James Heartfield wrote:
> Because you resist the materialist conception of history, you insist on translating Marx's concept, the 'development of the material forces production' into something quite different, the development of mind.
Actually, I interpret Marx's claim that the "material forces of production" "are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified" as meaning that he believes that the "material forces of production" ""are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified."
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
So, according to him, the development and accumulation of "material forces of production" is the development and accumulation of "the power of knowledge," i.e. ultimately (when "human being has become," and, in consequence, "in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society"), the development and "accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves."
"accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation—which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it—of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.
'… productive capital and skilled labour are […] one.' 'Capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous' ( [Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p. 33).
"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani’s thesis:
'… The real wealth … is man' (Della Moneta, Custodi. Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
Ted