Sigmoid Flexure Mundus Marx

[Richard Fiero]

Terrance wrote:
>.....The Right of Death & Power Over Life.....

I'd disagree with the final thought of the post by Terrance, ". 
. . technologies create the ways in which people perceive 
reality . . ." This is not central to what Marx is saying but 
may be a distant analog to what he is saying.
In 1844 fifteen pages of a pamphlet "The Holy Family" (a 
polemic attacking  the three Bauer brothers) were written by 
Engels and expanded into a book by Marx and published in 
February 1845. Marx's writings of this period are polemical and 
discursive rather than constructive in laying out a political 
economics. The purpose of the writing is to discredit the Young 
Hegelians and Bruno Bauer in particular. In the "Holy Family" 
Marx defends Proudhon against  Bruno Bauer's attacks. "He 
[Proudhon] puts an end to this unconsciousness."
In 1846 Marx invited Proudhon who declined, to become the Paris 
correspondent for the Brussels communists. Proudhon then 
published an anti-private property book System of Economic 
Contradictions which was subtitled Philosophy of Poverty. Marx 
countered with the Poverty of Philosophy, a devastating attack 
on Proudhon's use of Hegel's dialectic as being abstract 
speculation and refutes Proudhon's view of labor strikes as 
serving only to raise prices.
  "M. Proudhon most certainly wanted to frighten the French by 
flinging quasi-Hegelian phrases at them. So we have to deal 
with two men; firstly with M. Proudhon, and then with Hegel."
"Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that social genius produced, or 
rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim 
of transforming the settlers into responsible and 
equally-placed workers: and you will have effected a 
substitution of aims and of persons worthy of Providence that 
instituted landed property in Scotland, in order to give itself 
the malicious pleasure of driving out men by sheep."
  " Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are 
only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and 
natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial 
institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural 
institutions. In this they resemble theologians, who likewise 
establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not 
theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God."

>Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the 
>abstractions of the social relations of production, M. 
>Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, 
>sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the 
>principles, of these categories, which were slumbering — so M. 
>Proudhon the philosopher tells us — in the bosom of the 
>"impersonal reason of humanity".
>
>M. Proudhon the economists understands very well that men make 
>cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of 
>production. But what he has not understood is that  definite 
>social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, 
>flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with 
>productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men 
>change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of 
>production, in changing the way of earning their living, they 
>change all their social relations.
>
>****The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the 
>steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.*****
>
>The same men who establish their social relations in 
>conformity with the material productivity, produce also 
>principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.
>
>Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the 
>relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.
>
>There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, 
>of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the 
>only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement  — mors immortalis.
>
>[Marx quotes these words from the following passage of 
>Lucretius's poem On The Nature of Things (Book III, line 869): 
>"mortalem vitam mars immortalis ademit" ("moral life has been 
>usurped by death the immortal").]
>
>
>Poverty of Philosophy
>
>Marx understood that apart from their economic implications 
>technologies (hand-mill & steam-mill) technologies create the 
>ways in which people perceive reality, and that such ways are 
>the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life.