Julio Huato wrote:

> Fully-developed
> individuals won't be gods.  They will still be subject to a day that
> lasts only 24 hours.  Spending time producing goods doesn't
> necessarily un- or under-develop us.  The way we become fully
> developed is not by shunning work, but by performing it better---not
> only technically but above all socially.  My 2 cents.

Marx makes the labour process the "school" within which individual development 
occurs. Thus, though labour in capitalism was developmentally negative in many 
ways, it was, so he claimed, positively developmental of the degree of 
"integral development" required to initiate a transition to "the form of 
economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the 
productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man." 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

"The most complete development of man" required, in addition to "free time," a 
particular organization of the labour process (i.e of the instrumental labour 
that defines "the realm of necessity").

“Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his 
great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of 
the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free 
time—which is both idle time and time for higher activity—has naturally 
transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the 
direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both 
discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the 
same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and 
objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head 
exists the accumulated knowledge of society.” 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm

So, again, what you take Marx's idea to mean has little to do with the actual 
idea.

Ted



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