Dear people:
I'm trying to think of ways to understand the reading -- ways to make it more
accessible.
In order to understand it, I have to fight my way through the bramble hedge
raised around Marxism both in the Soviet Union (I'm still reading Bakhurst) and
in the US. At moments, these seem to be mirror images of each other. In both
cases, the ideas of Marx woke up sleeping dogs (still wake them up, whenever
possible), and both cultures have done their best to put the dogs back to
sleep. I'm reminded of Engestrom's one-liner: "Every activity system buries
its contraditions." (Where did he say that?)
Nevertheless. So far, I think we have it that consciousness emerges from the
division of labor at the level of society (not the individual) and that these
social relations (meaning the social relationships of who is doing what for
various purposes) are the social forces of production; that labor "rests" in
the product, and that the products of labor (which include roads, alphabets,
tools, weddings, etc -- think of the list that Ilyenkov offered) are, in turn,
the tools of consciousness (in Ilyenkov's terms, the "ideal").
We can actually see this in the diagram of a triangle-within-a-triangle in
Engestrom's chapter in the book that was up on our list about two months ago,
from idealibrary. I don't have a copy of his other triangles here right now,
but that triangle doesn't look much different to me than the previous
triangles. You can run your finger along the different sides of it and see what
is mediating what.
So these are important ideas for us in the United States who are deeply
acculturated to thinking of consciousness as individual and mental (internal,
private, personal), that mental and physical labor are inherently separate
(rather than separated by the social forces of production), and that the
division of labor has no history (or, that consciousness has no history). We
also tend to overlook that these ideas have political power in the immediate
present.
In about two weeks I will be teaching "the development of the modern industrial
process" to a class of workers at a big plant near Chicago. The class is part
of a labor-management program. The materials for the class were produced by a
labor-management team. If they had been produced by a labor team solo, they
would be very different and what I would be teaching would be very different.
The history I would be teaching would be very different. The lesson of that
history would be different. But the economic and political interests of the
team that is writing my paycheck rule what I am going to teach (academic
freedom has some very fine points!). One of the things I am going to be
teaching is the division of labor, as the manufacture of cars changed from
being a craft project where skilled tradesmen dragged elements of a car to a
central spot on the shop floor where they built the vehicle... all the way to
the creation of the moving assembly line.
This is a history that is brief in time but through which you can see vividly
the changes in social relations as the labor process changes (take a look at
Zimbalist, Case Studies in the Labor Process, Monthly Review 1979). If you can
put yourself in the place of the workers who experienced this transition, or
the new workers who came into the shops during (and ever since) this
transition, and those who -- like the students in my class in a few weeks --
come into it now, you can see how their conscousness is going to be shaped by
this process. In fact, the workers I'll be teaching are temps -- full-time,
some of them there for years and years, but according to the contract, temps.
Now THEY'VE got a consciosness problem!
And shaping their consciousnsess (by telling the history of their labor process
from a certain strictly controlled perspective) is my asignment.
!!
Helena Worthen
"Paul H.Dillon" wrote:
> ... Physical and mental labor are separated at the level
> of the social division of labor, not the level of the individual. ...
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