In Marx, "crisis" is but one of the conditions required for the
emergence of the degree of "free individuality" possessed of the
capability and will required to transform capitalism into the
penultimate social form. "Revolutionary praxis" itself is made
necessary to the development of this capability and will.
But prior to this, the capitalist labour process and the social forms
preceding it must, according to Marx, already have worked to bring
about a significant degree of development of the capability and will
of "free individuality".
For instance, the "petty industry" that capitalism "annihilates" "is
an essential condition for the development of social production and
of the free individuality of the laborer himself."
“The private property of the laborer in his means of production is
the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural,
manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential
condition for the development of social production and of the free
individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of
production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of
dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it
attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the
private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the
peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool
which he handles as a virtuoso.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Though the aspect of "free individuality" developed by the "private
property of the laborer in his means of production" is not developed
by the capitalist labour process, other important aspects of this
individuality are so developed. One such aspect is "general
industriousness":
"the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations
[Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general
property of the new species [Geschlecht]"
The positive consequences of wage labour, in contrast to slave
labour, for this development are summarized in the following passage:
"The slave belongs to a particular master; it is true that the worker
must sell himself to capital, but not to a particular capitalist, and
thus he has a choice, within a particular sphere, as to who he sells
himself to, and can change masters. All these differences in the
relation make the activity of the free worker more intensive, more
continuous, more agile, and more dexterous than that of the slave,
quite apart from the fact that they fit the worker himself to
undertake historical actions of an entirely different nature. The
slave receives the means of subsistence necessary for his maintenance
in a natural form, which is as fixed in kind as in extent — in use
values. The free worker receives them in the form of money, of
exchange value, of the abstract social form of wealth. However much
the wage is now in fact nothing but the silver or gold or copper or
paper form of the necessary means of subsistence, into which it must
constantly be resolved — money functioning here as the merely
transitory form of exchange value, as mere means of circulation —
abstract wealth, exchange value, and not a specific traditionally and
locally limited use value, still remains for the worker the purpose
and result of his labour. It is the worker himself who turns the
money into whatever use values he wants, buys the commodities he
wants with it, and as an owner of money, as a buyer of commodities,
he stands in exactly the same relation to the sellers of commodities
as any other buyer. The conditions of his existence — and also the
limited extent of the value of the money he has acquired — naturally
compel him to spend it on a rather restricted range of means of
subsistence. Nevertheless, some degree of variation is possible here,
such as e.g. newspapers, which form part of the necessary means of
subsistence of the English urban worker. He can save something, form
a hoard. He can also waste his wages on spirits, etc. But in acting
this way he acts as a free agent, he must pay his own way; he is
himself responsible for the way in which he spends his wages. He
learns to master himself, in contrast to the slave, who needs a
master. To be sure, this only applies when one considers the
transformation of a serf or slave into a free wage labourer. The
capitalist relation appears here as a step up the social scale. It is
the opposite when an independent peasant or craftsman is transformed
into a wage labourer. What a difference there is between the proud
yeomanry of England, of whom Shakespeare speaks,[73] and the English
agricultural day labourers! Since the purpose of labour is for the
wage labourer wages alone, money, a definite quantity of exchange
value, in which any specific characteristics of use value have been
extinguished, he is completely indifferent to the content of his
labour, and therefore to the specific character of his activity. In
the guild or caste system, on the other hand, this activity was
regarded as the exercise of a vocation, whereas with the slave, as
with the beast of burden, it is only a particular kind of activity,
of exertion of his labour capacity, imposed on him and handed down
from the past. Hence in so far as the division of labour has not made
his labour capacity entirely one-sided, the free worker is in
principle receptive to, and ready for, any variation in his labour
capacity and his working activity which promises better wages (as is
indeed demonstrated in the case of the surplus population of the
countryside, which constantly transfers to the towns). If the
developed worker is more or less incapable of this variation, he
still regards it as always open to the next generation, and the
emerging generation of workers can always be distributed among, and
is constantly at the disposal of, new branches of labour or
particularly prosperous branches of labour. In North America, where
the development of wage labour has least of all been affected by
reminiscences of the old guild system, etc., this variability, this
complete indifference to the specific content of labour, this ability
to transfer from one branch to another, is shown particularly
strongly. Hence the contrast between this variability and the
uniform, traditional character of slave labour, which does not vary
according to the requirements of production, but rather the reverse,
requiring that production should itself be adapted to the mode of
labour introduced originally and handed down by tradition, is
emphasised by all United States writers as the grand characteristic
of the free wage labour of the North as against the slave labour of
the South. (See Cairnes.) The constant creation of new kinds of
labour, this continuous variation — which results in a multiplicity
of use values and therefore is also a real development of exchange
value — this continuing division of labour in the whole of the
society — first becomes possible with the capitalist mode of
production. It begins with the free handicraft guild system, where it
does not meet with a barrier in the ossification of each particular
branch of the craft itself."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm
The last point, that the "variability" of labour exemplified by the
capitalist labour process in the US produces progress along the way
to the "fully developed individual" required for the activities that
define the realms of necessity and freedom of an ideal community, is
reiterated in Capital:
"Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes
the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production,
variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied
work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied
aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to
adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law.
