[lbo-talk] compare and contrast

[c b]

>
> On Apr 16, 2012, at 1:57 PM, Ted Winslow wrote:
>>
>> "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."
>
> This is one of those 19th-century clichés that occasionally
> disfigure Marx's writings. Medieval cathedrals, which took
> generations to build,
> certainly never existed in the imagination of any architect, no hive
> is built by "a bee" but by collective labor guided by the hive's
> collective consciousness. And now with computers beginning to serve
> as hive minds for our species "the architect," and with him his
> "imagination," is virtually otiose. We now can see, if we wish,
> that humans, like all structure-building animals, are guided by
> *function*, not imagined structure.
>
> Shane Mage

^^^^^
CB: Imagination is a social institution like all other human
institution, certainly in the way Marx uses it here. Marx subscribes
to Newton's maxim that the current human architect's imagination
stands on the shoulders of giants. This is what makes the architect's
plan more powerful than the spider's in some sense. The architect's
imagination is the accumulation of knowledge over generations, it
includes the thoughts of dead members of the species in the form of
symbols or signs, semiotic structures which can pass over the death
barriier from past generations to future generations.

Notice that raising it in imagination  before execution is to _plan_ .
So, "planned economies" are implied in our species-being and
capitalist anarchy of production deviates from our species-being. The
whole living society logically would coordinate their "imaginations".