James Daly wrote: > It has to be remembered that Marx's concept of nature was Darwinian, not > Newtonian. He was talking not about "the laws of nature", but of the nature > of things, including economic systems.
Marx's idea of "a process of natural history" isn't Darwinian; it's Hegelian. This conceives "nature" in a way that has it's full development end in the actualization of "self-conscious reason," i.e. in the actualization of a a fully developed human being as a "species-being." The "laws" operative in the process are those required to realize this end. Conceived in this way, "the moving and generating principle" of the process is "the dialectic of negativity." This "does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result." In human history this negative takes the form of "estrangement" within the labour process. "The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm> The working of the dialectic of negativity is the working of "reason." Consequently, "The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm> Capital as a critique of political economy is a work of "science" in this sense. It aims to accomplish what Marx, in a September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, claimed a "critic," given this idea of human history as a "natural process," could accomplish. "Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm> Ted _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
