> the Part of *my* answer to these questions would be to point to
> the third thesis on Feuerbach, where I think Marx posed the problem
> in terms
> of "the coincidence of the changing of minds and the changing of
> circumstances" and said that the answer was revolutionising practice
> by the
> working-class. At the same time he recognized that the transitional
> society
> would be stamped with the birthmarks of the old class system, the
> muck of
> ages. The working class's developing of its potential as the
> universal
> class would not be an easy process for a class enmired in the horrible
> relations of the old class society. It would involve conflict with
> the
> oppressor class, which would have to resist that development and
> smash the
> institutions and structures the working-class attempts to create, as
> we see
> nowadays happening all around us. It will also have to exploit every
> division, of "race", nationality, gender etc. To my mind these
> divisions
> however are material, and the oppressed cannot avoid the fight for
> their
> liberation, even if workers not oppressed in the same way see such
> struggles
> as divisive, and share the oppressor's imperialist and chauvinist
> consciousness, because part of their real, material relations are
> oppressive.
> However, more importantly perhaps, doesn't Ted's question ignore the
> massive
> humanising changes brought about by the revolutionary and even
> reformist
> (against odds) struggles of the working class and other anti-
> capitalists and
> anti-imperialists? (The *real* "late" Marx was freeing himself of
> over-concentration on the working class as the universal class, and
> seeing
> the potential in the peasant commune). That answer is even more
> relevant in
> view of the massive successes and gains which capitalism and
> imperialism
> have recently secured against their victims in the working class and
> the
> "third world".
Marx claims that, prior to the "revolutionary praxis" invoked in the third thesis to explain how individuals, without consciously intending it, will be enabled, by the particular kind of praxis involved, both to rid themselves of "the muck of ages" and to develop their "powers" to the further degree necessary to "appropriate" the degree of developed human powers objectified in the productive forces developed within capitalism, the capitalist labour process will itself have worked to bring about a significant development of the powers and will ultimately required to build "socialism" in his sense. It must have done this for the kind of "revolutionary praxis" further development requires to be possible.
He makes a number of claims about how the labour process does this.
Wage-labourers have private property in their labour and their wage. This, Marx claims, contributes to the development of "self-mastery." This distinguishes wage-labour, he also claims, from slave labour.
Wage-labour develops "general industriousness." This contrasts with serf labour.
Wage-labour in the "automatic factory" to which "real subsumption" leads develops both a significant degree of capacity for "civilised" variation of labour (the ultimate end point of such development being the "universally developed individual" who can "do what others do") and a "need for universality" in this sense, for "integral development."
Thus, in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx claims:
“What characterizes the division of labor inside modern society is that it engenders specialized functions, specialists, and with them craft-idiocy.
‘We are struck with admiration,’ says Lemontey, ‘when we see among the Ancients the same person distinguishing himself to a high degree as philosopher, poet, orator, historian, priest, administrator, general of an army. Our souls are appalled at the sight of so vast a domain. Each one of us plants his hedge and shuts himself up in his enclosure. I do not know whether by this parcellation the field is enlarged, but I do know that man is belittled.’
“What characterizes the division of labor in the automatic workshop is that labor has there completely lost its specialized character. But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft- idiocy.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02b.htm
>
This is repeated in Capital in the account of the development within capitalism from the "the division of labour and manufacture" ("formal subsumption") to "machinery and large-scale industry" ("real subsumption") (chapters 14 and 15 in Capital, vol. I). Both here and elsewhere he points to labour in the U.S. as exemplifying these positive developmental consequences, supporting this claim in Capital by quoting a French worker recently returned from San Francisco.
"A French workman, on his return from San-Francisco, writes as follows: 'I never could have believed, that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing.... Once in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer, slater, plumber, &c. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit to any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.' (A. Corbon, “De l’enseignement professionnel,” 2ème ed., p. 50.)" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#n227>
This is the basis of the distinction drawn in the Grundrisse between "barbarians having a predisposition which makes it possible to employ them in various tasks, and civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks."
“It might be said that phenomena which are historical products in the United States – e.g., the irrelevance of the particular type of labour— appear to be among the Russians, for instance, naturally developed predispositions. But in the first place, there is an enormous difference between barbarians having a predisposition which makes it possible to employ them in various tasks, and civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks. As regards the Russians, moreover, their indifference to the particular kind of labour performed is in practice matched by their traditional habit of clinging fast to a very definite kind of labour from which they are extricated only by external influences.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm
>
In the 1881 draft letters to Vera Zasulich he provides a different characterization of Russian peasants, suggesting that the conditions of the Russian peasant commune, particularly the role in it of private property, might have developed an individuality with the developed powers and will required to "appropriate" the productive forces developed in capitalism outside Russia and use them to create the higher penultimate communal form ("socialism") from which all barriers to full human development have been removed.
This does not describe what happened in the Russian revolution and in the subsequent "collectivization" of Russian peasant agriculture. And Soviet industrial development is not a matter of individuals with the requisite developed powers sublating capitalist productive forces and, on this basis, creating a labour process from which all barriers to full human development have been eliminated.
In fact, what Marx anticipated might happen in peasant Russia could not have happened because his 1881 surmises about Russian peasant commune conditions and their developmental effect on peasant individuality were mistaken.
Labour in capitalism did not develop in the way Marx anticipated and for this and other reasons (e.g. Marx's understanding of what's required for the individual development is badly flawed) has not had the developmental consequences he anticipated.
Does the technology embodied in the modern labour process develop and require the degree of "universal" development implicit in the idea of "civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks"? Does it develop "the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual"?
The "passions" dominant in the capitalism that has emerged in China look similar to those that Marx identified with the "primitive accumulation" that "annihilated" "petty proprietorship" in England, i.e. "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32
>
So not only was the Chinese revolution not a revolution characterized by the kind of "revolutionary praxis" necessary to create "socialism" in Marx's sense, it actually created conditions compatible with the eventual emergence and coming into dominance of such "passions" (which may, as Marx claimed of the similar "passions" motivating primitive accumulation in England, be "passions" in Hegel's sense).
The labour process these "passions" create embodies modern productive forces, but it does not require and will not in its present form develop the degree of "universality" Marx anticipated.
Ted