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
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005