> Education occurs _within_ a movement. A movement consists
> of people in movement, engaged in some collective action or
> (sometimes)
> related series of actions. It is only as those participating in those
> actions carry on lengthy conversations with each other that education
> occurs. So the first principle is GET SOME PEOPLE TOGETHER. To do that
> it is necessary to ignore the naivete of wankish onlookers who want
> the
> education to occur BEFORE ther eis anyone to educate.
This has nothing to do with what Marx means by the "education" required to produce the degree of "integral development" - the "virtuosity", the "free individuality" - required to initiate the kind of "revolutionary praxis" that will then "educate", in this sense, the individuals whose praxis it is to the further degree necessary to "fit" them to imagine and create the penultimate social form.
As I've many times pointed out, he claims that it is primarily relations and forces of production constitutive of the "labour process" that are "educative" in this sense. It's in this sense that they're "basic".
In particular, the relations and forces constitutive of the capitalist labour process are claimed (mistakenly, as it's turned out) to make "wage-labour" a "steeling school" that will develop the required "virtuosity".
This is the "positive" aspect of the "self-estrangement" of labour in capitalism (an essential aspect missing from the account of it in the passage from Gáspár Miklós Tamás you quoted).
This is Marx's idea of "reason" as "the rose in the cross" of the capitalist present, i.e. of "reason" as defining "true reality" and as working via its immanence in "existing reality" to transform the latter into "true reality", these ideas of "reason" having an ancient lineage and constituting the essence of Hegel's philosophy of history.
"No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow- minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement: 'All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.' That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings and censorship. That is how Frederick William III and how his subjects understood it. But according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: 'In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.'" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
>
Thus Marx claims in the letter to Ruge (mistakenly interpreted as a rejection of these ideas) that:
"What is necessary comes to pass." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>
This also underpins Marx's particular idea of "free individuality" and "freedom" as the actualization of the "good" - including the ethical "good" elaborated as relations of mutual recognition - in a "good" life in "the true realm of freedom".
The link of his own idea of "freedom" to the Greek idea is also pointed to in the letters to Ruge, specifically in the letter tracing German despotism to there being only a minority "human beings" in Germany, i.e. to the same lack of "enlightenment" said to be responsible for the despotism of the Bonaparte dynasty in 19th century France (a parallel pointed to in this letter) in the Eighteenth Brumaire.
“The self-confidence of the human being, freedom, has first of all to be aroused again in the hearts of these people. Only this feeling, which vanished from the world with the Greeks, and under Christianity disappeared into the blue mist of the heavens, can again transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims, into a democratic state." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05.htm>
Imagining and creating such a realm requires knowledge of this "good" - the "good" constitutive of the "highest aims" - and of how to actualize it, knowledge attainable, as the letter to Ruge claims, by means of "ruthless criticism" of the present in which it is immanent as the "rose".
This is a sublation of Hegel's idea of the relation of "the higher dialectic of the conception" to "the business of science".
"the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically. Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/ruge/index.htm>
Marx also claims, however, that this isn't the only labour process capable of developing the requisite "free individuality".
In particular, as I've many times pointed out, he also claims that the labour process characteristic of "the petty mode of production" (e.g. the labour process of English yeomanry in Shakespeare;s England and of the peasant citizens of "classical communities at their best") developed "the free individuality" - the "virtuosity" - of the peasant and artisan.
"The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1>
This is the basis of his mistaken surmise in 1881 that the labour process in the Russian peasant commune might have developed a sufficient degree of "free individuality" in Russian peasants to enable them to initiate a "revolutionary praxis" that could "appropriate" the productive forces develops by capitalism outside Russia and use then to create the penultimate social form.
This is not what happened in 1917.
Ted