[lbo-talk] You Can't Make Me Talk

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Mon Apr 9 09:36:46 PDT 2007


Charles Brown wrote:


> "Achieiving this with the least expenditure of energy" is an
> efficiency
> standard, in the rational and goal oriented, purposeful sense. "Most
> favourable conditions" is an optimal standard.

I think this is exactly right. In Marx's conception of an ideal community, there's not only no trade-off between "efficiency" and other "goods," "efficiency," which by definition concerns the adequacy of the "means" to the "end" (in this case a "good" life in "the true realm of freedom"), is absolutely necessary to the realization of the "good." The "end" determines the means with "the rigidity of a law" (an idea that sublates Aristotle via Hegel).

"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 I, Penguin ed., pp. 283-4)

This requires that the individuals engaged in the instrumental activity have the developed "universality" it requires.

"The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being – i.e., a being which treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standards of every species and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence, man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty.

"It is, therefore, in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Ted



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