Two quick points, then I'll get off. Three messages from me in one day is
pushing it!!!
1) Where can I find out who Ilyenkov was, why he was writing this in 1977,
whose work was he arguing with, who was his audience, etc?
2) .. and this is a response to Paul's question #4:
I find it helps to think of "labour" as more than just commodified labor which
is measured out in units of time and sold for wages, subject to market forces,
etc. It makes more sense to me to consider all kinds of labour -- the mom
dressing the kid in the morning, the people packing picnic meals to come by bus
and train to sit on the grass and listen to the jazz festival by Lake Michigan
tonight, the thinking that goes into these xmca messages -- because they
certainly match what Ilyenkov calls "purposeful form-creating life activity of
social man" (p. 30) even though they are not commodified.
To think of labor as effort also helps us remember the enormous amount of
effort that goes into, for example, working on a political campaign or
implementing some new legislation -- and it helps us remember that labor can be
destructive as well as creative (as in dismantling a system of public
services).
Helena Worthen
> Paul Dillon wrote:
>
> 4. Ilyenkov uses Marx's theory of value to show how human activity is
> embodied in material objects in the form of ideality (value) but Marx
> himself referred to this as a form characteristic of capitalist society, and
> the substance Marx claimed to be incorporated in objects for his analysis of
> the capitalist system was "socially necessary labor time". How can
> Ilyenkov's proposal that ideality is the form of human activity incorporated
> in material things be expanded to other (non-economic) cultural and
> historical phenomena. What, if any, substance other than abstract labor
> time is embodied in material objects that endows material objects with
> ideality? .....
>
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