> That's all very nice, Ted, but how do you propose to make sure people
> get food on the table and a roof over their heads?
That's a very interesting question. My point was, though, that it's not addressed by critical or "Marxist" treatments of the matter that misinterpret its nature.
For instance, a key "need" met both by the instrumental activity itself and by the "scale of consumption" it makes possible is developmental.
“Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time—which is both idle time and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
"this share [of "wages" in production in the penultimate social arrangement] is freed from its capitalist limit and expanded to the scale of consumption that is both permitted by the existing social productivity (i.e. the social productivity of his own labour as genuinely social labour) and required for the full development of individuality" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch30.htm
If we move things back to the beginning of this penultimate arrangement just after it has emerged from capitalism, this developmental problem involves overcoming the irrational thinking and feeling that Marx claims would still characterize "individuality" in that context. In the Ecoonomic and Philosophic manuscripts he elaborates this in terms of sexual thinking and feeling.
> communism is the positive expression of annulled private property –
> at first as universal private property.
>
> By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:
>
> (1) In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of it
> [of this relation]. As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the
> one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it
> wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed
> by all as private property. It wants to disregard talent, etc., in
> an arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence
> is direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not
> done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of
> private property persists as the relationship of the community to
> the world of things.
>
> Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to
> private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing
> to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the
> community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal
> and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community
> of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and
> thoughtless communism.[30] Just as woman passes from marriage to
> general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression
> of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a
> relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the
> one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater
> – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. – Note by Marx
> [31]] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective
> substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with
> the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution
> with the community. This type of communism – since it negates the
> personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression
> of private property, which is this negation.
>
> General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in
> which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in
> another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such
> is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form
> of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that
> this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition.
> Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this
> levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a
> definite, limited standard.
>
> How little this annulment of private property is really an
> appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the
> entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the
> unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs
> and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has
> not yet even reached it.
>
> The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages
> paid out by communal capital – by the community as the universal
> capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an
> imagined universality – labour as the category in which every
> person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and
> power of the community.
>
> In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal
> lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for
> himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous,
> decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man
> to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-
> relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary
> relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In
> this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is
> immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is
> immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination.
> In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced
> to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has
> become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the
> human essence of man.
>
> From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of
> development. From the character of this relationship follows how
> much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to
> comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most
> natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore
> reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become
> human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a
> natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to
> be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to
> which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which,
> therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need –
> the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same
> time a social being.
>
> The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism
> – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private
> property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community
> system.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Ted