> While I agree that creation is vital, trying to "appropriate" causes
> the problem of attachment. Why can't beauty and other goods be
> appreciated rather than appropriated? Again, I would maintain that
> when a person tries to appropriate it is an attempt on her part to
> reinforce a shaky sense of self-identity that she feels can be
> remedied through acquisition/consumption.
This isn't what Marx means by true human "appropriation."
"Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property — i.e., the perceptibleappropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world — seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving — in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it — when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., — in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property — labour and conversion into capital.
"In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world."
Ted