Title: MARX ON FULL AND FREE DEVELOPMENT , By: Jenkins, J.L.

, Social Theory & Practice, 0037802X, Summer96, Vol. 22, Issue 2 Database: Academic Search Premier

MARX ON FULL AND FREE DEVELOPMENT

Contents 1. Full

Marx has been severely criticized for his unrealistic view that under communism, self-development in work would be full and free. A fully developed individual has developed all of her talents. A freely fully developed individual has developed all of her talents as ends in themselves, not merely as means. The "full" aspect of the ideal is taken to be unattainable because a person

Development 2. Free

Development Notes

who tried to be, for example, a brain surgeon in the morning and a philosopher in the evening would turn out

to be good at neither of these things. The ideal is a practical impossibility.[1] The ideal is not only seen as unattainable, but also as undesirable, on the grounds that it leaves people without a social role to provide them with selfidentification, and it ignores the need of creative individuals to concentrate exclusively on their chosen field of endeavor.[2] The "free" aspect of the ideal faces another problem: Marx appears to deny that labor is a realm in which humans can engage in free activity. I want to defend Marx's ideal not by showing that on the usual interpretation the ideal is desirable and practical, but rather by showing that the common reading of the ideal is incorrect. I will first show that by full development Marx did not mean the development of every potential talent of the individual. Second, I will argue that Marx consistently held that human freedom could be achieved in labor activity.

1. Full Development There are numerous passages in Marx's writings that appear to suggest that he thinks every human is a nascent Leonardo da Vinci, prevented from full Flower only by the constraining bonds of capitalism.[4] The following is a famous one: For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.[5] The particular examples that Marx gives make the fullness ideal neither implausible nor undesirable. Ranchers in the American west probably do all of the things mentioned with the exception of critical criticism. However, a substitution of brain surgery in the morning, nuclear physicist in the afternoon, concert pianist in the evening makes the view absurd. Even if a person had the potential talent to do all of these things in separate lifetimes, they are all so demanding that only one or two can be achieved in a single lifetime. Hence, the ideal is obviously unattainable. One might doubt that this and other passages from the German Ideology express Marx's considered view, given that the German Ideology was coauthored, not published in Marx's lifetime, and never polished. However, in volume I of Capital, Marx quotes the writings of a French workman whose experience bears a striking resemblance to the life praised in the German Ideology:

