Ted wrote: > Yes, but my point was that "the formal principles of > 'economy'" embody an idea of "useful effects" > inconsistent with Marx's where what is involved is > the "economy of time" spent creating "means" for > good lives in the sense I specified, including in such > means those required for the development of the > requisite individual capabilities.
I'm saying that we need to abstract content from form. Do we believe that there are principles of time economizing in general, regardless of how they apply under different social formations? I believe Marx's answer to that question is affirmative, as shown in the quotations I pasted. And that is just common sense. Marx could have said anything and that would have altered nothing about that fact of life. You may use a knife to slice tomatoes or to cut a throat. The mechanical principle of the knife doesn't necessarily "embody" either tomatoes or throats. You cannot say tomato slicing makes a knife something other than a knife. I don't think it's fair to Marx's communist idea to hold it as something so sublime that it falls beyond the realm of human possibility. Yes, there are commonalities between slave-owning societies, capitalist societies, and communist societies -- humans, who must care about how their finite productive powers are to be used, inhabit them! _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
