----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 18:55 Subject: Spam: Re: [lbo-talk] argumentum ad scientiam socialem
>
> Carrol Cox quoted Marx:
>
>> Social life is essentially _practical_. All mysteries which mislead
>> theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and
>> in the comprehension of this practice.
>>
>> And now add the Ninth, Tenth & Eleventh:
>>
>> The highest point attained by _contemplative_ materialism, that is,
>> materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical
>> activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in "civil society."
>>
>> The standpoint of the old materialism is "civil" society; the standpoint
>> of the new is _human_ society, or socialised humanity.
>>
>> The philosophers have only _interpreted_ the world, in various ways; the
>> point, however, is to _change_ it.
>
> If we understand "practice" in this context as deriving from Aristotle's
> idea of "praxis" as activity which is an end-in-itself, the concept is
> inconsistent with the "materialism" in terms of which you're interpreting
> it. "Sensuousness" interpreted in terms of "practical activity" in this
> sense involves the idea of developed capacities for those activities that
> constitute praxis - the activities of creating and appropriating beauty
> and truth within relations of mutual recognition. It's in this sense that
> truth is the outcome of "practice."
>
> "The supersession of private property is therefore the complete
> emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this
> emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become
> human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human
> eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man
> for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their
> immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the
> thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and
> vice versa. [Marx's note: In practice I can only relate myself to a thing
> in a human way if the thing is related in a human way to man.] Need or
> employment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost
> its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use.
> "Similarly, senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own
> appropriation. Apart from these direct organs, social organs are
> therefore created in the form of society; for example, activity in direct
> association with others, etc., has become an organ of my life expressions
> and a mode of appropriation of human life.
> "Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the
> crude non-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear,
> etc.
> "To sum up: it is only when man's object becomes a human object or
> objective that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only
> possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself
> becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for
> him in this object.
> "On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality
> universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential
> powers, becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential
> powers, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself,
> objects that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects — i.e.,
> he himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his
> depends on the nature of the object and the nature of the essential power
> that corresponds to it; for it is just the determinateness of this
> relation that constitutes the particular, real mode of affirmation. An
> object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the
> eye's object is different for from the ear's. The peculiarity of each
> essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and thus also the
> peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living
> being. Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in
> thought but with all the senses.
> "On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective aspect:
> only music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful
> music has no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be
> the confirmation of one of my essential powers — i.e., can only be for me
> insofar as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute
> (this is because the sense of an object for me extends only as far as my
> sense extends, only has sense for a sense that corresponds to that
> object). In the same way, and for the same reasons, the senses of social
> man are different from those of non-social man. Only through the
> objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective
> human sensitivity — a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in
> short, senses capable of human gratification — be either cultivated or
> created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual
> senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human
> sense, the humanity of the senses — all these come into being only
> through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature. The
> cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense
> which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense.
> For a man who is starving, the human form of food does not exist, only
> its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crudest
> form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from
> that of animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no
> sense for the finest of plays; the dealer in minerals sees only the
> commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals;
> he lacks a mineralogical sense; thus the objectification of the human
> essence, in a theoretical as well as a practical respect, is necessary
> both in order to make man's senses human and to create an appropriate
> human sense for the whole of the wealth of humanity and of nature."
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm>
>
> Activity as praxis defines life in the "realm of freedom" one aspect of
> which is time for the full development of the capabilities required for
> such activity. In the passage of Capital where the phrase occurs it is
> identified with this development.
>
> "The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in
> itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of
> necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic
> prerequisite." (Capital, vol. 3 [Penguin ed.], p. 959)
>
> The "realm of necessity" is the realm of instrumental activity creating
> means for life in the realm of freedom.
>
> The following passage from the Grundrisse gives a slightly more detailed
> account of the development involved, it is "the artistic, scientific etc.
> development of the individuals".
>
> "The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of
> necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the
> general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which
> then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the
> individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of
> them." (Grundrisse pp. 705-6)
>
> This explains the definition of "wealth" both as "free time" and as full
> human development:
>
> "free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment
> of the product, partly for free activity which - unlike labour - is not
> determined by a compelling extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled"
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-
> value/ch21.htm>
>
> "What is wealth other than the universality of individual needs,
> capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal
> exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of
> nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature?
> The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no
> presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes
> this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as
> such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick?
> Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his
> totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the
> absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics - and in the epoch
> of production to which it corresponds - this complete working-out of the
> human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal
> objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited,
> one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely
> external end." (Grundrisse p. 488)
>
> This conception of a realm of freedom is the ideal republic of the
> imagination that provides the final cause determining the will to
> _change_ the world.
>
> Ted
>
Ted,
I'm not sure how to regard your citations of Marx's version of Erewhon,
whether as a straight faced exercise in irony or an amazingly naive program
for action.
After all, the processes whereby men have "turned the tables" on nature, the development of machine production, the factory system and the market system that enables the distribution of the means of production to the loci of productive activity are all products of the intrinsically alienating system of production that has cast men out of the garden of Eden (if there ever was one) of production for the sake of production. My reaction to the ethereal phrases you've cited regarding the society of absolute emancipation from need and from history is much the same as my reaction to Mandel's more concrete and convoluted description of the socialist society of the future as he presents it in his The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: last chapter, Progressive Disalienation or Inevitable Alienation? (1971). Where's the huge investment in resources and labour and the continued development of technology necessary to provide the industrial economic infrastructure of Erewhon and to cope with the impact of this industrial activity on the survivability of human beings going to come from? Or is this a minor detail that can be dispensed with by a well worded text?
Like the 1st or 2nd coming (depending on your denomination if you have one) it appears that the realization of Erewhon should not be expected in the near future. It appears more likely that for the next century or so men and mankind in general are going to have their hands full just perpetuating themselves (the primary and most basic of human life activities). Oudeyis
>
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