On Dec 3, 2006, at 10:53 AM, Leigh Meyers wrote:
No he didn't, the mistake is to interpret what he's saying as relevant to any society other than industrial societies, which by their very nature are *Never* going to be an ideal social systems.
As the context makes clear, he's explicitly discussing Marx's idea of the "realm of necessity" of an ideal society. "Possession and procurement of the necessities of life are the prerequisite, rather than the content, of a free society. The realm of necessity, of labor, is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free play of human faculties and desires. The optimum in this realm is therefore to be defined by standards of rationality rather than freedom - namely, to organize production and distribution in such a manner tht the least time is spent for making all necessities available to all members of society. Necessary labor is a system of essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities; in such a system, individuality cannot be a value and end in itself. Reasonably, the system of societal labor would be organized rather with a view to saving time and space for the development of individuality outside the inevitably repressive workworld. Play and display, as principles of civilization, imply not the transformation of labor but its complete subordination to the freely evolving poetentialities of man and nature. The ideas of play and display now reveal their full distance from the values of productiveness and performance: play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitive traits of labor and leisure; it 'just plays' with the reality. But it also cancels their sublime traits - the 'higher values.' The desublimation of reason is just as essential a process in the emergence of a free culture as in the self-sublimation of sensuousness." pp. 195-6 The reference is to Marx's division, in vol. III of Capital, of an ideal society into a "realm of necessity" and a "true realm of freedom". "Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can only consist in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm Ted
