Charles Brown wrote:
> Textual evidence, please. I don't recall Marx saying his conception of
> the "ideal" is "eudaimonic".
So far as I know, he doesn't anywhere explicitly use Aristotle's term, but that he believes life in the "true realm of freedom" would be productive of "happiness" - true "joy" - in Aristotle's sense is evident from his description of it. The description also sublates Aristotle’s idea of true “friendship” as a relation of mutual recognition.
“Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.
“Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.
“This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.
“Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
“My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.
“Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one.
“My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm
This is why “the greatest wealth” is “the other human being”, i.e. a relation of mutual recognition.
"It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man – under the assumption of socialism – receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance.
“Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth – the other human being.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm These claims are also echoing Goethe at the end of Faust about what will be revealed as the moment to which we would say "stay" when "wisdom speaks its final word and true".
Ted