Re: [Pen-l] What are these lists for?

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Julio Huato wrote:

> > This misunderstands what's meant by "the
> > inner connection of things" and, relatedly,
> > the implications of this 'inner connection"
> > for individual and social development.
>
> I guess -- if you say so.  I have no clue as to what *you* mean by
> "internal relations."

The idea indicated by this term is the idea that the "essence" of any  
"thing", say the "individuality" characteristic of a particular kind  
of "society", is the outcome of the "relations" constitutive of that  
particular kind.

So, in the Grundrisse passage on "abstract labour" I quoted, Marx  
claims the individuality characteristic of the relations constitutive  
of capitalism, particularly in the form these take in the United  
States, is essentially different from the individuality characteristic  
of the relations constitutive of the Russian peasant commune.

"One could say that this indifference towards particular kinds of  
labour, which is a historic product in the United States, appears e.g.  
among the Russians as a spontaneous inclination. But there is a devil  
of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used  
for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to everything.  
And then in practice the Russian indifference to the specific  
character of labour corresponds to being embedded by tradition within  
a very specific kind of labour, from which only external influences  
can jar them loose."

This difference is a difference in the degree of developed "mind", of  
developed "virtuosity", of "integral development".  The expression of  
this degree is the degree to which individuals are able "to apply  
themselves to everything".  This is Hegel's definition of an "educated  
man".  It's found in the other passage from the Grundrisse i quoted.

"Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to  
replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition  
of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere  
fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a  
variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to  
whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes  
of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>

All these ideas appear in the 1868 letter to Kugelmann from which you  
quoted.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11.htm>

The "essence" of "bourgeois society" is a particular kind of  
"intrinsic interconnection", i.e of "internal relations" in the above  
sense.  Once we know this, we also know that capitalist "conditions"  
don't have the character of "perpetual necessity"; they can be  
transformed by transforming the "intrinsic interconnection" they  
express.  Marx elaborates a particular set of ideas (ideas that  
include the "law of value") about how the "intrinsic interconnection"  
that defines capitalism works to bring about its own "collapse" "in  
practice".

"Once interconnection has been revealed, all theoretical belief in the  
perpetual necessity of the existing conditions collapses, even before  
the collapse takes place in practice."

There are also internal relations between "appearance" and "essence".   
Through these relations, "appearance" reveals as well as hiding  
"essence".  The work of "science" is to discover sand reveal this  
"intrinsic interconnection".  Stated in a more general way, this idea  
underpins the Grundrisse text on "the method of political economy",  
e.g. the distinction drawn there between, on the one hand, the order  
of discovery and of historical development of the "intrinsic  
interconnection" that defines capitalism, and, on the other, the order  
of presentation of this "intrinsic interconnection", this "essence",  
in Capital.

"The vulgar economist has not the slightest idea that the actual,  
everyday exchange relations and the value magnitudes cannot be  
directly identical. The point of bourgeois society is precisely that,  
a priori, no conscious social regulation of production takes place.  
What is reasonable and necessary by nature asserts itself only as a  
blindly operating average. The vulgar economist thinks he has made a  
great discovery when, faced with the disclosure of the intrinsic  
interconnection, he insists that things look different in appearance.  
In fact, he prides himself in his clinging to appearances and  
believing them to be the ultimate. Why then have science at all?"

The object to be revealed, in this case the "intrinsic  
interconnection" constitutive of capitalism in general and of the "law  
of value" operative in it in particular, is knowable by "really  
comprehending thinking".  Such thinking, however, requires "maturity"  
of "mind".  This is itself the product of "intrinsic interconnection"  
and develops with it, i.e. human history understood in terms of these  
ideas is an internally related set of "educational" "stages in the  
development of the human mind".

"Since the reasoning process itself arises from the existing  
conditions and is itself a natural process, really comprehending  
thinking can always only be the same, and can vary only gradually, in  
accordance with the maturity of development, hence also the maturity  
of the organ that does the thinking. Anything else is drivel."

Ted


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