Ricardo wrote:
>
> A few points: Kant is writing about artistic production, the act of
> producing a work of art, so I have trouble with your argument that
> Kant is anticipating what Marx later says about work.
So, it seems to me, is Marx in so far as production in the "realm of
freedom" is concerned.
"man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces
only in freedom from such need"
"man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty"
"The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by
necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond
the sphere of material production proper."
"In a higher phase of communist society ... labor has become not only a
means of life but life's prime want"
In the Grundrisse, opposing both Smith's conception of all work as sacrifice
and Fourier's conception of artistic work as "mere fun, mere amusement", he
points to "composing" as exemplifying "really free working".
"It seems quite far from Smith's mind that the individual, 'in his normal
state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility', also needs a normal
portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labour
obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the
obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever
that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity - and
that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely
external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual
himself posits - hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject,
hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of
course, that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and
wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced
labour; and not-labour, by contrast, as 'freedom, and happiness'. This
holds doubly: for this contradictory labour; and, relatedly, for labour
which has not yet created the subjective and objective conditions for itself
(or also, in contrast to the pastoral etc. state, which it has lost), in
which labour becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realization,
which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier,
with grisette-like naivet�, conceives it. Really free working, e.g.
composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the
most intense exertion." Grundrisse p. 611
The point re Fourier and the idea of the "laws of beauty" are also based on
Kant.
"But it is not inexpedient to recall that, in all free arts, there is yet
requisite something compulsory or as it is called, mechanism, without which
the spirit, which must be free in art and which alone inspires the work,
would have no body and would evaporate altogether; e.g. in poetry there must
be an accuracy and wealth of language, and also prosody and measure. [It is
not inexpedient, I say, to recall this], for many modern educators believe
that the best way to produce a free art is to remove it from all constraint,
and thus to change it from work to mere play." Critique of Judgment p. 147
> The master/slave dialectic comes early in the Phen. and is eventually
> sublated by stoicism
>
Hegel's treatment of the master/slave relation shows only that "relations of
production" can be connected with the development of rational
self-consciousness so that Marx's emphasis on class is not incompatible with
the interpretive thesis that he views the historical process as a process of
the development of "freedom" in the sense of Kant and Hegel.
Ted
--
Ted Winslow E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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