Jim Devine wrote:
labor in the ideal community isn't completely (is that what
"essentially" means?) different from all prior forms or from labor
under capitalism. It's definitely different, but there are some shared
characterists. There is a tranhistorical "essence" to labor, as in
Marx's CAPITAL, vol. 1, chapter 7, section 1.
In a process of development characterized by "internal relations,"
later forms "sublate" earlier forms so "essentially different"
doesn't mean completely different. Thus the "worst architect" shares
with the best that she first creates the structure in the mind before
building it in reality.
My point was that the "new" that comes into existence through this
process can't be completely elaborated in terms of characteristics
shared with what has previously been actual. It actualizes "forms"
that have only existed previously as potentials.
Historical explanations that invoke, as an essential explanatory
factor, "forms" that have hitherto only existed potentially have such
"forms" in common with Plato's ontology. There's reason to believe,
in fact, that, in Marx's case, they "sublate" this and other features
of that ontology.
In this, Marx is also sublating Hegel who, in the Philosophy of
History, approvingly cites the following claim of Sophocles:
“Sophocles in his Antigone, says, ‘The divine commands are not of
yesterday, nor of today; no, they have an infinite existence, and no
one could say whence they came.’ The laws of morality are not
accidental, but are the essentially Rational.”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm
The same idea is impliict in following claim in the Critique of the
Gotha Programme:
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-
operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and
society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs!"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
This also makes the "all-around development of the individual" a
prerequisite for the actualization of the ideal ethical form pointed
to at the end.
Ted
