> in other words, the conditions under which every person can explore > full range of potential human capacities for creativity and > enjoyment...in effect, capitalism 'teaches' folks to be dissatisfied > with subsistence level needs satisfaction *and* it creates "need" to > transcend that level...
This is a correct dialectical view, in my opinion, it is just that "need" and "desire" are conflated and depicted in an idealist way. The hostility which many Marxists feel about "the market" should not be a mindless hostility, since often the very ability to feel hostility against the market presupposes the ability to draw personal advantages from the market which permit a withdrawal from market relations. Socialists accept that markets do allocate resources efficiently in some contexts, but not in others, but this requires us to theorise exchange relations (transactions) comprehensively, and not make concessions to the universal abstraction of "the market". Unfortunately, autonomism (which rejects the false, inhuman side of market relations) does not do this, because sociality is reduced to individual/subjective and intersubjective experience, and there exists no sociality which transcends intersubjective experience - but this is an unwarranted concession to postmodernism. Marx remarks as a sarcastic joke in Capital Volume 1 how the moral-historical component of the wage enables a "civilising influence" in the sense that the worker is able to buy a newspaper and read it. Jurriaan
