Dhalgren wrote this following in a billion reply thread that is impossible to keep track of anymore

The thing I have been trying to stress(in my woefully imperfect way) is the difference between "labor" and "conditions". Most everyone (Herr Marx included) do not distinguish between the two; so that, often, when someone "denigrates" labor, they are actually talking about the conditions under which the labor is performed - not the "real" labor, itself. Now, I will grant that with Capitalism the difference between labor and conditions is forcefully rejected. And with Marx, his Hegelian background won't allow for any distinctions between labor and condition (system/method), but to me that is the very nature of working class suppression and oppression. The factories are a "living hell" and the lives that these factories and their owners force the working class into are also a "hell". That everyone seems to be trapped in this "matrix" of "this is the bast we can do" does not change this...

Marx actually makes a distinction more primary than "labor" and "conditions": Labor and Work. Labor is all human effort that is used to shape our world and reproduce ourselves physically, culturally, and societally (ie in every way)

Marx also makes a great many distinctions aboout "work' by which he means closer to wage labor. First there was piecework -- relatively independent craftsman who produced an entire product individually. Then came the capitalist division of labor and mechanization and "modern industry"

Marx considered this type of alienating work to be deplorable. It is alienating both because the output does not appear to be the product of the workman's labor but also because the workman has no stake in the final product produced (the only thing he comes away with is cash payment)

Dragging Hegel into this is really a stretch -- I think you are under a misconception that Marx has appropriated Hegel's system as opposed to his dialectical method. Marx explicitly states the opposite to be true and on mutliple occasions.

I know thats not a complete answer but it will do for starters

and I am thinking about this. "I'll be back."

If its that hes an idealist or along those lines it kind of begs the same question that we touched on before: whats the value of philosophy in the first place (not rhetorical)

EDIT: scratch that, you're a fan of Parmenides/Plato..gotta keep better track, ha

My problem with Hegel is the same one (or one of the ones?) that Marx had. He was a mythologist. But that is another thread.

Hegel thought that method and system were the same (yeah McCluhan was a plagiarist). I was under the impression that Marx agreed with this. If he did not, then please enlighten me! That is what I was referring to when I said Marx saw labor and conditions as the same thing. And I understand that, completely. I just don't necessarily agree with it.

I love reading Marx's criticisms of Hegel (I tend to write "Yes!" a lot in the margins). :)

Hegel is "corrected" by Marx in many ways; Aristotle tried to do the same with Plato, but with less success...

I am still reading shit, so don't be impatient...


On edit: Please know that I get a lot of my "Marx" through having been a Maoist, so bear with me...

I have a quote in mind for you, but it is from Alexander Kojeve. I have heard of McLuhan but am not sure I understand how he fits in. If what I think is correct, then my quote would be perfect.

The thing that is cool is I am pretty sure it would make Anaxarchos shit a brick or lay an egg or possibly both :)

I started reading a bit of Kojeve because I was trying to figure out a few points in Philosophy of Right but abandoned him quickly because I found him unintelligible. Not because I didn't understand, but because he was unintelligible.

I will save that for later though and possibly forego it entirely because it is a side concern

Here is Engels, explaing why Hegel was important and for what contributions. This is really all I know about Hegel, even after wading through some of his works (I've stuff with the "shorter" Stuff such as the Intro to Science of Logic)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age.

The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.

Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization".

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".

Engels seemed to hold Hegel in much higher esteem than did Marx. But Freddy was a soft touch. :)

Let me get through this (I appreciate the post)...

to you and Kid both, that this thread is really interesting reading for me. Not sure that I'll have much to say but I hope the conversation between you 2 keeps going.

:)

Early on Marx and Engels are more critical of Hegel and more profuse with praise for Feurbach but that fades with time and Marx famously "rediscovers" Hegel and declares himself a pupil of Hegel's method while writing Capital.

