> This hints at the issue of the division of labor. Communism will
> still have a division of labor, so there will still be exchange.
*********** Yes, just not an "enslaving division of labour". Not everyone can or should be flying passenger airplanes or doing "their share" of right hemicolectomies; but nobody should be restricted from learning how to contribute to general, societal needs in more than one or two ways. *************
> The division of labor creates organic solidarity in the Durkheimian
> sense ;The solidarity of complementary groups and unity of different
> peoples based on specialization.
>
> In communism, the aim is to sublate commodity exchange, "extract" the
> silver lining of commodity exchange. Even going back to precapitalist
> trade, that rational kernel or silverlining has been to create greater
> socialization of the human race, wider interconnection of peoples. and
> potentially beneficent exchange purged of exploitation ( including
> making a killing in all senses on the market).
Of course goods and services would be exchanged as use-values sans the exhange-value abstraction in a communist society. There's no need to employ a "market" except in the sense of socially knowing (aka planning) which goods and services are being used and therefore planning what will be needed in terms of using the commonly owned means of production.
***************************
> So, for internationalism in exchange sans exploitation!
Ted Winslow responded:
I don't think this adequately represents Marx's idea of communism.
His identifies it with universally developed individuals living fully good lives in a "true realm of freedom." ******************
MB) This "true realm of freedom" can only be realised within the context of a highly developed means of production with its complex divisions of labour which in turn, would be socially owned and democratically managed for the uses and needs of the classless society.
************* TW:
This realm is defined by end in itself activity, the activity of creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. The creating and appropriating constitute the content of the relations. They actualise the "universal" and, therefore, require the fully developed "powers" that define the universally developed individual. *************
MB)
Of course, if the social revolution is to be made by the workers themselves (and this was a principle which Marx insisted upon in his political work) they will have to have become class conscious enough (have "fully developed 'powers') to pull it off and if they pull it off, they will be living in a classless society, actualising the 'universal' and appropriating the "beauty" and "truth" of the products which they create. The workers already run production within capitalism. That they attribute the creation of wealth to Capital contributes significantly to the lack of contemporary class consciousness.
************ TW:
The idea of fully free activity as actualizing the universal is an appropriation of Hegel.
"In caprice it is involved that the content is not formed by the nature of my will, but by contingency. I am dependent upon this content. This is the contradiction contained in caprice. Ordinary man believes that he is free, when lie is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free. When I will the rational, I do not act as a particular individual but according to the conception of ethical life in general. In an ethical act I establish not myself but the thing. A man, who acts perversely, exhibits particularity. The rational is the highway on which every one travels, and no one is specially marked. When a great artist finishes a work we say: 'It must be so.' The particularity of the artist has wholly disappeared and the work shows no mannerism. Phidias has no mannerism; the statue itself lives and moves. But the poorer is the artist, the more easily we discern himself, his particularity all caprice. If we adhere to the consideration that in caprice a man can will what he pleases, we have certainly freedom of a kind; but again, if we hold to the view that the content is given, then man must be determined by it, and in this light is no longer free." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm#PR15
> *************
MB)
I don't think Charles was arguing for capricious freedom. To be sure, "the real is the rational" within the legal, moral etc. boundaries of class based civilisation. Hegel could not see beyond class based civilisation and did not want to contemplate "going beyond" what his sense of Objective Spirit had achieved--recognizing the already achieved levels of "grey on grey". On the other hand, Marx was able to see the limitations which bourgeois political-economy placed on the realisation of freedom. Hegel was arguing that humankind was temporally travelling towards freedom, using the metaphor of Objective Spirit and the mystifications concerning the Absolute Ideal. But Hegel was a philospher, not a critic of bourgeois political-economy and certainly not a communist revolutionary. *********
TW:
So too is the idea of the fully developed "powers" this activity requires as inconsistent with the activity being divided and specialized. The idea of the universally developed individual appropriates Hegel's idea of the "educated man" who "can do what others do."
"By educated men, we may prima facie understand those who without the obtrusion of personal idiosyncrasy can do what others do. It is precisely this idiosyncrasy, however, which uneducated men display, since their behaviour is not governed by the universal characteristics of the situation. Similarly, an uneducated man is apt to hurt the feelings of his neighbours. He simply lets himself go and does not reflect on the susceptibilities of others. It is not that he intends to hurt them, but his conduct is not consonant with his intention. Thus education rubs the edges off particular characteristics until a man conducts himself in accordance with the nature of the thing. Genuine originality, which produces the real thing, demands genuine education, while bastard originality adopts eccentricities which only enter the heads of the uneducated." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm> ***************
MB)
But certainly the "educated man" as Hegel certainly was, could not be expected to know how to temper steel in Dresden or hunt for deer in the forests of Pennsylvania as well as those who practised these disciplines to make their living in his era. So, "educated women and men" in a communist society, yes. Absolute freedom of being able to effectively carry out mining operations one day and classes in philosophy the next and then genetic engineering the next, probably not. Even in an industrialised classless society there is no absolute freedom from recognising the necessities imposed by one's intellectual and physical limitations.
******** TW:
The German Ideology explicitly makes this point about artistic activity in communism.
"The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour. Even if in certain social conditions, everyone were an excellent painter, that would by no means exclude the possibility of each of them being also an original painter, so that here too the difference between ?human? and 'unique' labour amounts to sheer nonsense. In any case, with a communist organisation of society. there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labour. In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03l.htm
True, more people will be able to exercise their freedom of artistic expression in a socialist society because they will have appropriated the labour time which they had previously given over to the employing class to produce commodities for that class to sell and make profit. In short, they will have appropriated a wealth of disposable time where they can develop whatever creative skills they seek to cultivate. Nobody will be subjected to the narrowness of having to pursue farming or work in the local factory for the boss night and day for a 'fair day's wage' because that's what poppa had to do.
Why? Because we will have self-consciously taken control of our lives by appropriating what we socially produce, including the means of production. In short, we will have ended wages system of slavery. At least, that's the way I've read that passage over the years.
Mike B)
http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join
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