> Ted says "Forces of production" are objectifications of ideas.
> That's what Hegel thought. This is what Marx said:
>
> 'it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world
> and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished
> without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom
> cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in
> general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to
> obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and
> quantity. "Liberation" is an historical and not a mental act, and it
> is brought about by historical conditions, the development of
> industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse'
>
> Liberation in an historical and not a mental act - write those words
> on a post-it note and stick them on your monitor.
>
> Forces of production are not simply mental ideas realised, because
> they incorporate non-mental elements, natural forces, which for
> Marx, where he is at odds with Hegel, exist outside of the Idea.
> What technology does, says Marx, following Francis Bacon, is not
> overthrow natural laws, but mediate them. More than that, he says
> that the division of labour itself is a nature imposed necessity,
> whose exigency is not wholly transcended but only moderated in its
> operation by the social organisation of production.
>
> So I am still of the opinion that Charles has a better grasp of Marx
> than Ted, and am still reluctant to attribute the failure of the
> cultural revolution to the endemic stupidity of the Chinese people.
Marx attributes to Hegel's "idealism" the idea that "liberation" is a merely "mental act," i.e. merely a matter of changing our "idea" of reality, as opposed to an "historical act" requiring "real, sensuous activity," i.e. "revolutionary practice." The requisite "sensuous activity" is "historical" because it embodies the individual "powers" developed by the historical process understood as a "school" generating "the integral development of every individual producer."
Marx also claims that the treatment of "revolutionary praxis" as itself "educational" and hence developmental of the requisite intellectual and other "powers" avoids the logical incoherence of any and all forms of "vanguardism."
"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, theactive side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such."
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only asrevolutionary practice." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
That the "objectification" of "ideas" in forces of production is an "appropriation" of "natural forces" - i.e. "objectifies" "natural necessity" - is explicitly claimed in the passage from Engels connecting "liberation" - the development of "freedom" - to the development of mind, i.e. to the development of "knowledge of natural necessity."
In Capital, Marx makes this a "materialist" sublation of Hegel's "idealist" idea of "the cunning of reason."
In that context, he again explicitly represents this development as the the development of "slumbering powers" substituting for "those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal," forms found in "that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage."
"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. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. 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. ...
"An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims. [2]" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
Footnote [2] is a quotation from Hegel:
[2] “Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s intentions.” (Hegel: “Enzyklopädie, Erster Theil, Die Logik,” Berlin, 1840, p. 382.) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#2
As to the relation between "stupidity" - i.e. "superstition" and "prejudice" - and "despotism," Marx explicitly points to such a relation in writing stretching from the 1843 to 1881 (as the passages I just quoted demonstrate).
Such a relation is also pointed to by Engels as in the passage from Anti-Duhring:
"it is a fact that man sprang from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communities have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis of the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm
The 1886 passage from "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" explicitly connects the idea of the relation to Hegel:
"applied to the Prussian state of that time, the Hegelian proposition ['All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.'], therefore, merely means: this state is rational, corresponds to reason, insofar as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears to us to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
Perry Anderson's recent piece about Russia and China in the NLR, while documenting in great detail the specific nature of despotism in both places, makes no mention at all of the link Marx and Engels make between despotism and superstition and prejudice so to treat him as an authority on what an "historical materialist" treatment of Russian and Chinese "communism" or "Western Marxism" (including his own) would reveal is a mistake.
Ted