> Jim Farmelant wrote:
> >
> >
> > I don't think that the Bearded One had any such illusions concerning
> > the proletariat. The proletariat would eventually overthrow
> capitalism,
> > not because they were inherently noble but because of their peculiar
> > position within the capitalist mode of production which on the one
> > hand oppressed them through exploitation and alienation but which
> > on the other hand placed them in a strategic position which gave
> > them both the motive and the potential means for waging effective
> > class struggle. I think that the Bearded One took it for granted
> that
> > exploitation and poverty would necessarily have a corrosive effect
> > on human character.
> >
>
> This seems to me elementary. I would guess that in (say) 1916 the
> miners
> of Cherm were not too different from what the Czarist emigres on a
> trans-siberian train expected them to be in 1918 to be. For how they
> actually were in 1918, see Albert Rhys Williams, _Through the Russian
> Revolution_ (Monthly Review Press, 1967), pp. 207 ff.
As I've said before, this makes no sense to me. I think it's also inconsistent with Marx's own view of what is required to achieve a "purpose." That view is set out in the following passage from Capital.
"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)
This is inconsistent with the idea that the "means" - a "revolution" - can be successful when those employing them have no idea of the "purpose" their labour is to realize and have been reduced by their condition of absolute "alienation" to the opposite of "universally developed individuals."
The claim Marx makes about the nature of human labour is derived from Aristotle. So too is the following idea that a "subjective state" is required for the enjoyment of the "finest play."
> On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just
> as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most
> beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear — is [no] object
> for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my
> essential powers — it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my
> essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because
> the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has
> only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) — for this
> reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the
> non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of
> man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility
> (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form — in short, senses capable
> of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential
> powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only
> the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical
> senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of
> the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of
> humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the
> entire history of the world down to the present.
>
> The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted
> sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that
> exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well
> be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say
> wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The
> care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play;
> the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the
> beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no
> mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence,
> both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make
> man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding
> to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.
These ideas offend against your positivism. Does the following judgment apply to them?
> I find offensive all claims that the subjective states of _some_
> people are inferior to the subjective states of _other_ people. This
> is a profoundly reactionary tendency going back I suppose (like most
> reactionary tendencies) to Plato.
The idea of "love" in the passage from Dante also has roots in Aristotle. It's appropriated by Marx in his account in "Comments on James Mill" of how we would produce if we produced as human beings, an account that also appropriates the above idea of developed "senses."
Ted