On Sun, Dec 7, 2025 at 07:48 PM, Charles wrote: > > Now put him in a time machine back to ancient Rome. He has no > semiconductor chips, no electronic anything to work with. He is no > productive force.
A charming rebuttal. Did you know that time has no "forward" or "back"? Those are spatial metaphors imaginatively and absurdly applied to time. I wonder, though, WHO BUILT your so-called time machine? Did it just appear magically? Or did your time traveling Robinson Crusoe build it himself? If he built it himself, one would hope that he would pack his bags with a laptop and a few spare batteries, if only to dazzle the Romans. Or maybe the nuclear-powered time machine itself incorporates a large language model and the gpus to run it. What fun! What happens if, instead of sending our "social individual" back to Ancient Rome in a time machine, we send just a computer? > > Contrary to your idealist conceptual twist, the products of human labor > are indeed part of the productive forces. > An absurd contraption of an argument does not refute even an "idealist conceptual twist." Your assertion that the products are part of the forces is much better articulated by Gerald Cohen in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence and refuted better than I could do here by Derek Sayer in The Violence of Abstraction. Sayer devoted an entire chapter to productive forces. In his discussion of productive forces, Sayer quotes part of a paragraph from the "Chapter Six" manuscript that I would prefer to quote in full. Note that Marx included the *use* of machinery, not the machinery itself as a productive force and called the "form of the productive power of capital" a mystification: > > The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of > directly social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour come into being > through co-operation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of > machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the > conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific > ends, technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of > scale corresponding to such developments (for it is only socialized labour > that is capable of applying the general products of human development, > such as mathematics, to the immediate processes of production ; and, > conversely, progress in these sciences presupposes a certain level of > material production). This entire development of the productive forces of > socialized labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of > individuals), and together with it the use of science (the general product > of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the > form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the > productive power of labour, or even of that part of it that is identical > with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power > either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the > process of production. The mystification implicit in the relations of > capital as a whole is greatly intensified here, far beyond the point it > had reached or .could have reached in the merely formal subsumption of > labour under capital. (page 1024) > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39662): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39662 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116655555/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
