There are lots of people who get hold of one particular dimension of Marx's thought and take it be the whole thing. There is a group that think that Marx's unique contribution is the Labour Theory of Value (Alan Freeman is one) who go on and on about that as if Marx's was a footnote to Ricardo. There are others who think that Marx's point was that everything is class struggle and make that into the magic key that unlocks all doors. And then there are the Hegelian Marxists who see Marx's tarrying with economic categories as an incidental to the underlying dialectical development. You seem to be one of the latter, Ted, with your own particular fixation on the human mind, as if the real challenges of science and industry, social change and struggle, were only the earthly mediation of the mind's interaction with its own realisation. The problem with all of these approaches is that they reduce Marx to one dimension of the larger synthesis of his thought, and become dogmatic when they insist that the whole must be subordinate to the part.
Ted writes: 'What I fail to understand is how these interpretive claims can be made consistent with what Marx actually writes.' Well, maybe you do fail to understand, but that might be my fault, or it might be yours.
Ted goes on to say
'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 I did not argue any such thing - I wrote about 'the diminution of the realm of necessity, by abbreviating the labour process, and the consequent expansion of the (potential) realm of freedom'. You smuggled 'surplus labour' into my sentence to cast me in the role of capitalist oppressor, whereas I was arguing for the expansion of the realm of freedom.
And then you put words into Marx's mouth. You write 'The "artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free" '(quoting Marx, in the Grundrisse, p 705) but then you finesse Marx's words by saying that what he means 'is the development of the human mind as the development of self-conscious reason whose actualization in end in itself activity is "freedom." '
But this is falling back into Hegelese. But human freedom is not identical to the actualisation of self-conscious reason, it is whatever it wants to be, not the fulfilment of a preordained Hegelian idea of the Spirit. Why is only the development of the mind a goal? Won't we want to play football in our newly conquered realm of freedom? Or eat fabulous meals?
More problematic, though is the way that you reduce the question of the analysis of and transition from capitalism to its end point, the edenic end of the realm of necessity. That might be the horizon of Marx's thought, but it is largely an empty vacuum (and properly so, if we could outline the conditions that freedom must meet, it would not be freedom). Marx's scientific work is not writing recipe books for the canteens of the future, but analysing the alienation of human powers in the present.
To answer all analyses of the present with the rebuttal that they are not the future is simply to misunderstand what is being said. It is all the more surprising that you should take such offence at Evald Ilyenkov, who more than most, insisted on the importance of the development of human consciousness and the priority of the ideal. Indeed much of the rest of the essay is set out in terms that I think you would approve of. However, as a Marxist, Ilyenkov did not reduce Marx to a footnote to Hegel, but took his unique contribution, the materialist conception of history seriously. But for you, because Ilyenkov does not talk foreground the development of the human mind in that short paragraph I quoted from a twenty page essay, you read that as an error on his part, not what it truly is, Ilyenkov talking about something other than your exclusive preoccupation.
You ought really to apply this method to Marx himself, and go through his works deleting all the passages that are not dealing with the development of Mind, and then you could have the one true Marx, wholly cleansed of all unpleasant arguments about exploitation, overaccumulation or class struggle. Indeed, in a sense, that is what you are doing, when you snip the little quotes out of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and then wrap them up tightly in Hegelese verbiage. Only you don't use the dogmatic formulation 'error', but the more tactical 'what Marx means is'.
You go on to write, Ted, that Marx 'sublates Kant both directly and via Hegel. ' Which, no doubt is true, but you read 'sublate' as repeat, whereas Marx appropriates critically, reducing Kant's ideas (as Hegel's) to the raw material out of which he forges his own thinking. Recognising that Marx draws on these sources, you go on to make the illegitimate step of reducing him to the work he develops - which is to say that you refuse Marx's own contribution.
>From then on, of course, you post departs from any discussion of the point
in hand, to reiterate the thing that interests you (some investigation of
the Ethnological Notebooks and primitive communities) - which is your right,
but it is not a conversation.
No doubt you will reply with a long post that reiterates your point, full of bits snipped from Marx's earlier writings, interspersed with Hegelian rewordings. But what you will not do is engage with anything that passes outside of your comfort zone, which makes me wonder whether you can hear anything said that does not already correspond to the preconceived categories of Mind.