And, actually, I think they each ghostwrite for the other on occasion, so it is going to be pretty difficult to pare one from the other. Although Engels was much more into applying dialectics to nature I think (not that Marx wasn't but Engel's work of that name -- Dialectics of Nature -- confuses me..another thing to put in Anax's queue I guess -- its not technically a "work" anyway because it was compiled from varied writings and some times margin notes and scribblings of Engels and I *think* it was posthumous)

in the twenties, I think. But, they point out that Engels held Hegel's dialectics of nature and the idea of nature's "consciousness" in much high esteem (as far as I can tell) than did Marx. Marx on several occasions speaks of Hegel's going too far and (I believe) saying that the dialectic was an expression of human evolution. But, again, I could be reading too much into it. I still think that Marx held to the idea of "method=system" which was central to Hegel's ideology.

Still looking for shit to back me up (might not find it - that will be interesting)...

this is the identical first "assignment" I had with my discussion group... think I told you how we'd hardly discussed the article at hand, but the current situations...then we decided the discussion was dialectic... ;)

I remember because I was kind of skeptical -- so much room for self-indulgence on this topic (and I know because I've went through most of it personally ;))

As I recall it really shocked me how well you reported that it went..was pretty sweet..wish I'd been there.

There are a lot of butchers of "dialectics" out there in my experience, which makes it extra sweet.

Anaxarchos had a great metaphor for Marx's dialectical methodlogy in Capital but I can't tell it right and I don't know if hes written it up in a public post or not. I think the Engels quote a few posts up is a pretty fair summation however.

and I do have to peruse Marx's stuff more thoroughly (is that redundant "peruse.. thoroughly"?)

Marx moved away from Feurbach precisely because Feurbach disavowed the dialectic in his "materialism". Marx considered this tantamount to positing an unscientific materialism which, of course, was absurd. Marx praises Hegel for the scientific "method" he brought to the study of man in the world and the evolution of nature.

I think that if Anax wants to wade in and set us straight, I'd be OK with that (might not agree, but would be "OK" :) )...

this his materialism was passive (ie blind play of forces, etc). The key point about the dialectic is that Hegel finds it in SOCIETY (which is why the Engels stuff confuses me as I mentioned above). "Passive" doesn't necessarily mean deterministic by the way, although I think it always comes to that either expressly through the front door or covertly through the rear. The idea is that there is a self-transformation that is always on-going and always the "subject" at hand (just to keep you on your toes philosophically!)

At the risk of repeating from above, Pisarev's Bees is a pretty good example of Geist and it starts to unravel the motion of Geist as well.

If you want to turn it into catchphrases like "negation of the negation", "interpenetration of opposites" or even the dreaded "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" I think that is a deadend.

To Hegel or not to Hegel is partly a function of which Hegel. If we are talking about Science of Logic, Hegel is a demigod. If we are talking about Philosophy of Right, not so much. The key here is the role that Hegel played in Marx's system, and not the other way around. Hegel was seen as a way to organize (and classify, with apologies to Aristotle) that which was otherwise a daunting mess. Yes, there are very great perceptions in the method, but it is as a way of presenting material in which Hegel shines... for Freddie too... and for Mr. Ulyanov. To approach the dialectic seriously was difficult work. This is true for Marx, too. He didn't make it up in the shower. And ironically, I think Hegel was very bad at using his own method. He didn't put enough elbow grease into it.

More, there is a Collected Works which gathered up every letter, article, and scrap of paper that the old guy and Freddie ever penned. It is not required reading but it leaves a picture of a couple of "regular guys". Sometimes they gossip, sometimes they take the issue more seriously, sometimes they apply the dialectic in a passing way but the attempts to formalize this method are rare and anticipate the sheer mass of work involved. The normal "world view" of these guys is better described as a very consistent historical materialism, without the sentimentality of someone like Pisarev. Sometimes it is crude and deterministic, because it is entirely impossible to become Mr. Spock, no matter how much one tries. Not the same degree of labor was expended on every publication, and collections like Dialectics of Nature are a mixed bag, more speculation than science... but very, very interesting, nevertheless. Freddie always gets called "crude", but I love the guy.

