Nathan Tankus wrote: > When Marx talks about the transition from subjective principles of > production to objective principles of production, does he mean that > production shifts from needing direct applications of human skill and > muscle (and thus human intellect) to functioning without direct > applications of human skill and muscle? Or am i missing something about the > meaning of subjective and objective here?
My interpretation is that, in manufacturing, as a rule, production depended greatly on the personal skills, dexterity, talents, attention to quality, and even personal style of the immediate producer. The parameters of the production process were subjective insofar as they were "software" loaded on each individual's brain hard drive. With mechanization and the development of industrial production proper, the parameters of production resided -- as it were -- in the "hardware" itself, with individual producers becoming a sort of appendage of the complex mechanical monster. The pace or tempo of production, the quality standards to embed in the products, etc. were thus fixed (to some extent) in the mechanism as a whole, again a social mechanism and not a mere (forgive the redundancy) mechanical mechanism. In my upcoming book, I will show in detail how *all* scale economies are the result of labor cooperation, where cooperation means simply that the producers share given means of production (cross-sectionally or inter-temporally). My 2 cents. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
