Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.
Here, even at this extraordinarily high level of abstraction, while mind is central to the process, the bodily initiation, regulation and control of the reactions between Man and Nature never transcend the tripartite and always emergent relations between the mind set in motion, the natural forces of the body set in motion and the material participation and re-actions of nature. None of this can be separated from the architects imagination and I think Marx rather clearly overstates the case when he suggests or at least implies that the end of every labor process the result is a direct realization of the image in the architects mind before work was started. Implying this reifies mind, pacifies bodies and nature and undermines the first third of the paragraph.
My sense is not that, upon the end of the realm of necessity, there is a domination of bodily and external nature by mind/s but that the state of the integration of mind, body and nature is such that the relationship between the three is started, regulated and controlled, not by domination, but by understanding, accommodation and co-operation... though I'm not at all sure this is how James sees it.
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> James Heartfield wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>