> The Marxist critique of the existing social order results from an
> effort to appropriate the world mentally from the perspective of the
> proletarian workers.
Actually, the perspective of Marx's "critique" is that:
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
In the 1843 letter to Ruge where this elaboration of critique is found, the claim is that:
"As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state – in all its modern forms –which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason."
Later, he switches to a critique in this sense of "civil society."
One consequence is the focusing of critique on the "proletariat."
What he and Engels claim to find in its "existence," its "being," is developmental relations for individuals that will ultimately generate a "development of individuality," i.e. of "reason," enabling the individuals involved to initiate a "revolutionary practice" that will then further develop their "individuality" to the degree necessary to enable them (1) to imagine a social form from which all barriers to "the full development of Individuality" and the actualization of "true reality" have been removed and (2) to "appropriate" the "productive forces of social labour" developed in capitalism and use them to build this form.
This remains, therefore, a "mere critical analysis of the facts" of "existing reality" claiming "to develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." (It's in this sense, rather than in one that excludes any specification of the concrete content of "true reality," that it's concerned with "the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm)
This is also true of his "critical analysis of the facts" of the Russian peasant commune in 1881. Thus he claims to find there developmental relations consistent with the same required degree of "development of individuality."
Understood in this way, his critical analysis of the relations constitutive of both wage-labour and the Russian peasant commune turns out to have been mistaken.
The "true reality" to which this development process is to lead is one where individuals will be provided with what is "required for the full development of individuality."
To provide what's required is one of the tasks of activity in "the realm of natural necessity" of an ideal society, this instrumental activity remaining necessary in "all social modes of production" including this ideal one (though here it occupies a relatively small amount of time given "the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour" made possible by "the full development of individuality" - "the all-around development of the individual" - "the most complete development of man").
“If however wages are reduced to their general basis, i.e. that portion of the product of his labour which goes into the worker’s own individual consumption; if this share is freed from its capitalist limit and expanded to the scale of consumption that is both permitted by the existing social productivity (i.e. the social productivity of his own labour as genuinely social labour) and required for the full development of individuality; if surplus-labour and surplus-product are also reduced, to the degree needed under the given conditions of production, on the one hand to form an insurance and reserve fund, on the other hand for the constant expansion of reproduction in the degree determined by social need; if, finally, both (1) the necessary labour and (2) the surplus labour are taken to include the amount of labour that those capable of work must always perform for those members of society not yet capable, or no longer capable of working—i.e. if both wages and surplus-value are stripped of their specifically capitalist character—then nothing of these forms remains, but simply those foundations of the forms that are common to all social modes of production.” (Capital, vol. 3, Penguin ed., pp. 1015 -1016)
Ted