> There is no idea of a vocation which may be assimilated or re-formed
> by the determinations or law which it fails to acknowledge or the
> strength which it underestimates. Because Marx did not relate
> actuality to representation and subjectivity, his account of
> structural change in capitalism is abstractly related to possible
> change in consciousness. This resulted in gross oversimplification
> regarding the likelihood and the inhibition of change. This is not
> the argument that Marx’s predictions about the conditions of the
> formation of revolutionary consciousness were wrong. It is an
> argument to the effect that the very concept of consciousness and, a
> fortiori, of revolutionary consciousness, are insufficiently
> established in Marx.
This appears to be a misinterpretation.
As Marx hinself points out, his treatment of the "labour process" as "basic" sublates Hegel.
"The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self- creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." <http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm>
"Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. [47] He grasps labour as the essence of man – as man’s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man." <http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm>
According to Marx, what human being becomes through "labour" (in the successive internally related forms it takes in the historical process of "bildung" that make these successive forms "stages in the development of the human mind") is the rationally self-conscious "universally developed individual," i.e. the "Divine Being" Hegel elaborates as "the unity of the universal and individual."
This being has the fully developed "powers" required to actualize universal ethical principles in the relations that constitute "mutual recognition." Such actualization constitutes what Hegel and Marx mean by "freedom."
Though it has largely disappeared from "Marxism," this developmental idea is the essence of Marx's treatment of capitalism.
According to him, the capitalist labour process develops in the individuals subjected to it the "powers" and will required to initiate the "revolutionary praxis" (itself a form of "labour" understood as developmental in Hegel's sense) that then further develops individual "powers" to the degree necessary to enable the individuals engaged in it to "appropriate" the "productive forces" (understood as objectifications of mind) developed within capitalism and use them to create the penultimate social form from which all barriers to full human development have been removed.
Marx's understanding of the capitalist labour process as a process of "bildung" in this sense is badly flawed, but not in the way Rose appears to suggest.
One such flaw is the "mathematical" falling rate of profit argument. Even here, however, Marx is aware of the limitations an internal relations ontology places on the applicability of axiomatic deductive (including "mathematical") reasoning. The "labour theory of value" underpinning the argument requires the sublation of another aspect of Hegel's sublation of classical political economy's treatment of "labour," the idea of labour as "alienated" labour.
"But by the same token the abstraction of labour makes man more mechanical and dulls his mind and his senses. Mental vitality, a fully aware, fulfilled life degenerates into empty activity. The strength of the self manifests itself in a rich, comprehensive grasp of life; this is now lost. He can hand over some work to the machine; but his own actions become correspondingly more formal. His dull labour limits him to a single point and the work becomes more and more perfect as it becomes more and more one-sided.... No less incessant is the frenetic search for new methods of simplifying work, new machines etc. The individual’s skill ‘s his method of preserving his own existence. The latter is subject to the web of chance which enmeshes the whole. Thus a vast number of people are condemned to utterly brutalising, unhealthy and unreliable labour in workshops, factories and mines, labour which narrows and reduces their skill. Whole branches of industry which maintain a large class of people can suddenly wither away at the dictates of fashion, or a fall in prices following new inventions in other countries, etc. And this entire class is thrown into the depths of poverty where it can no longer help itself. We see the emergence of great wealth and great poverty, poverty which finds it impossible to produce anything for itself." (Hegel, as quoted by Lukacs in "Hegel’s economics during the Jena period" in The Young Hegel) <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/youngheg/lukacs35.htm>
Were it not "alienated" labour it would lack the homogeneity necessary for the applicability of the "labour theory of value." This is one of the reasons this theory is inapplicable in a ideal community where "labour" is no longer "alienated," but is the activity of universally developed individuals freely associated in relations of mutual recognition in the "realm of necessity."
Because, among other reasons, of the relevance of internal relations, the rest of Marx's treatment of the historical process of "bildung," including the role played in the process by the "passions," can't be represented mathematically.
Ted