[lbo-talk] What government spending?

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Tue Oct 12 13:09:05 PDT 2010


c b quoted Marx and Engels:


> "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. "

But these negatives are features of "self-estrangement," i.e. of a "dialectic of negativity" that contributes, and must contribute if the negative is to be successfully transcended, to "the integral development of every individual producer."

This 1877 claim by Marx repeats the idea of wage-labour as self-estrangement found in The Holy Family which portrays it both as "the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of" the wage-labourer's human nature - "the abstraction of all humanity" - and as "poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing."

By going through "the stern but steeling school of labour," "man," though he "has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm

Particular ways in which capitalist wage-labour is claimed to act as a "steeling school" contributing to "integral development" are specified throughout Marx's writing (including in Capital), so it's not true that the "dialectic" of "self-estrangement" was subsequently abandoned.

Ted



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