I never could have believed, that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing. . . . Once in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer, slater, plumber, &c. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit for any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man. Marx notes with approbation that this shows that modern industry must produce the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. The obvious similarity between the passages indicates that what is said in the German Ideology should indeed be taken seriously. A natural way to read the German Ideology passage is to suppose that the point is about the freedom of development that communist production would give people, not the fullness. So, on that reading, Marx is not seriously suggesting that communist individuals would actualize every potential talent, but rather that they could try to if they wanted to, since they would not be trapped in a particular profession by necessity. If one wished to be a hunter in the morning and a critical critic in the evening, one could try to achieve this without the threat of starvation hanging over one's head. Thus, the passage can be read as relevant only to the "free" aspect of the ideal, not as recommending or predicting anything about fullness. The standard reading of the passage pictures someone who is a dilettante. But if it is true that people find excellence in some productive capacity rewarding, then they would not find rewarding a situation where they were only a little bit good at many things. Hence, although communism might
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make it possible for people to try to develop all of their potential talents, it is doubtful that more than a handful would choose to do so if the abovementioned substitutions are made. So my claim is that Marx can allow that people would not want to be dilettantes, but rather would want to specialize in order to be good at something, just as they have a mind. One might object, however, that Marx makes repeated claims that communism will produce wholly developed, all-round individuals. We have . . . shown 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. [W]ith a communist organisation of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness which arises entirely from the division of labour, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of his professional development. . . . In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities.[9] The first passage and others where Marx extols the desirability of the development of the whole individual present no problem for my reacding.[10] To be all-round is to be neither a mindless grunt, nor a hysterical bluestocking, nor a technocratic hive member knowing only one thing. The goal of liberal education is to produce individuals who are wellrounded in this sense, but it in no way precludes specialization. The second passage does appear to preclude specialization. The prediction is that there will be no "painters," only people who paint among other things. In favor of Marx's claim, it is important to notice that if the activities sewer worker, filing clerk, or gravedigger are substituted for painter, that is, "there are no [sewer workers] but at most people who work in sewers among other
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activities," there is no objection to the ideal. To abolish these roles seems very desirable. Also, in the context of the passage, Marx is arguing that the appearance of artistic talent in only a few individuals is explained by its "suppression in the broad mass" by the division of labor. So he is making the general point that many more people would be capable of artistic endeavor if they were not stuck doing something else. It is only when roles admired in society are substituted that the claim seems objectionable. To be a brain surgeon is valuable and rewarding, and thus there seems to be no good reason why a person should not primarily engage in such an activity. But Marx does claim that painters are narrow. Does this mean that there is no specialization in a communist society? It does not if we admit that painters, and too many other specialists in our society, are too narrow. They attend a technical school or an art school, and know about almost nothing else. They fail to satisfy our own liberal ideal of a developed individual. As Marx would have it, given the way division of labor responds to supply and demand, that kind of narrow specialization is what is efficient. The current trend in North American universities of de-emphasizing the study of the humanities, in favor of churning out scientists and engineers who can produce, reflects that fact. So, when Marx says that there will not be any painters, he means that there will not be any hive-mind painters, who know about painting and nothing else. Again, that seems desirable and not unattainable. The projected freedom of development under communism allows the potentially few Leonardos (if they are potentially few) the opportunity to develop themselves fully. The rest of the population has the opportunity to follow Milton as their exemplar who "produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk . . . [as] an activity of his nature."[11] A society which produced only pale, washed-out, dilettantish versions of Milton has not produced fully developed Miltons. It is not one Marx recommends. It might be objected that I have ignored Marx's insistence, contra Hegel, that people should not identify with, or become engulfed in their social roles,
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and that, hence, Marx must oppose specialization.[12] To be engulfed in one s social role is to see ones role as a natural or inevitable aspect of one's identity, such that independence from or abandonment of that social role is not conceived as a possibility. As we have seen, the fully developed individual is one who recognizes that he is "fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers." One of the benefits of capitalist production is that it makes the worker aware that her social role is not fixed or inevitable, and so she is independent from her role in a way that the medieval craftsman is not. What characterises the division of labour in the automatic workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialised character. But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft-idiocy.[13] The modern worker is driven away from the engulfment typical of the medieval craftsman. The question is whether escape from engulfment precludes any sort of specialization or whether it is only the type of specialization characteristic of the "idiotic" medieval craftsman that Marx condemns. G.A. Cohen argues convincingly that it does not follow from Marx's contempt of the medieval craftsman that Marx thinks that craft labor must disappear in communist society. For the labourer to escape a "servile relationship" to his work, it was necessary that artisanship be replaced by a labour of repellent material character, but it does not follow that a return to the earlier physical form betokens a renewal of the engulfment which attended it. Craft labour can be unengulfing, but if engulfed craft labour is the point of departure, transition to craft labour without engulfment requires the demise of craft labour and the rise of proletarian. Proletarian labour effects a break with the
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engulfment craft labour promoted, but it thereby enables craft labour to reappear free of its original "idiocy." Cohen's view is that when Marx says that in communist society there are no painters, he does not mean that "in a communist society there are no fulltime painters but at most part-time painters."[15] Rather, there are no engulfed full-time painters. According to Cohen, this means that Marx envisioned a society in which "the status 'painter' is not assumed even from time to time," although there may be people who paint full-time.[16] Cohen suggests that this idea may be conceptual or sociological nonsense, and it is easy to understand the charge. There is a name for someone who paints full-time--"painter." To suppose that someone paints full-time but is not a painter seems incoherent, since someone who paints is a painter. "Painter" is what it is to be someone who paints. If, however, taking on the status "painter" means being seen as necessarily a painter, it is not conceptual nonsense to say that there will be no painters such as that. This contrasts with Hegel's view that for a person to become an integral part of society she must come to be seen and to see herself as exclusively confined to a particular role. A man actualizes himself only in becoming something definite . . . this means restricting himself exclusively to one of the particular spheres of need . . . in his way gaining recognition both m one s own eyes and m the eyes of others. Marx's position represents, I think, a significant advance over Hegel's. Marx can recognize both the human need to specialize in a field in order to find it rewarding, and the lack of freedom that results if people come to be seen and to see themselves as fixed in their social roles. And Marx's position in no way precludes the satisfaction of the human need for self-identification. The communist painter has a definite identity. She is someone who mainly paints, but not naturally and not inevitably, and not necessarily exclusively. Specialization is not constitutive of engulfment. That means that the
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supposed ideal of incredibly varied activities would be an additional desideratum. And as I have already argued, none of the passages which are usually cited as support. for the view commit Marx to that absurd ideal. Marx does claim that communism will abolish the division of labor, and that again suggests that he predicts the disappearance of specialists. However, his primary concern is the division between mental and physical labor. He says that "division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears."[18] A situation where some elite are privileged to do the interesting things such as painting and science, while the vast majority put heads on dolls and so on, represents the kind of waste of human lives Marx thought communism could overcome. By "full" or "all-round" development Marx did not mean that communist producers would develop every single potential that they possess, but rather that they would develop both their mental and physical capacities until their lives are full of fulfilling activities. That point can be reached in a Leonardo-like fashion or a Milton-like fashion.[19] 2. Free Development There is another reason for thinking that Marx rejects the desirability of occupational roles. He appears to deny that people can be free in their work. If they cannot, then specializing in some occupational role cannot be a part of the person's full and free development. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. . . . Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under

conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.[20] Cohen, for example, interprets this passage to mean that Marx had a pessimistic view about the possibilities for human fulfillment in the production process.[21] Since Marx is pessimistic about fulfilling labor, the working day must be shortened. He takes this to be Marx's considered view rather than the later claim in "The Critique of the Gotha Program," where labor in the higher form of society is said to become "life's prime want."[22] I contend that Marx was consistent throughout his career. In the Manuscripts of 1844 he asserts that humans are by nature freely producing beings, and near the end of his career he asserts that labor becomes life's prime want. The apparently negative assessment of the passage in volume III of Capital sometimes echoed in the Grundrisse, is merely apparent.[23] There are two ways to understand the assertion that the working day should be shortened. First, one might hold, as Cohen does, that this means that labor cannot be an end in itself.[24] Second, one might think that labor cannot become life's prime want until people are allowed enough leisure to develop themselves. Once they are allowed that freedom, they have the capacity for activities that are not just mundane and necessary, but also ends in themselves. I shall argue that the second is Marx's view. This interpretation has several advantages. First, it avoids the necessity of describing Marx as inexplicably changing his mind from year to year about the place of labor in human life. Second, it explains why Marx says both that labor can constitute real freedom and that the working day must be shortened for real freedom to be achieved. Third, it does not violate the common sense view, of which Marx was surely aware given his own work life, that there are many forms of labor which are rewarding ends in

themselves. Marx had good reason for asserting that the labor he describes as necessary and mundane could not become an end in itself. He pictures it as follows: [I]t is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it. . . . The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.[25] The increase of automation turns human producers into machine-tenders. Anyone who has tended such a machine knows that not much room for human creativity exists in such an occupation. There would be something wrong with someone who made opening and closing the door of her machine an end in itself. So, Marx rightly describes this kind of labor as mundane and necessary, as labor that cannot become an end in itself. Since the Capital (vol. III) passage quoted above asserts that the shortening of the working day is the basic prerequisite for entry into the true realm of freedom where activity is an end in itself, one might think that Marx's pessimism about labor extends to all forms of labor, not only to the kind of labor in which the worker finds herself an appendage to a machine. However, Marx himself inveighs against Adam Smith for not having realized that labor is an end in itself for human beings. It seems quite far from Smith's mind that the individual, "in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility," also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquility. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity--and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits-10

hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour, by contrast, as "freedom, and happiness." Here Marx claims that labor can be not only fulfilling, but also posited as an end in itself. He describes it as an activity in which the person gains real freedom. This leaves a puzzle. If labor can be fulfilling and free, why does Marx think that the shortening of the working day is the basic prerequisite to freedom? To understand why, it must be noticed that Marx does not say that labor time must be minimized.[27] It must merely be shortened. That is because a long working day leaves people with no time to develop themselves, especially if the work is of the mundane but necessary stripe described above. If I work twelve hours opening and shutting the door of my machine as it emits parts, my time to educate myself in the arts and sciences is minimal. As long as I do not have time to educate myself in the arts and sciences, the only kind of labor within my capacity will be the mundane. If I do have such time, then I will be capable of labor that is an end in itself. So, my working day must be shortened to make it possible for labor to become life's prime want. The reason, then, for the shortening of the working day is to make labor life's prime want. Marx describes the worker's changed attitude toward the production process, once educated, in this way: Free time--which is both idle time and time for higher activity--has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. The shortening of the working day has the result of turning the worker into a new subject--one for whom labor can be rewarding rather than debilitating-one for whom labor could even become life's prime want.
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I conclude, then, that Marx's vision of human activity under communism is much more attractive and optimistic than commentators have thought it to be. Full development is not an absurd dilettantism. Free development does not occur only during one's leisure hours. I have several times compared Marx's ideal to the liberal ideal of education. Marx himself would perhaps be unhappy at being referred to as "liberal" in any way, but the comparison is suggestive. It suggests, at least, that there is a common ideal of human life held by liberals and communists. Their differences lie in their views about the means of achieving the ideal.[29] Notes 1. See, for example, Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 522.

