> You are arrested at some point in Marx's working out of his philosophy that is between Hegelianism and Marxism, but fail to understand that Marx subsumes Hegel's overriding preoccupation with mind and makes it a subclause in Marx's materialist conception of history.
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> The development of the mind is an issue, it is just not the most important - except to you. To Marx the most important is the diminution of the realm of necessity, by abbreviating the labour process, and the consequent expansion of the (potential) realm of freedom.
What I fail to understand is how these interpretive claims can be made consistent with what Marx actually writes.
The "true realm of freedom," for instance, is identified by Marx with "the development of human powers as an end in itself," with "the free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."
The "artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free" is the development of the human mind as the development of self-conscious reason whose actualization in end in itself activity is "freedom."
This sublates Kant both directly and via Hegel.
Thus Kant defines "art" as "production through freedom, i.e., through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action."
“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e., through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art. For, although we are pleased to call what bees produce (their regularly constituted cells) a work of art, we only do so on the strength of an analogy with art; that is to say, as soon as we call to mind that no rational deliberation forms the basis of their labour, we say at once that it is a product of their nature (of instinct), and it is only to their Creator that we ascribe it as art.
“If, as sometimes happens, in a search through a bog, we light on a piece of hewn wood, we do not say it is a product of nature but of art. Its producing cause had an end in view to which the object owes its form. Apart from such cases, we recognize an art in everything formed in such a way that its actuality must have been preceded by a representation of the thing in its cause (as even in the case of the bees), although the effect could not have been thought by the cause. But where anything is called absolutely a work of art, to distinguish it from a natural product, then some work of man is always understood.” http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt
Marx repeats this in his definition of human labour in Capital. He also in that context distinguishes forms of human labour that are more or less rationally self-determined from those that are instinctively determined and makes the former that outcome of an historical developmental process that substitutes it for the latter, i.e. "we are not now [in defining human labour] dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
Another of the characterisitics of art making if "free," according to Kant, is that it's "play" in the sense of end in itself activity. This idea is also sublated in Marx's elaboration of "really free working," e.g. "composition."
"Art is further distinguished from handicraft. The first is called free, the other may be called industrial art. We look on the former as something which could only prove final (be a success) as play, i.e., an occupation which is agreeable on its own account; but on the second as labour, i.e., a business, which on its own account is disagreeable (drudgery), and is only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g., the pay), and which is consequently capable of being a compulsory imposition."
Marx also makes a significant degree of "the free development of individualities" a prerequisite for imagining and creating socialism.
This is explicitly and implicitly claimed in the late texts cited in support of the contrasting interpretive claim that Marx ultimately abandoned the idea that socialism could not emerge from "more primitive communities," e.g. in Scott Hamilton's claim that:
"For the late Marx, the communal forms of property that existed in societies like Russia, the Iroquois Federation, and Java could become the building blocks of an agrarian, indigenous socialism." http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2010/04/history-necessity-and-new-zealand-wars.html
The late texts pointed to in support of this claim are, among others, Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, his 1877 letter to the editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky and his 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich. http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2007/09/chavez-is-not-marxist-but-neither-was.html
But these texts reiterate Marx's earlier claims that the move to socialism requires a significant degree of development of "free individuality" and that conditions in "archaic types" of "primitive communities" are incompatible with the development of the required degree.
Thus, in the Ethnological Notebooks, it's claimed of American Indian tribes in general and of the Iroquois in particular that “in this early condition of society, individuality of persons was lost in the gens.” (Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, p. 150)
This passage from the Notebooks, along with many others contradicting Hamilton's claim, can be found here: http://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu/msg23293.html
And, as I've pointed out, the 1881 draft letter makes the direct move to socialism from the Russian agricultural commune depend upon conditions in the latter being (in contrast, it's explicitly claimed, to those in "archaic types" of "primitive communities") compatible with the development of the required degree of free individuality.
Moreover, that this developed degree of individuality is a developed degree of development of mind is implicit in Marx's pointing in that letter to the "isolation" of the commune as the main characteristic inconsistent with the required development and in his tying of this to "despotism."
Also sublating Kant, his theory of the development of mind - of "real intellectual wealth" as the "ability to think" - gives a key role to "real connections," and his theory of "despotism" explains it as the political expression of widespread superstition and prejudice, i.e. of a lack of development of individual "enlightenment" as the ability to think, to use one's reason without guidance from another.
In contrast to what Marx claimed of conditions in the Russian agricultural commune, the individuality developed within them was characterized by a significant degree of superstition and prejudice. Though inconsistent with the development of "socialism" in Marx's sense, it was consistent, on Marx's theory of it, with the development of "despotism."
Ted