Jim Devine wrote:
Marx's CAPITAL = the Torah BEYOND CAPITAL = the Talmud BUILD IT NOW = the Kabbalah.
Marx, though, claimed to have substituted "science" for mystical apocalyptic messianism. As a "science" of capitalism, this was an account of how capitalist conditions worked to create a "subject" with the developed capabilities required to transform capitalism into a social arrangement from which all barriers to full human development had been eliminated. This requires that the "impoverishment" to which capitalism, as Marx analyzes it, necessarily leads, must not be something merely negative. The process also has to be positively developmental of capabilities. This is the meaning of the conception of the labour process as "dialectical." "the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm Marx appropriates this idea in the context of explicitly denying that he is treating the "proletarians as gods." Thus, though in "the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete," it "has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven to revolt against this inhumanity." The "theoretical consciousness" and the other capabilities the successful transformation requires are claimed to be developed by "education" in "the stern but steeling school of labour." This dialectical development, according to Marx, is a defining characteristic of the internal relation that defines the "proletariat." This is why "it is a question of what the proletariat is." "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm It's not obvious that this correctly describes the dialectical necessity present in the capitalist labour process. Any appropriation and application of the dialectical conception of development it involves to other forms of "impoverishment," however, needs to explain how the particular form works positively to develop both the will and the capability to transform relations in the required way. Marx does this, for instance, in his explanation of how conditions in the Russian peasant commune might be consistent with the positive development of the required subjectivity. Ted
