Jim Farmelant wrote:
>>> You tell me it's the institution
>>> well you know you better free your mind instead
>
> The real problem with that line in John's song was
> the word "instead." Emancipation requires both
> changes in consciousness and changes in social
> institutions. Both are the outcomes of praxis and
> those two phenomena are inseperable. Wasn't that
> the real message of Marx's *Theses on Feuerbach*?
I wouldn't read too much into it. I think it's consistent with Marx insofar as you read it as pointing, in the idea of "free your mind," to Marx's notion of the development of rational self-consciousness as "enlightenment" in the sense of freeing your mind of prejudice and superstition and as pointing, in the "instead," to Marx's idea that social relations - "institutions" - are our product, we are not their product. The fully free mind will be fully conscious of this and will make these relations accord with reason. (I interpret "praxis" as a developmental and an epistemological doctrine consistent with these ideas i.e. rational self-consciousness develops through "praxis" within relations of production and "praxis," understood as a characterization of the nature of human experience, is the ultimate ground of rational belief.)
The opposite view (as in "structuralism" or any other version of the "materialism" criticized in the third thesis) is, according to Marx, an expression of "mystical consciousness"; it reifies and fetishizes these relations.
“It has been said and may be said that this [‘the way in which their own exchange and their own production confront individuals as an objective relation which is independent of them’] is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it [‘the world market’]: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which It presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities.” (Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 161-2)
Ted