> 've done dishwashing, merchant marining, toll collecting, loading
> trucks, mopping floors - all in small doses, with the knowledge that
> it was almost certainly very temporary. But that sort of manual labor
> leaves one exhausted and mentally numb. I don't think there's any
> wisdom to be derived from it. Isn't one of the points of being a
> socialist or other sort of radical helping make people's work lives
> less damaging?
Motives and the ideas of socialism associated with them vary.
Very few of the ideas, however, embody Adorno's claim that "it is a human right ... to develop one's self mentally" and that life conditions can more or less facilitate such development.
So Marx claiming the conditions characteristic of mid-19th century village India, like the similar conditions in much of mid-19th century peasant France, "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass" is not interpreted as claiming that those conditions were radically inconsistent with those required for the full "development of the human mind."
The ontological and anthropological ideas that constitute human history as a set of "educational" "stages in the development of the human mind" have largely disappeared from what's on offer as Marxism (indeed, from what's on offer as social "theory" generally).
The implication of these ideas is that "socialism," in Marx's sense, is only practicable where preceding conditions have worked to develop the minds of the great majority of individuals to the degree necessary to enable them to "appropriate" the degree of developed mind objectified in the productive forces developed within capitalism. The latter degree is limited by the "fetters" capitalist relations place on the development of mind, so the "socialist" appropriation, like the preceding capitalist appropriation of the productive forces developed within feudalism, must be a "sublation," a sublation that frees science itself not only from the particular form of fetishism characteristic of mind as fettered by its development within capitalism, but from fetishism per se.
So this "socialism" is the set of conditions, including those of instrumental labour, from which all fetters to full individual development have been removed. According to Marx, it leads ultimately to the set of conditions that express the full development of mind, a development necessary to and expressed by "the union of the universal and individual," the identity of "freedom" and "necessity," in "the true realm of freedom."
“Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm>
Ted
> It is a human
> right, not to torture one's self physically, but
> rather to develop one's self mentally.