The "dialectic" on work and labor in Capital is straight forward: werk is the kind of labor that creates use-values. It has always existed, is very specific (concrete, part of the division of labor) and has no presence in value (except to Alfred Marshall who finds it because it has to be there). Labor, as used in the big C, is the opposite. It is completely abstract, a congealing of some-kinda-social-labor-expressed-as-time and appearing only as the expression of exchange, most importantly in the exchange of commodities. In this context, "alienation" is a reference to abstract labor alone... that labor which produces surplus value which is appropriated by others, i.e. "alienated:.

but I know that those scraps and letters are somtimes used to try and make Marx look petty, vain, worldy, materialistic (vernacular)

I also read some biographical background on Marx and Engels (Marx especially) and have to say that Young Marx was an awful lot like me. I am not sure that is in anyway a good thing but I thought it was pretty rad

You really do get the "mixed-bag" feeling from Marx's discussions of Hegel and his system. I realize this is a bit of jumping around, but once bitten...I think that it would be a much more interesting discussion to talk about current "needs". Marx was very clear about human needs being the "motor" of history. I wonder what would be considered the current "human needs" that would drive the next (and near-term?) movement in history? Didn't Marx hold that these needs could be anticipated or discerned at present or as real 'possibilities' and not just as after-the-fact historical occurrences? Also, what is actually meant by "human needs"? I know that some would say things as "simple" as food, clothing, and shelter are these "needs", but I have read where it is more of "productivity" and "valuation" "needs". How do we detect, emphasize, recognize - whatever - these human needs?

Marx starts with the ultimate simplifying abstraction -- a commodity in the abstract -- one his way to explicating the vast, circuitous mesh that is the exchange of commodities and social labor which together comprise the capitalist system.

He plucks that one fine thread and traces out from it in expanding shells more and more complex interactions, interrelationships and internal movement until hes rebuilt the whole system from the ground up.

Only now instead of one chaotic mess, you have an intelligble collection of processes and connections that are not only seen as a whirlwind of random and indecipherable action, but instead of are contituent parts and components of a defineable system.

This is not equivalent to empiricism or positivism because if you followed that path you would start charting the movement of the commodity itself -- which can obviously be quantified with a great deal of accuracy, but tells you nothing about the underlying operations of the system (since at that point you have only compiled sales charts, price data, information on volume, and so on)


So that same approach would be applied to the idea of "needs"..for instance, man didn't *need* the steam engine until social relations were organized around commodity production and wage-labor (you probably already know about it, but look up the aeoliplie sometime)

Karl used in Capital? Where would you start? I can see why and how Marx could use a commodity in the abstract to build-up the entire system (staggering), but what would be the nucleus of a search for "human needs"? Any ideas?

but yet since the meeting of "needs" is met in real time (by definition really) there IS some impulse at work that functions as a driver/motivator. Once again, thats what Hegel calls Geist (I think).

The needs we become conscious of as proletarians are our own abject poverty in the sense of having no direct claim on the means of production or even the proceeds of our own labor. This in turn insures that we always have a tenous, fret-ridden existence from moment to moment, because the means of our subsistence lies in the hands of others. That is what Marx says differentiates the Proletarians from any previous non-owning class: a conscious understanding of our own precarious position and thereby the ability to discern the need to abolish class society.

But even that need is analytical in the sense that we can posit all of the (pre)conditions for this awareness to come about. That is to say, we know this awareness couldn't have come about in feudal times because the means of production were not sufficiently developed to allow it, exchange was not universalized, and the non-owing class simply did not have the foundation necessary to unite them on an international basis (and indeed "national" did not mean the same thing as it does to us)

Like Anax says, it is very very hard to apply dialectics in practice in a way that doesn't simply echo Hegels own pronouncements if not in his conclusions but his austere and detached manner of reckoning (and sometimes his laughableness). So I don't claim to be good at it or have a bead on how to do it in any given case study.

would be the fundamental starting point to any kind of class "self-awareness". To me, one of the major problems on the left is this lack of class "self-awareness". I am always making persons angry at me by pointing out to them that they do not belong to the class that they think they do. Invariably people identify "up" in their class awareness - it can be funny, but mostly it is sad.

An articulation of needs might be the place to bring the lower classes together and begin to self identify based on those needs. Is that reasonable? Or are we not yet "there"?

In pratice the left is all about articulating and agitating for real needs (which might be better called DEMANDS). It still comes down to the need to have control of our own lives which entails taking over the means of production however.

this guy pisses me off in alot of ways, but his articles are normally worth a read

I don't necessarily agree with him on everything (or even most things) but this one is pretty on target for our discussion here. He also has one detailing a Korean sit-in and plant occupation that is this summer.

