>The passage from Marx illustrates Marx's treatment of the capitalist
>labour process as a process that develops the capabilities of the
>individuals subjected to it and, in this and other ways, constitutes
>them as the subjects able to create the penultimate social form from
>which all barriers to the full actualization of "freedom" have been
>eliminated.
Thanks for this post. I don't share this reading, however. Or rather, I think it only captures part of the story. It's late and I've enjoyed several of Sierra Nevada's fine 2006 Celebration Ales, so my textual evidence and articulation won't match yours, but here's why: You indicate that Marx sees the labor process as constituting subjectivity, but forget that the laboring subject, or at least the collective subject, also acts on capital. This, I think, is the point of, among other things, the sections in Capital on cooperation and the fight for the ten-hour day (and even the sections on primitive accumulation). And I certainly don't agree with your teleological, progressivist account of Marx's conception of history. Probably in Marx's early years this existed, but it disappeared by Capital. Presumably, when you say "penultimate social form" you mean before the final social form, ie, communism. But Marx defined communism as the destruction of the present state of things, so I don't see how a stagist, progressive history fits in with a future that never arrives. Finally, I don't think that Marx has such an essential view of freedom as you indicate here; that is, I don't read freedom as a static state to come to. The Chapter on Money on Capital is clear that capitalism *depends* on freedom, even if it is a wholly negative freedom.