On 8-May-09, at 7:42 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> 'm with Mike. It seems to me that there are only "stages" if
> there's some
> sort of teleological history - and Marx certainly stressed potential,
> opportunity, and contingency more than a singular historical
> trajectory. It
> also seems to me that, thoroughgoing materialist that he was, Marx
> couldn't
> possibly have accepted a method that put an abstract human mind at the
> center of history without a kind of relational approach where "words
> like
> bats" are constantly redeveloping the meaning of the human mind as a
> bodily,
> sensuous, social and situated agency.
Like Beggs's remark, this misunderstands the interpretive point I made and the texts I quoted in support of it.
The "teleological" aspect of Marx derives from the ontological idea that there is knowable and objective "good" - and, hence, a potential "universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc." - and from the anthropological (in the philosophical sense) idea that human being is the being potentially able to develop the intellectual and aesthetic "powers" required to know and actualize this "good".
This is the idea of "freedom" Marx makes the "telos" of human history in the passage from vol. 3 of Capital.
What's "contingent" is whether or not this potential will ultimately be realized and, to some degree, the "educative" stages required to produce the degree of individual "integral development" its realization requires.
The second kind of contingency is pointed to in the 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich where Marx speculates that the relations characteristic of the Russian peasant commune might be consistent with developing the degree of "integral development" of individuals required to enable them to "appropriate" (in the sense specified in the passage I quoted from the German Ideology) the "universality" embodied in the forces of production developed within capitalism outside Russia and use them to create the penultimate social form from which all barriers to full "integral development" and the actualization of "universality" have been removed.
The "educative" stages are, however, only contingent to some degree. Precisely because they are "educative" there are "internal relations" between them. Thus the stages preceding the penutimate stage are "necessary" to its creation and functioning because these presuppose the requisite degree of "integral development".
That letter is also consistent with the idea of "teleology" I'm attributing to Marx. In particular, the main obstacle it claims the relations of the commune put in the way of the required "integral development" is "isolation".
As he makes clear elsewhere, including in the passage from the Grundrisse claiming that "wealth" as "universality" is "created by universal exchange", this is an obstacle in the way of the development of "mind" to "universality" - to "enlightenment" - because "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections".
"the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then [following the communist revolution] will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All- round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co- operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
>
"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm>
This is a sublation of Kant's idea of the "sensus communis" as a method of escaping the limitations of one's own "perspective" and attaining to "universality" by incorporating the perspectives of others. This "universality" is the capacity for "enlarged thinking" Kant identifies with "enlightenment".
Kant also identifies a lack of "enlightenment" in this sense with "superstition" and "prejudice" and links these to the uncritical following of leaders, i.e. to "despotism". Marx, as he does elsewhere, makes the same link in this letter.
"There is one characteristic of the 'agricultural commune' in Russia which afflicts it with weakness, hostile in every sense. That is its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this type but which, wherever it is found, has caused a more or less centralised despotism to arise on top of the communes." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm>
The "universality and comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities" constitutes "the integral development of every individual producer." Contributing to such development is one of the two essential ways in which capitalism "begets its own negation" by creating "the elements of a new economic order", the other being the development of mind embodied in "the productive forces of social labour".
“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer.” Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
>
The whole basis of the identification of the history of the development of mind with the history of technology is that, for Marx, the mind is embodied in "sensuous activity", in "practice". This is also made clear in vol. 1 in the general discussion of human "labour" and the "labour process" in section 1 of chap. 7 - a section that elaborates what Marx takes to be going on in human "labour" by means of a footnote reference to Hegel:
“Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s intentions.” (Hegel: “Enzyklopädie, Erster Theil, Die Logik,” Berlin, 1840, p. 382.)" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#2a>
The first thesis on Feuerbach points to "idealism" as providing the means to correct what is claimed to be the ignoring of this relation of "sensuousness" to "mind" in Feuerbach's and all earlier forms of"materialism".
"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of theobject or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm>
These theses also make "sensuous human activity, practice" the real "school" that "educates" individuals to "universality".
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
This is repeated and elaborated in the following passage from the German Ideology, a passage that also elaborates what Marx means by the "appropriation" of "the existing totality of productive forces".
"Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.
"The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.
"This appropriation [of the forces of production developed in capitalism] is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.
"This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm
>
Marx himself connects the idea of "labour" within "estrangement" as "educative" to Hegel.
"The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self- creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." <http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm>
Ted