> And also, when you asked the other day
> "Was Marx right about the "proletariat"? " . I thought " History isn't
> over yet."
Ted Winslow answered:
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
******************* Just to add to your excellent analysis Ted, Marx was born and died before full psychological impact of modern capitalist industrialization came to be known. I think the quote below from Eric Fromm pretty well sums up the major *psychological* stumbling block to class conscious praxis, although there are other determinants at work as well, including the very real dependency structure inherent in the employer/employee relationship i.e. the degree to which we have to sell ourselves into wage-slavery in order to eat or feed others who are dependent on us.
Mike B)
"..freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual's potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously."
Eric Fromm Escape from Freedom, 1941
Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht! http://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml
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