> Then there's the point made by Slavoj Zizek - that the productiity of
> capitalism depends on capitalist discipline, meaning that it's not so
> easy to carry over the technological achievements of this social
> system into a socialist one.
For Marx, this "discipline" is negative as well as positive. The positive is described as follows:
"the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
But this and the other alleged positive effects of capitalism on the development of the "individuality" of wage-labourers occur within "fetters" which when transcended through the development they make possible will create a context consistent with the full development and actualization of "true individuality" and, hence, with the greatest imaginable "productivity."
I would argue Marx's account of the development of "true individuality" badly needs revising. Among other things, such revision needs to take account of the insights available from psychoanalysis (itself revised to allow for idea of "true individuality").
Do the set of ideas represented by Zizek, including the Lacanian version of psychoanalysis, have logical space for Marx's idea of "true individuality" and its implications for "productivity," i.e. for the idea of a "subject" in the sense I take James Heartfield to be defending?
Ted