> It has simply gone unnoticed (except by John Torrance) that Marx is
> making the argument that while no individual worker can say as an
> individual that she is treated unjustly, she can lay claim to unjust
> or at least not just treatment as a member of an aggrieved class.
These aren't Marx's ontological premises.
His are "individualist" in the sense that they exclude the treatment of a social entity such as a class as a locus of agency and the realization of value independent of the individuals constituting it.
"Above all we must avoid postulating 'society' again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>
The relevant distinction is between individuals conceived as embedded in "internal relations" and individuals conceived as embedded in "external relations," between an "organic" and an "atomic" view of interdependence.
The organic view constitutes the individual as the "social being" in two senses.
First, the particular "individuality" of the individual - e.g. capitalist individuality with its defining "passions" - is the expression, the "charactemask", of the internal relations that define capitalism. Capitalist individuality is, like the proletarian, a form of "self-enstrangement." In contrast to the proletarian form, however, the relations constituting it are not developmental of the capability and will required to transform social relations into those from which all barriers to the full "all-around development of the individual" have been removed.
When the development of individuality reaches completion in the "universally developed individual," it makes practicable the actualization of "the true realm of freedom" and the implementation of the ideal principle of distribution required for the existence of the kind of individuality constitutive of this realm. The distribution is an essential feature of the internal relations required for the constitution of individuals as "universally developed individuals" with the developed "powers" ("virtues") and other means necessary - "needed" - for a good life.
Second, the "universally developed individual" is a "social being" in the sense that the "goods" constitutive of a good life are essentially social, "ethical." They are relations of mutual recognition whose communicative content is scientific and aesthetic, truth and beauty. This is why the "free development of individualities" they make possible is the "artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals".
“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well- spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non- labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. 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.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm>
All this - including what is required for artistic development, e.g. for the development of a "sense for the finest play" - is elaborated in the EPM in the manuscript "Private Property and Communism."
"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."
"We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man produces man – himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.
“Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment – i.e., activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men – will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.
“But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.”
Ted