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>
"A French worker wrote as follows on his return from San Francisco,:
"I could never have believed, that I was capable of working at all
the trades I practised in California. I was firmly convinced that I
was fit for nothing but the printing of books ... Once I was in the
midst of this world of adventurers, who change their jobs as often as
their shirts, then, upon my faith, I did as the others. As mining did
not pay well enough, I left it for the city, and there I became in
succession a typographer, a slater, a plumber, etc. As a result of
this discovery that I am fit for any sort of work, I feel less of a
mollusc and more of a man." (A. Corbon, "De l'enseignement
professionnel," 2nd ed., p. 50.)"
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#n227>
A key reason Marx gives for the possibility of the individuals
constituting the Russian peasant "agricultural commune" moving
directly to a "higher" communal form without passing through
capitalism is that, in it, "the private house, the cultivation of
arable land in parcels and the private appropriation of its fruits
permit a development of individuality which is incompatible with
conditions in more primitive communities."
“It is easy to see that the dualism inherent in the ‘agricultural
commune’ might endow it with a vigorous life, since on the one hand
communal property and all the social relations springing from it make
for its solid foundation, whereas the private house, the cultivation
of arable land in parcels and the private appropriation of its fruits
permit a development of individuality which is incompatible with
conditions in more primitive communities.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm
This is a change of view from the distinction drawn in "The Method of
Political Economy" between capitalist wage labour (once more as
exemplified by the condition of wage labour in the US) and Russian
peasant labour:
"The fact that the specific kind of labour is irrelevant presupposes
a highly developed complex of actually existing kinds of labour, none
of which is any more the all-important one. The most general
abstractions arise on the whole only when concrete development is
most profuse, so that a specific quality is seen to be common to many
phenomena, or common to all. Then it is no longer perceived solely in
a particular form. This abstraction of labour is, on the other hand,
by no means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of concrete
types of labour. The fact that the particular kind of labour employed
is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which
individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another, the
particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore
irrelevant. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become
a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased to be tied as an
attribute to a particular individual. This state of affairs is most
pronounced in the United States, the most modern form of bourgeois
society. The abstract category "labour", "labour as such", labour
sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes
a practical fact only there. The simplest abstraction, which plays a
decisive role in modem political economy, an abstraction which
expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations,
nevertheless appears to be actually true in this abstract form only
as a category of the most modern society. It might be said that
phenomena which are historical products in the United States – e.g.,
the irrelevance of the particular type of labour – appear to be among
the Russians, for instance, naturally developed predispositions. But
in the first place, there is an enormous difference between
barbarians having a predisposition which makes it possible to employ
them in various tasks, and civilised people who apply themselves to
various tasks. As regards the Russians, moreover, their indifference
to the particular kind of labour performed is in practice matched by
their traditional habit of clinging fast to a very definite kind of
labour from which they are extricated only by external influences."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/
appx1.htm
The historical process has to work to develop the "individuality of
persons" in this sense with the "end" of such development being the
actualization of "true individuality" understood as the "rich
individuality" of the "universally developed individual". Unless it
does so the "end" is unattainable. The conventional treatments of
the role of "crisis" in generating transformation ignore this.
Ted