2. For these criticisms, see, for example, G.A. Cohen, "Reconsidering Historical Materialism," in History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 140.

3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1981), p. 820.

4. Marx's position might be seen as influenced by Schiller's view that by the "confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities" (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Wilkinson & Willoughby trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), Letter 6, sec. 8). However, first, Schiller seems to have thought that any form of specialization was harmful to the individual, whereas that was not Marx's view, and, second, as Bernard Yack argues, worries about the fragmentation of the modern individual were a commonplace in German writing (Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton: Princeton
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University Press, 1986), p. 158).

5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 47.

6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 487 n.

7. Capital, vol. I, p. 488.

8. The German Ideology, p. 439.

9. Ibid., p. 394.

10. See ibid., pp. 225, 256 for other claims about wholesale development.

11. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 389.

12. I shall henceforth call tiffs phenomenon "engulfment," following several recent commentators. See, for example, G.A. Cohen, "The Dialectic of Labour in Marx," History, Labour, and Freedom, pp. 183-208, and David Miller, "Marx, Communism, and Markets," Political Theory 15 (1987): 182-204, for a discussion of the dangers of engulfment in communist society.

13. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 125.

14. Cohen, "Dialectic of Labour," pp. 202-3.

15. Ibid., p. 206.

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16. Cohen elsewhere endorses the view that a part of Marx's point is that there are no full-time painters (see Cohen, "Reconsidering," p. 141). His considered view appears to be that although specialization is not sufficient for engulfment, Marx thinks that both varied rules and avoiding engulfment are desirable.

17. G.W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), sec. 207.

18. The German Ideology, pp. 44-45.

19. It is interesting to note that although Marx condemns the engulfment of the medieval craftsman, he praises Milton for engaging in an activity of his nature. This suggests that Marx would not want to say that Milton is engulfed, even though his activity is seen as natural. And that suggests that what Marx wants to condemn is the engulfment which occurs in a society where people are taught that certain roles are natural for them even though they are not, not a society where people are encouraged to develop talents for which they actually have a natural bent.

20. Marx, Capital, vol. III, p. 820.

21. Cohen, "Dialectic of Labour," p. 207.

22. Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker ed. (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1978), p. 531. James Klagge argues that Cohen is wrong. His compromise view is that Marx in his early writings had an optimistic view about the fulfillment humans could extract

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from productive labor, but the later view is that although labor should be minimized, it can still be fulfilling and free given certain conditions (James Klagge, "Marx's Realms of 'Freedom' and 'Necessity'," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1986): 769-77).

23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, M. Nicolaus trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 612.

24. Klagge, although he disagrees with Cohen that Marx had a pessimistic view about productive activity under communism, admits that one can only explain the "Gotha Program" passage either by supposing that Marx became optimistic again later on, or that Marx got carried away in a heavy-handed rhetorical flourish (Klagge, "Marx's Realms," p. 777).

25. Grundrisse, pp. 692-93.

26. Ibid., p. 611.

27. Klagge does make the inference that labor time must be minimized, so that in spite of his recognition that Marx describes labor under communism as really free, he can only understand Marx's demand for a shorter working day as expressing some perfectionist value--that activities that have no hint of the necessary are higher in value than activities that are both means and ends (Klagge, "Marx's Realms," p. 774).

28. Grundrisse, p. 712.

29. I would like to thank Robert Shaver, Annette Baier, Jennifer Whiting, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their

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helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. ~~~~~~~~ By J.L. Jenkins Department of Philosophy, University of Manitoba

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Source: Social Theory & Practice, Summer96, Vol. 22 Issue 2, p181, 12p Item: 9609194492

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