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

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox wrote:

> Ted Winslow wrote:
> > 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".
>
> Two different things. (1) Capitalism, a unique  social order, which
> constitutes (in _tendency_*) a totality, and hence must be  
> understood in
> terms of its "internal connections." (2) Humanb history as a whole,
> which does NOT, so far as we know, constitute such a toatality, and
> cannot be understood in terms of such "internal relations."

Are you disputing the ideas I'm attributing to Marx that the  
"intrinsic interconnection" constitutive of capitalism is "educative"  
- a "steeling school" - for wage-labourers and that it must be so if  
it is to work to make "socialism" practicable, since the "intrinsic  
interconnection" that constitutes "socialism" requires an  
"individuality" with a particular degree of "integral development",  
the degree produced by the "intrinsic interconnection" constitutive of  
wage-labour and the "intrinsic interconnection" constitutive of the  
"revolutionary praxis" required to transform capitalism into socialism?

This is what is meant by the claim that socialism is "internally  
related" to capitalism (and, more generally, by the claim that the  
historical process is an "educative" process of "internally related"  
"stages in the development of the human mind").  The "essence" of  
socialism requires for its existence (and, in this sense, is therefore  
"internally" related to) the "integral development" of "individuality"  
generated by capitalism (or by some other social form able to produce  
the same degree of "integral development" e.g. in 1881 Marx speculated  
that, in contrast to what he had claimed in the Grundrisse passage,  
Russian peasant commune relations, particularly the role played in  
them by private property, might have developed the required degree).

By the way, his 1881 speculation about conditions in the Russian  
peasant commune, mistaken though it turns ought to have been, is  
consistent with his treatment of the "peasant" conditions he claims  
were characteristic of classical Athens and of Shakespeare's England  
(the economy of classical Athens having been an economy primarily of  
"peasant-citizens" rather than "slaves" and that of Shakespeare's  
England one of peasant "petty property").  In both cases, he claimed  
the particular character of the social relations involved was  
significantly developmental of "free individuality", i.e. contributed  
significantly to "integral development".

This developmental fact was "internally related" to the degree of  
"really comprehending thinking" of which the "individuality" of both  
historical periods proved capable, "thinking" exemplified by Socrates,  
Plato and Aristotle ("the greatest thinker of antiquity" according to  
Marx) in the case of classical Athens and by Shakespeare himself in  
the case of Shakespeare's England (Marx, like Hegel, having viewed  
Shakespeare as exemplary of  an "individuality" with a developed  
capability for "really comprehending thinking").

Marx treats the  "intrinsic interconnection" constitutive of these  
peasant conditions  as much more consistent with "integral  
development" than the "intrinsic interconnection" constitutive of the  
19th century Indian peasant commune, of a significant part of 19th  
century peasant France, and (so he claimed in the Grundrisse, though  
not in 1881)) of the 19th century Russian peasant commune.

Ted


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