you don't read lengthy posts.

kelley



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