Jim Devine wrote:
There are some utopian tinges to CAPITAL, but they aren't really about what social will or should be. Marx saw socialism as arising from the actual, concrete, process of history. Specifically, that meant from the laws of motion of capitalism (which was, and is, conquering the world). The two main elements in CAPITAL that are "precursors" are (1) worker-managed cooperatives; and (2) the centralization of capital (into the corporate form) which allowed the separation of ownership from management. Methinks these go together rather than be separate: he was looking for a worker-managed centralized economy. But again, it sprung not from his imagination (as with utopians) but from the normal inner workings of capitalism.
If it actualizes what has not before been fully actual - the "totally developed individual" and the "true realm of freedom" - and if it must first be built in the mind before building it in reality, how can it become actual without springing in part from the "imagination"?
Marx's socialism is "scientific" rather than "utopian" not because it rejects the idea of an ideal republic of the imagination but because he claims to show, in contrast to the utopian socialists, how this ideal will arise out of the "real" conditions of capitalism. His conception of the "real", however, includes the real existence of as an yet unrealized "ideal". Such an existence is essential, for instance, to the meaning of the "real" fact of "self-estrangement", a fact that is an essential aspect of Marx's account of "the normal inner workings of capitalism" and of how these work to create the will and capabilities required to make the ideal actual.
Given that (as is claimed in Capital) the end determines the means with "the rigidity of a law", the "scientific" analysis of capitalism must show how it works to develop the will, the capabilities and the other means required to build socialism in the mind and then create it in actuality. It's not possible to do this without knowing what socialism is. "Revolution" is itself made a necessary means in this sense, i.e. it's made necessary to the development of the kind of "architect" socialism requires.
"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ ch01d.htm
The social form that emerges from capitalism is only the penultimate form; it isn't fully ideal. Further individual development is necessary for the ideal to become fully practicable. This is explicitly claimed in the passage from the Critique of the Gotha Programe I quoted. Marx is explaining why the distributive principle that will characterize the penultimate social form cannot be the ideal principle ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"), a principle that requires the "the all- around development of the individual" to become fully practicable.
Ted