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/socreprod.html

Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In
Loren Goldner
“The animal is immediately one with its life activity, nor distinct from it. The animal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of will and consciousness. It is not a determination with which he immediately identifies. (The animal)… produces in a one-sided way while man produces universally...The animal only produces itself while man reproduces the whole of nature.”
K. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts

In the worldwide renaissance of interest in the work of Karl Marx of the past decade, a renaissance well-timed for the current (August 2007-November 2008) textbook liquidity crisis resulting lawfully from the anarchic character of capitalist accumulation, one key concept of Marx still remains in the shadows: the expanded reproduction of society and of nature. As increasingly erudite and radical “re-readings” of Marx slough off a century of Social Democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist ideology and deformation (that is, statist and productivist deformation), as book after book rehabilitates a concept of “value” in full recognition of Marx’s lifelong involvement with Hegel, contemporary critique still fails to do full justice to Marx’s idea that

“Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, transform into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the worker (i.e. means of subsistence)… In a word, surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the MATERIAL COMPONENTS of a new quantity of capital.” (Capital, vol. I, pp. 726-727) (our emphasis)

The modest aim of the following essay is to reconnect with the insight that “surplus value” in Marx is not only an abstraction (however necessary) but also a surplus of concrete goods and services that are either “productively consumed” in the expansion of what Marx called Dept. I (production of means of production) or of Department II (production of means of consumption), or else they are used by the contemporary vast army of unproductive consumers, thereby ceasing to be capital and “falling out” of the “circuit” of capital and depleting rather than expanding the reproduction of society and nature. It aims to show that Marx’s materialism (different, as he insisted in the First Thesis on Feuerbach, from all previous materialisms by its incorporation of the ‘active side developed by idealism’) was no mere epistemological stance but was, in fact, what Engels later called it, namely “the germ of a new world outlook.” The “sensuous transformative activity” of the Theses was not some later-forgotten youthful lyricism but informed Marx’s views of science, technology, natural history and resources, population, agriculture and ground rent, and are the (generally more implicit than explicit) underpinning of Capital. As such, they are of course of the greatest relevance today.

In taking seriously Engels’ remark, we rehabilitate Marx’s method as a theory not only of world history but of biosphere and ultimately universe history. Such an approach allows us to see the atmosphere created by much of the ecology movement, from its 1960’s/1970’s emergence with the Club of Rome, the (MIT) Meadows Report on the Limits to Growth and John D. Rockefeller III’s Zero Population Growth to its contemporary incorporation into the mainstream as many aspects of green capitalism, as an updated Malthusianism (Malthus, aside from his famous argument about the arithmetic growth of food production and the exponential growth of human population--refuted in his own time by innovations in British agriculture) also predicted that London would be buried in horseshit from horsedrawn carriages ca. 1890). We can thereby pinpoint LINEARITY as a fundamental aspect of bourgeois ideology, and see the non-linear “apples to oranges” effect of periodic revolutions in technology, which move capitalist society as a whole from one “manifold” to another in a way that cannot be extrapolated from the earlier manifold but which involve a “leap,” a new standard of value. Both the productivist Ricardo (the “Hegel” of classical political economy, the “most advanced bourgeois viewpoint” as Marx said in Theories of Surplus Value) and the anti-productivist Malthus posed “end of the world” scenarios that rested on the assumption of non-innovation, or at best mere linear innovation of technology and of the resources on which technology could be based. Capitalist ideology historically reified many things as “fixed”: fixed linear development, fixed resources available to society, fixed human activity in the division of labor, which latter (following the 1844 Manuscripts definition of an animal as “producing only its own nature”) implies the “animalization” of human beings in capitalism (cf. our opening quote), culminating in the bestiality of fascism.1

(much more at link)

I will say, however, that working class needs are not "historical" as such, but need to be determined and articulated with every evolutionary/revolutionary development. As "new culture" is created and man "re-produces" himself (as well as the 'universe'), needs will not - cannot - remain static. At least a sizable part of the drawing together of the working class will rely upon the articulation and propagandizing of these needs. Does this make sense?

I liked the opening of the Goldner article. There is TOO much material there to wade through all of it and much of it might as well come from the lips of a heathen. But I am a kitchen sink kinda guy so I figured I would shake your tree

:eek: