> In the chapter Marx wrote for the Anti-Duhring, he pointed out that Plato's
> study of form was excellent. I would construe this as noting that one can
> ignore the metaphysical existence Plato ascribes to his forms; rather, they
> can be taken as abstractions. Actuality then is not an 'imitation' of the
> forms but their origihn.
>
> And that brings us back to the derivation of thought from action rather than
> action being merely the implementation of thought.
>
> And that brings us to the Eleventh Thesis.
>
> And it also gets rid of the redundancy that always attaches to "moral"
> arguments. The moral principle is always added on (as baggage) _after_ the
> act; it never guides the action because what doesn't exist can affect what
> does exist.
But "human" change of the world requires that the change first exist in imagination before being carried out in reality.
"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. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement."
The change Marx has in mind is the creation of a world in which we carry out production as "human beings," a world that has never existed.
On your ontological assumptions, how can it exist in imagination before being erected in reality?
Ted