Here are two more texts from Marx (Tom Walker has them on his web site
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/dispose.htm) elaborating the idea of "free
activity" and of "wealth" as "free time" for "the artistic, scientific etc.
development of the individuals", "the free development of individualities".
As do the other passages to which I've pointed, they involve an ontological
idea of "freedom" (incorporating e.g. Hegel's ontological ideas of a "will
proper" and a "universal will") that seems to me inconsistent with a
scientific materialist ontology.
How can such texts (found throughout Marx's writing) be made consistent with
a scientific materialist interpretation of "the materialist conception of
history" or, alternatively, with Justin's interpretive hypothesis that
"historical materialism, construed as a view about the centrality of class
and the economy in social explanation, is consistent with any ontological
view - including Machean or Berkeleyan idealism, as the Empiocritics
pilloried by Lenin argued--are [or?] none"?
As I mentioned earlier, criticisms of scientific materialism that offer in
its place what amounts to a "dialectics of nature" can be found in Whitehead
(as an explicit criticism of Darwin's ontological premises, in *The Function
of Reason*). Another such criticism is found in Husserl's phenomenology,
particularly in *The Crisis of the Modern European Sciences*. *The Crisis*
has been used as a basis for interpreting Marx e.g. in Karel Kosik's
*Dialectics of the Concrete* and Enzo Paci's *The Foundation of the Sciences
and the Meaning of Man*. Paci points to the close correspondence between
Husserl and Whitehead. Ollman's *Alienation* has an appendix on Whitehead
on "internal relations".
"Time of labour, even if exchange value is eliminated, always remains the
creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production.
But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment
of the product, partly for free activity which - unlike labour - is not
determined by a compelling extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and
the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty,
according to one's inclination.
"It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal length
and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for
myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and
men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character,
it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time -
the time of labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much
higher quality than that of the beast of burden." Marx *Economic Manuscript
of 1861-63*, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 391
"The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based,
appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by
large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased
to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to
be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of
use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for
the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for
the development of the general powers of the human head. With that,
production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material
production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. 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. Capital
itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour
time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole
measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the
necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits
the superfluous in growing measure as a condition - question of life or
death - for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the
powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social
intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent
(relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants
to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby
created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the
already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations -
two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to
capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited
foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this
foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6
rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real
wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct
production, for every individual and the whole society.'
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry;
natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or
of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain,
created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The
development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social
knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree,
hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under
the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with
it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not
only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social
practice, of the real life process." Grundrisse pp. 705-6
Ted
--
Ted Winslow E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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