File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 167


Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 16:26:53 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: abortion


Rob wrote:
>Now,
>I take 'communism' to be that currently (I suspect permanently) unknowable
>state - all contradictions in human affairs are gone = human life is now
>moral = nothing to struggle against (and perhaps nothing to strive for, I
>dunno).

Well, there will be many things that human beings under communism can
strive for. Beauty. Love. Friendship. Knowledge. Happiness....

More practically, they will have to work on how to make work tolerable for
people, for instance, by radically reducing work weeks that are occupied
for production of necessities and by making labor processes less alienating
and more intellectually engaging. So productivity has to go up, and yet
certain ways of raising efficiency will have to be discarded or modified;
for instance, infinite divisions of labor imposed for the sake of
capitalist efficiency will have to go, without reducing human capacity to
produce enough goods and services to forever get rid of problems of
scarcity. Perhaps, redefinitions of human well-being will be in order as
well....

Also, we'll have to repair damages done to human beings, culture, and the
environment under capitalism.

Lots to do!

>And that essential human is pretty damned close to Kant's picture of
>him/her - a being in need of freedom right up to the logical limit imposed
>by the essential fact that s/he is *a social being*.  Such freedom need
>only observe the law that all others are equally subjects, to be treated as
>ends in themselves.

What does it mean to treat others as ends in themselves? I can see what it
would *not* mean, but as a positive prescription, the statement seems
empty. One of the problem of ethics (or what ethics has been up to the
present), as I see it, is its emptiness and impotence.

About the essential human, I would rather keep this category relatively
open. I think what is human can only be elaborated and illuminated through
praxis, in that it is profoundly social and keeps changing.

Yoshie




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