> But since a point is being made of the exchange between Marx & the
> reporter, let us look at the original context of that too. First, the
> question and answer were outside the framework of the interview; the
> interview was completed, and the question was an afterthought, almost a
> joke, on the part of the reporter. Moreover, the question was wholly
> nonspecific, "What is?" Not, "How does one explain history?" or "How do
> we reach socialism?" or "How are working hours decided?" To the last
> question Marx had given a very precise answer, it happens, in his most
> carefully written text, C v.I. Where rights are equal, force
> determines.
> I would be interested if anyone on this list (including anti-marxists)
> would wish to challenge that. The question was ontological, asking what
> was in the most abstract sense.
As I've said before, for Marx human pre-history is "struggle" because he's taken from Hegel the idea that rational self-consciousness develops within a "process" - the "labour process" - constituted by internal relations of domination and submission, i.e. of class struggle. The process in question is claimed to prove more positively developmental for the dominated than the dominating class, as in Hegel's account of the relative impacts on the self-consciousness of master and slave of the master/slave labour process.
We then have "pre-history" - i.e. human history prior to the actualization of the human "essence" - as an "educational" process through which the human mind attains to rational self-consciousness and individuals develop the capacity to create for themselves a "realm of freedom" in which they finally produce as true "human beings" (as described in the text from "Comments on James Mill," the text mentioning the "totally developed individual" in Capital vol. 1, the text on this realm in Capital, vol. 3, etc.). Their relations are and must be now relations of "mutual recognition." This excludes "struggle" in the above sense.
Through much of this process the positive results are not consciously willed by individuals. They result from "passions." As the end of pre-history nears, however, the nature of the "product" to be produced - the "realm of freedom" - makes it necessary that it be the product of something close to fully rational self-conscious willing and acting, the highest form of what Capital vol. 1 makes the defining feature of human labour in all times and places. There Marx repeats Hegel's point that the end determines the means with the "rigidity of a law," a point found as well in Aristotle (in particular, it's adumbrated in the passage differentiating Chrematistic from Oecconomic I recently quoted: "those arts that pursue means to an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them").
"We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it." (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, [Penguin ed.] pp. 283-4)
In the passage I just quoted, Hegel, employing this conception of the relations of means to ends, indicates why the "realm of freedom" must first be built in the minds of those buidling it before being built in reality.
"The first idea that presents itself in speaking of means is that of something external to the object, and having no share in the object itself. But merely natural things — even the commonest lifeless objects — used as means, must be of such a kind as adapts them to their purpose; they must possess something in common with it. Human beings least of all, sustain the bare external relation of mere means to the great ideal aim. Not only do they in the very act of realising it, make it the occasion of satisfying personal desires, whose purport is diverse from that aim — but they share in that ideal aim itself; and are for that very reason objects of their own existence; not formally merely, as the world of living beings generally is — whose individual life is essentially subordinate to that of man, and is properly used up as an instrument. Men, on the contrary, are objects of existence to themselves, as regards the intrinsic import of the aim in question. To this order belongs that in them which we would exclude from the category of mere means, - Morality, Ethics, Religion. That is to say, man is an object of existence in himself only in virtue of the Divine that is in him, — that which was designated at the outset as Reason; which, in view of its activity and power of self-determination, was called Freedom."
Ted