> And also, when you asked the other day
> "Was Marx right about the "proletariat"? " . I thought " History isn't
> over yet."
I meant by that question the developmental claims Marx makes about the capitalist labour process and the revolutionary praxis that transforms it. To what extent do these embody a true understanding of what's required for individual development.
Successful transformation, as Marxe envisions it, requires "subjects" with the requisite developed will and capacities. He claims the process and the praxis develop these.
Thus, in spite of the fact that it leads to "immiserization" (which is itself said to contribute in a necessary and positive way to the development of the required will), the capitalist labour process is a "steeling school" for those subjected to it. It develops "general industriousness" and, in its mature form, some capability for the "variation of labour" whose full development is a defining feature of the end point of the historical developmental process, "the totally developed individual." The limited individual choice it leaves open to the worker and other developmental features of the process "fir the worker himself to undertake historical actions."
"The slave belongs to a particular master; it is true that the worker must sell himself to capital, but not to a particular capitalist, and thus he has a choice, within a particular sphere, as to who he sells himself to, and can change masters. All these differences in the relation make the activity of the free worker more intensive, more continuous, more agile, and more dexterous than that of the slave, quite apart from the fact that they fit the worker himself to undertake historical actions of an entirely different nature." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm
He claims "revolutionary praxis" further develops these capabilities in a necessary way.
"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ ch01d.htm
The "appropriation" (something much more than merely taking "possession") of the forces of production developed in capitalism (forces that objectify the development of mind) through this praxis also itself further develops the "Individual capacities" "appropriation" in this sense requires.
"Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.
"The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.
"This appropriation [of the forces of production developed in capitalism] is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ ch01d.htm
Marx explicitly distinguishes this developmental account of how the capitalism and revolutionary praxis fits proletarians to be the architects and builders of a higher social form from the treatment of them as "gods," i.e. from messianism.
The abstraction of "class struggle" from this conception of history as "stages in the development of the human mind" is Hamlet without the prince.
Ted