W. Kiernan wrote:
> Ted Winslow wrote:
>>
>> ... Marx makes this point in the preamble to the
>> claim that the ideal distribution principle that
>> would be actualized in such a community is: "From
>> each according to his ability, to each according
>> to his needs!"
>>
>> That such a principle proved impracticable in the
>> former Soviet Union...
>
> I'm not so sure I buy this. The Soviet Union was under embargo and/or
> siege for almost every single year of its existence. That they didn't
> deliver the consumer goods under those circumstances doesn't exactly
> invalidate the concept. It's like saying that the principles of
> capitalism were discounted as impracticable by the fact that the
> English
> had food rationing from 1940 all the way through 1953.
This misses the point.
The distribution principle presupposes a particular kind of individuality, the kind that defines what Marx calls "universally developed individuals." This requires the "the all-around development of the individual."
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co- operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Universally developed individuals have the developed powers required to create an ideal community, an essential characteristic of which is ethical (in a wholly positive sense). Such individuals will self- consciously create relations that are ethical in this sense (the sense that constitutes them as "freely associated"). They and the conditions their full development requires are "no product of nature, but of history," "of a long and painful process of development."
"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm>
"The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm>
The conditions that define the penultimate social form, those from which all barriers to "the all-around development of the individual" have been removed, were not and could not have been created by the Russian revolution. They could not have been created because the developmental conditions of the majority of individuals, the conditions of the Russian peasant commune, did not develop the kind of individuality that, according to Marx, is itself a prerequisite for the kind of revolutionary praxis their creation requires.
Since the ethical is the essence of a good life, each individual in an ideal community requires that all be provided with the means ideal relations require. These means constitute the "needs" specified in the ideal distribution principle. Such needs include a developed "sense for the finest play" and the "capacities" required to "appropriate" fully developed productive forces (capacities that, again according to Marx, a praxis revolutionary in his sense works to create).
The instrumental activity that meets these needs defines "the realm of natural necessity" of the ideal community. Such activity provides each with what each needs for the end in itself activity that defines "the true realm of freedom." Though it requires and utilizes the same capacities (e.g the capacities required to create and appropriate fully developed productive forces) and is carried on within the same relations (relations of mutual recognition) as end in itself activity, instrumental activity requires to be minimized in order to maximize the time available for fully free end in itself activity.
Freely associated universally developed individuals freely share this instrumental activity in accordance with their highly developed abilities.
"Time of labour, even if exchange value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which— unlike labour—is not determined by a compelling extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one's inclination.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
>
Ted