On 2010-12-02, at 12:52 PM, Ted Winslow wrote:
> Miles Jackson wrote:
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>> If I understand this argument correctly, people must be individually "enlightened" before socialism is possible. Based on my reading of Marx (I'll spare you the quotes), this is exactly backwards: individual characteristics are a product of social relations, and thus socialism is the precondition for the type of "enlightened" individuals you valorize. As in our discussions about social change, the fundamental fallacy here is that social structure is a precipitate of individual psychological characteristics. That's capitalist ideology through and through, as old Whiskers pointed out incessantly.
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> You don't understand it correctly.
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> What the modes of production and exchange determine is varying _degrees_ of enlightenment. Full enlightenment requires the mode which is itself the product of full enlightenment, i.e. it requires the mode Engels in the chapter from Anti-Duhring identifies with "the kingdom of freedom."
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> As Engels claims there, it's a mode
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> "securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties."
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> In this mode, "the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature" and "for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom".
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> “with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.
> “Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends.”
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> “for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”
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> What the capitalist mode is claimed to develop, as I just again pointed out, is the _degree_ of individual enlightenment required to appropriate, among other kinds of knowledge, "a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act ['of universal emancipation'] it is called upon to accomplish," a "full knowledge" necessary for successful accomplishment of the act.
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> Your "materialism" isn't Marx's.