File spoon-archives/marx-engels.archive/marx-engels_1996/96-09-11.063, message 35


Date: Sat, 20 Apr 96 07:31:12 +0200
From: kls-AT-unidui.uni-duisburg.de (Hinrich Kuhls)
Subject: Re: Capital quote: "Fragmentary human beings"


Ken, I am not sure whether I've got your point, but I think the quote you
give is no reason at all to express a pessimistic view [just cogs in the
machine] on the labour movement, nor to connect such a view to the movement.

Yes, there are contradictions within the class-consciousness of the labour
movement as well as most individuals [including the soicalist
intelligentsia] have both illusions about *and* clear insights into the
conditions of the capitalist society, and the dissolving of class bias or
class prejudices is a process which will not go up simultaneously within the
class. Marx' Capital is not only a systematic development of economical
catogeries, but also the representation of the connexion of economical
catogeries, social relations, *and* forms of consciousness. Hence Capital
implicitely gives the explanation why both capitalist and worker do have
illusions about the circumstances they live in as well the explanation why
the proletariat will take of these illusions. Insofar socialists do not need
a seperate theory of class-consciousness, and the policy of *carrying the
class-consciousness into the labour movement* has to be examined.

Referring to your quote I would have chosen from it this subject-line:
"Fully developed individuum",
to whom the different social functions she/he performs, are but so many
modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.

I agree with you that this section  -  the Factory Acts  - of the chapter on
Machinery and Modern Industry is one of the central passages of Capital one,
but we should not overlook the piles which Karl put to your quote, as there are:

"Factory legislation, that *first*  *conscious* *and* *methodical* reaction
of society against spontaneously developed form of the process of
production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of
modern industry as cotton yarn, self actors, and the electric telegraph."
(p.451; MEW 23, S. 504)

"Though the Factory Act, the first and meagre concession wrung from capital,
is limited to combining elementary education with work in the factory, there
can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably
it must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take
its proper place in the working-class schools. There is also no doubt that
such revolutionary ferments, the finals result of which is the abolition of
the old division of labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic
form of production, and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding
to that form.

"But the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form
of production, is the only way in which that form of production can be
dissolved and a new form established." (p.458; MEW 23, S. 512)  ----

I see it's high time to have Karl's opus magnum in the archive completely.
Then we can beat the drum with a new slogan: Type your arguments, paste your
quotes!

Hinrich




   

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