- Aeolius
- Jul 16, 2003
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Simon Templeman Fanclub
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I don't know where I'm going but I'm wondering if Marx or any of his followers made any connections to philosophy of mind, and if anyone has any specific readings to recommend given my background (I haven't' read most of the foundational works yet).
I do indeed think there's something in this that connects very well to Marx's "sensuous human activity" and dialectical materialism's primary emphasis on temporality, motion and becoming. Unfortunately, I can't offer a proper answer to your question; philosophy of mind is not in my wheelhouse.
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Apr 17, 2021 21:09
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May 15, 2024 02:28
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- Aeolius
- Jul 16, 2003
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Simon Templeman Fanclub
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Even in the early 20th century, Marxists recognized that an individual person will not necessarily fall into exactly one class. The importance is the distinction between class interests - those of labor and those of capital. And an individual person's actions are driven by these interests as they are objectified by the capitalist mode of production.
In the following quote, Rosa Luxemburg describes how the activity of worker-owners must be primarily driven by the interests of capital, despite that they by all accounts are workers (emphasis mine):
I believe offhand that even Marx said as much but I can't think of a citation to back that up, so I will avoid making a claim on that 
I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind:
quote:The essence of the political economy of capital is the exploitation of labour, the maximization of surplus-value for capital. But whereas capital defines wealth in terms of the maximization of surplus labour, for workers "wealth is disposable time and nothing more." The Ten Hours Bill, like more than a century of subsequent working-class struggle internationally, demonstrates that workers strive to limit the time in which they are subject to the dictates of capital, to win time for their own free self-development. For workers, "free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for the free activity which - unlike labour - is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose."23
From this principle flows the basic dynamic of a socialist economy, its tendency to develop the forces of production not in order to produce surplus value, but in order to reduce the amount of necessary social labour performed by its members. A society of freely associated producers would thus organize production with the following principle to the fore:
quote:The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created for all of them.24
This principle, embodied in workers’ struggles to shorten the working day, had for Marx already found its corresponding form of production: the co-operative factory. The co-operatives, he suggested, "have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modem science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters." Not that Marx was starry-eyed about co-operative production within capitalism. On the contrary, he recognized that, because they operated in the atomized framework of commodity exchange, they would inevitably reproduce the "defects of the existing system" by forcing workers to become "their own capitalist" and to subject themselves to competitive pressures to exploit their own labour.25 However, notwithstanding this severe deficiency, co-operative production prefigured a society based upon "associated labour"; indeed, the very deficiencies of co-operative workplaces within capitalism underlined the need for workers to overthrow the rule of capital. The limits imposed by capitalism on workers’ co-operatives highlight the fact that "to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted," changes which can be realized only "by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz. the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves."26 And, as I have noted above, reuniting workers with the means of production involves much more than instituting workers’ control at the level of the firm; it also requires establishing democratic control of the whole process of economic regulation of society.
The "making ... labourers into their own capitalist" line appears fully in "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production," in Capital III, which frames cooperatives as something more advanced than the factory system from which they sprouted, but nevertheless still a transitional form.
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Sep 24, 2021 05:17
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Apr 17, 2021 21:09
