> The Realm of
> Necessity is where ruling classes control masses by conditioning
> fulfillment of needs on exploited classes producing surpluses for the
> exploiting, ruling classes. That's where these phony left arguments
> against positive powers freedoms are slipping us back to.
I think this mischaracterizes what Marx meant by "the realm of natural necessity."
It's part of an ideal community, the part defined by the fact that the activity it involves is instrumental rather than an end in itself. It's in this sense that it's not fully free. The "ends" of the activity are given to it from "the true realm of freedom." The activity meets the material and other needs of life in this relm where activity is an end in itself having internally related intellectual, aesthetic and ethical aspects. This is Marx's conception of "positive freedom." Activity in both realms requires fully developed "powers" in Aristotle's sense of "virtues."
The ethical aspect of fully free activity is relations of mutual recognition. By definition, these are and must be completely free of coercion. This, however, is only a negative characterization. When actualized, they and the other aspects of fully free activity constitute an ideal life, "flourishing" in Aristotle's sense of eudaimonia.
Relations in the realm of necessity must also be relations of mutual recognition both because these are the ones "most worthy and appropriate to their ['the associated producers'] human nature" and because these are the most "efficient" relations, i.e. the relations enabling instrumental activity to be carried out with the least expenditure of energy and time and thereby freeing the maximum amount of energy and time for end in itself activity.
"Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can only consist in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 3 [Penguin ed.], p. 959)
Since as a purely logical matter it's quite possible to imagine, as does Marx here, positive conceptions of "freedom" that logically exclude any form of coercion, inability to imagine such a conception suggests a significant degree of unmastered instinctive coerciveness. This applies as well to those who can't imagine "human nature" as other than a sadistic "will to power," an idea that must, merely as a logical matter, be true of their "nature."
Ted