Charles asks:
How do you integrate Marx's concept of "necessity" into your analysis ?
Two ontological ideas, "internal relations" and an objective and knowable "good," generate an idea of "necessity" that makes it consistent with fully "free self-determination." The second idea, the idea of an objective and knowable "good," means the life of "freedom," involves the "necessity" of actualizing eternally valid aesthetic and ethical principles and the "necessity" of developing the "capabilities" required for this. The first idea, the idea of "internal relations," introduces "necessity" into the the relation between the stages of the historical "educational" process ending in the full development of these "capabilities" and the actualization of the "freedom" they make possible. So even though, as Marx conceives this necessity, it's possible for individuals in some social contexts to bypass capitalism, the existence of this possibiity requires that development inside and outside their context have created both highly developed forces of production and a subjective capability on the part of the particular individuals to "appropriate" them for the construction of a social arrangement from which all barriers to full individual development have been removed. In both cases, the concept of "necessity" is internally related to the concept of "freedom." So it's not the concept of "necessity" associated with "scientific materialism." The latter has no logical space for the ideas of "internal relations," "free self- determination," and "final causation." It's the mistaken interpretation of Marx's "materialism" in terms of this latter ontology, along with the failure to interpret "forces and relations of production" in terms of what Marx calls "idealism" (i.e. in terms of the ontological ideas of "internal relations," "free self- determination" and "final causation") that leads to the mistaken interpretation of Marx as an "economic determinist." By the way, the role Marx assigns to absolute immiserization in the production of a subject with the developed capability and will required to transform capitalism into the penultimate social form has to be combined with the positive developmental role he assigns to the capitalist labour process in creating such a subject. If you leave out the latter (as Zizek does in his claim about slum dwellers), you've abandoned the essential feature of capitalism according to Marx, namely, that it is an economic arrangement that produces its own gravediggers by facilitating "the development of the human mind." Moreover, it's the absolute immiserization aspect that's the most dodgy part of the argument when the argument is understood in this way. Immiserization of the kind envisaged is radically inconsistent with the the development of the kind of subject the argument requires. Ted
