[lbo-talk] Keynes on Trotsky

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Wed Jun 2 08:53:12 PDT 2004


Charles Brown asked:


> I know you have repeatedly pointed to activities of appropriating and
> creating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition as to
> what
> it is all about in Marx's view. I don't remember where you derived
> that.
> Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 ?

The passage I usually quote is the one from the Comments on James Mill.

The ideas there are restated in many places e.g. in the discussion of the "realm of freedom" in the material organized by Engels as vol. 3 of Capital and throughout the Grundrisse (as in the passage pointing to "composing" as "fully free working"). Here is a passage from the Private Property and Communism section of the EPM that precedes the passage on the development of "human" senses, e.g. "the sense for the finest play," as "a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present" I quoted earlier. Development as "a labour" is "praxis" within internal relations of production as a developmental as well as an ontological and epistemological doctrine. The passage concerns "what it is all for" i.e. what Lenin is supposed to have had in mind as the ultimate end of the political and economic "poesis" that includes the peasant policies.


> 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 perceptible appropriation 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. [On the
> category of "having", see Hess, Philosophy of the Deed].
>
> The abolition of private property is therefore the complete
> emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this
> emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have
> become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a
> human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object — an
> object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly
> in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing
> for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human
> relation to itself and to man, [in practice I can relate myself to a
> thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human
> being] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its
> egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use
> becoming human use.
>
> In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my
> own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social
> organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in
> direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for
> expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.
>
> It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from
> the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear,
> etc.
>
> We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when
> the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is
> possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he
> himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being
> for him in this object.
>
> On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world
> becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man's essential
> powers — human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own
> essential powers — that all objects become for him the objectification
> of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his
> individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the
> object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of
> the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to
> it; for it is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship
> which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an
> object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the
> eye is another object than the object of the ear. The specific
> character of each essential power is precisely its specific essence,
> and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its
> objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed in the
> objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his
> senses.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>

Ted



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list