Respecto al Tercer Objetivo Específico y Reflexiones Finales

Marx thought that the revolutionary appropriation of the productive forces of social labour by the working class involves the development of the abilities required to collectively control them in a manner consistent with the initiation of a “communist organization of society.” In his view the process of appropriating the knowledge objectified in these forces, and attempting to exercise the technical capacities associated with their use, further develops the ability required for it. In particular, he claimed that

“private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.”⁵⁴⁴

As a feature of revolutionary subjectivity this “all-round fashion” of individual development is more accurately described as the workers’ “indifference to the particularity of labour.”⁵⁴⁵ The

544 Marx and Engels 1998, 464. “This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse.

Even from this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse. The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the

development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves” (Ibid., 96).

545 In Capital, Marx included a statement on this matter by a French labourer who went to California for work: “I could never have believed that I was capable of working at all the trades I practiced in California…. 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” (Marx 1976, 618). Cf.

Marx 1973, 104; Marx 1981, 289; Marx 1976, 1013-14.

development of this “indifference” is facilitated by the tendency to ‘deskill’ the production process which increases the relative ease of transition from one occupation to another. In The Poverty of Philosophy he claimed that the “division of labour...engenders specialized functions, specialists” which is a kind of one-sided development—he called it “craft-idiocy”—but within the “automatic workshop” of capitalist production “labour has...lost its specialized character,”

and “the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt.”⁵⁴⁶ He thought this was a positive consequence of the “estrangement” experienced by wage-labourers because the

“automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft idiocy.”⁵⁴⁷ Immature forms of the “rational”

indifference to the particularity of labour that Marx thought would be achieved in the

“communist organization of society”—i.e., “the totally developed individual”—germinate through “estrangement” in capitalism.⁵⁴⁸

In tandem with this process, the “general mania for money” encourages the movement which develops our “versatility,” i.e., the “perfect indifference towards the particular content of work and the free transition from one branch of industry to the next.”⁵⁴⁹ This aspect of the

“estrangement” experienced by wage-labourers which develops “self-conscious reason” is thus fundamentally mental-psychological and socio-practical. The key significance that Marx

ascribed to the mental-psychological dimension for the development of revolutionary productive capacities makes it worthwhile to quote him at length:

546 Marx and Engels 1976, 190.

547 Ibid.

548 Marx 1976, 618.

549 Ibid., 1034.

“Greed, as the urge of all, in so far as everyone wants to make money, is only created by general wealth. Only in this way can the general mania for money become the wellspring of general, self-reproducing wealth. When labour is wage-labour, and its direct aim is money, then general wealth is posited as its aim and object.... Money as aim here becomes the means of general industriousness.... In this way the real sources of wealth are opened up. When the aim of labour is not a particular product standing in a particular relation to the particular needs of the individual, but money, wealth in its general form, then, firstly the individual’s industriousness knows no bounds; it is indifferent to its particularity, and takes on every form which serves the purpose.... It is clear, therefore, that when wage-labour is the foundation,

money...acts productively.... General industriousness is possible only where every act of labour produces general wealth, not a particular form of it; where therefore the individual’s reward, too, is money.”⁵⁵⁰

Marx claimed that “the sole purpose of work in the eyes of the wage-labourer” is money, and since money is “a specific quantity of exchange-value” from which “every particular mark of use-value has been expunged,” workers are “wholly indifferent towards the content” of their labour.⁵⁵¹ This is a key ingredient in the developmental context of the proletariat as opposed to the slave. Marx claimed that wage-labour is playing a vital role in the historical emergence of

“general industriousness as the general property of the new species” and that slavery can “never create general industriousness” because it fosters the perspective that freedom is “loafing.”⁵⁵²

550 Marx 1973, 224.

551 Marx 1976, 1033. Cf. Marx 1973, 163.

552 Marx 1973, 325-326. Cf. Marx 1976, 1014.

In contemporary literature, Guido Starosta places a strong emphasis on Marx’s idea of productive subjectivity, although the mental-psychological dimension of the development of the productive capacities of revolutionary subjects is generally overlooked.⁵⁵³ Starosta recognizes and attempts to explore the relationship between subjective powers and the ‘socio-material’

productive basis of society⁵⁵⁴ but he fails to notice the depth of Marx’s idea of subjectivity and mental-psychological life. To begin with, Starosta misinterprets Marx’s idea that truly

“universal” productive subjects can only exist in an “advanced phase of communist society” and not as revolutionary subjects.⁵⁵⁵ He does not place adequate emphasis on the “universality” of humanity in the sense of our “rational” and therefore “free” nature, i.e., that which makes our productive activity unique among animals that “also produce.” In effect, Starosta condenses Marx’s idea of human “universality” into the colloquial sense of the term (i.e., as all-rounded) and places excessive emphasis on productive capacities; e.g., he writes about “a universal worker, that is, a productive subject capable of taking part in any form of the human labour-process.”⁵⁵⁶ Marx’s idea of “general industriousness” incorporates the notion of “all-sided development” in this sense. However, as demonstrated in previous chapters, his idea of our

“universality” involves all other aspects of human subjectivity.

553 He maintains that for Marx “productive subjectivity” is a uniquely human trait, and that in Marx’s writing from 1844 “the content of the history of the human species consists in the development of the specific material powers of the human being as a working subject, that is, of human productive subjectivity” (Starosta 2013, 233). Thus for Starosta the “essence” of the “capitalist transformation of the production-process of human life lies in the mutation of the productive attributes of the collective labourer according to a determinate tendency: the individual organs of the latter eventually becoming universal productive subjects” (Ibid., 236).

554 He claimed, for example, that “it is on the fully-expanded universal character of human productive subjectivity that the material basis for the new society rests” (Ibid., 244).

555 Consider, for example, his claim that a “passage from the Grundrisse mentions that the universality of

‘revolutionary’ productive subjectivity must be the expression of a scientific consciousness, capable of organising work as ‘an activity regulating all the forces of nature’” (Ibid., 247).

556 Ibid., 239. He also claimed that “Large-scale industry’s tendency to produce an increasingly universal worker” is equal to “the disappearance of the technical necessity for a particularistic development of the worker’s productive subjectivity” (Ibid., 240).

Marx thought the capitalist transformation of human subjectivity is more extensive than just the development of productive capacities. In particular, the development of our ethical character is an essential aspect of revolutionary subjectivity. Thus while the development of productive capacities is an integral subjective transformation for the revolutionary appropriation of the productive forces of social labour, the revolutionary character of this appropriation also requires a corresponding development of a more “rational” individual ethical character⁵⁵⁷ among members of the working class.