c b quoted Marx ( and Engels)
> "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in
> the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the
> self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the
> interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum
> of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without
> the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into
> the air. "
The "movement of the immense majority" has to be "self-conscious" and "independent."
According to Marx, this requirement is met by the developmental consequences of the self-estrangement that is wage-labour, i.e. by the contribution capitalism makes "to the integral development of every individual producer."
^^^^ CB: In the Manifesto Engels and Marx also say something of the reverse:
"In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. "
^^^^
This development is a prerequisite for the initiation of the kind of revolutionary practice that, again according to Marx, will then produce the further degree of integral development - of "universality" - necessary for "the immense majority" to be able to imagine "the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man" and to "appropriate" the degree of developed universality objectified in existing capitalist forces and relations of production and use it to build the imagined "form."
Wage-labour has not been developmental in the way Marx anticipated, so this account of the "reason" in the rose of the capitalist present - of "the dialectic of negativity" at work in it - is mistaken.
Ted
^^^^^ CB: Maybe because:
" In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. "
In the US, this is reflected in superstructure in the law in that corporations have been declared "persons" ( individuals) by the Supreme Court