> Ted, that's the trouble with your category Mind: it is everything. Football is mind, eating a good meal is mind the development of the productive forces is mind. Nothing remains from the all-conquering imperialism of mind. But at just the moment that you had subsumed everything into the void of mind, then, you, Ted, snap back into the role of policeman excluding those things that you think are unworthy of mind. So when I say that you cannot prescribe the content of freedom, you say, oh no, that's not freedom, freedom is the development of mind.
>
It's not my category; it's Marx's.
You're again misrepresenting tit. It doesn't concern "mind" in some sense that transcends individuals. It concerns individual "minds."
Marx makes the role "mind" in this sense plays in human activity the defining characteristic of the activity.
"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
It's Marx who identifies "freedom" with "the development of human powers as an end in itself," "the free development of individualities," "the artistic, scientific etc. development of individuals" and, consistent with this, invokes "composing" in order to contrast his own view of "really free working" with Fourier's.
The "higher phase of communist society" (characterized by "the all-around development of the individual") is a set of "objective and subjective conditions"
"in which labour becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization, which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like [35] naivete, conceives it. [36] Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion. The work of material production can achieve this character only (1) when its social character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same time general character, net merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all the forces of nature." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch12.htm
This contrast is repeated elsewhere in the Grundrisse. Activity in "the realm of natural necessity" of communist society (which can't be "play" in Fourier's sense for the additional reason that it's instrumental rather than end it itself activity) is the activity of "the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society."
"Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, [5] although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
The relation of this idea of "freedom" to Hegel's was pointed to by Engels in Anti-Duhring.
"Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity (die Einsicht in die Notwendigheit).
'Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood [begriffen].'
"Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm
Marx's idea of "freedom" is, by the way, inconsistent with any role for a cop.
Ted