Andy,
What did you mean to write in this sentence " . . . is directly changes to
other people . . . " ? in"
> Very few of us today see a tangible, material product of our labour, the
> outcome of which is directly changes to other people and their social
> relations. Psychology needs to look at this change which is a further
> revealing of the essence of labour.
I know what you're talking about but that sentence is important, especially
since it is tied to the provocative statement concerning psychology's need
and "the essence of labor."
> ____________________________
> [Leontev 2] "Of particularly great significance . . . the transition from
a class society to communism."
>
Thanks for pointing back to this passage. It is very interesting to read
this way of expressing alienation: "the inadequacy of that **sense** that
gives objective significance to man, to his activity, to its products."
> I don't know what Russian word is translated as "disintegration", but this
> separation of the forms of labour is an essential part of the constitution
> of consciousness and cognition.
here I'm not sure what you mean by "forms of labor" ? physical and mental,
in the first instance? if so this ties back to what you said earlier about
the disappearance of even an indirect (primary extractive , mill and
factory-based) relationship to the product of the our immediate social
productive relations.
>In the embryonic form in which there is no
> social division of labour beyond the limited sphere of a kinship group,
> cognition is surely limited and narrow. I question the idea that private
> labour leads to labour losing objective significance. Surely it is equally
> true that is loses its subjectivity?
I think this is what is being said. I didn't read Marx as saying that our
labour loses its "objective significance" but that the "**sense** that gives
objective significance" to labour was "inadequate". What could this sense
be? Sense of participation, ownership, in the collectivity in which social
productive activity is carried out?
>. On the
> contrary, to the person who has lived only within the confines of kinship
> relations, the trees and rocks have a human spirit, subjectivity, while to
> who have grown up with private labour Nature is objective and spiritless??
> Sure, for the non-worker, the theoretical attitude predominates over the
> practical attitude.
This also seems to me to point directly to the property relation. When you
say "confines of kinship" I assume you are referring to non-market economic
relations (living in NW California I always think of pre-contact NW coast
indian tribes ranging from the Miwok and Pomo through the Tlingit, Haida,
and Tsimshian), where the individual's access to the social product is
mediated totally by concrete kinship relations. Of course those were
non-state, stone tool, hunting and gathering societies. The variations of
pre-industrial agricultural labor/property organization and kin-based
peasant societies, that co-occur with various modes of production, (ie,
tribute based, feudal, capitalist) often still preserve the "animistic"
framework world view you describe. Property relations are basic. I wonder
what studies have been conducted on the development of property concepts in
children?
Paul H. Dillon.
> any thoughts?
> Andy
>
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | - Andy Blunden - Home Page - http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm - |
> | All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational |
> | solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.|
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
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