Yes but it doesn't precede labor.
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This is good. It is also verifiable.
This is not.
Marx's economic reductivism (for that is what hard Marxism, which wants to make of itself a philosophy, is at the end of the day) forgets that labour - and even survival - are not at all the 'originary' or initial state of man; rather, communicability must inevitably exist before any production or socialization can transpire. For instance:
Communication precedes production.
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Yes but it doesn't precede labor.
Yes, it does.
Without communication, man does not labor. There is a distinction between harvesting and hunting and laboring; the two are not synonymous, and man is not the 'laboring-animal'; furthermore, his 'species-being' is an accumulated product of communicability, not of labor.
How does man labor if he does not know precisely what he ought to labor for? It is absurd to claim otherwise. Marx was wrong.
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This quote isn't even on Marxists.org.
Search results of their site return 0 hits. Source of your quote please?
TragicClown: "i'm not though...i'm how like, every conservative christian father would want their daughter to behave"
Intelligitimate: "The bible has gang-rape in it...I like the Bible."
"The right to enslave is a positive right." - Tungsten
"The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist." Karl Marx
People who cheated me out of a mathematical proof: Jazzremington, Severian, Che y Marijuana
One must labor to acquire food. One must labor to acquire shelter.
I don't quite think you understand what labor is.
Early man did nothing different from his primate ancestors, and primates do not labor. Once again, there is a severe difference between simply picking fruit up off the ground or from a tree and consuming it - which requires an exceedingly negligible effort on the part of the gatherer - and tilling the ground. Among the differences is that the first is done neither for profit nor for the benefit of the collective; it is almost accidental, meant simply to satisfy an urge without rational reflection on the end-goal of that urge (to keep me, myself, alive). Labor is undertaking economic activity for a deferred purpose, either for personal or communal gain.
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Aside from the fact that you state that early man didn't have to labor at all for their food or their survival (a fact which is pretty obviously false), you are contradicting yourself. You state that the "early labor of man" is "almost accidental, meant simply to satisfy an urge without rational reflection on the end-goal of that urge". Aside from your claim to understand the rationale of early man, which is outlandish in itself, you later contradict this statement by saying that "Labor is undertaking economic activity for a deferred purpose, either for personal or communal gain." Either you don't consider satisfying an urge to be personal gain or you're contradicting yourself.
Except that it's patently true.
What are the properties of labour?
1. It is organized. Gathering forage is not organized.
2. It involves a deferred goal - immediate consumption neither defers a goal nor involves any tangible goal.
3. It involves - and here's the kicker - communication. A lone individual out beating about the bush is not, at all, in any way, communicating with others to find food.
Once again: communication precedes labor.
Yes, and Herr Marx, with his romantic-Rousseauian-Feuerbachian pipedreams, did.
Satisfying an urge is not undertaken with the holistic well-being of the individual in mind. It is nothing more - and nothing less - than the immediate satisfaction of a particular urge. An unthinking creature does not comprehend that satiating this need is required for his continued existence. Thus early man was neither egoistic nor altruistic, as the priests Hobbes and Marx respectively want to have it. 'Human nature', in all its various forms - from contra bellum to 'species-being', is no different from either 'original sin' or the 'noble savage' and other such nonsensery: it is an attempt to advance a doctrinaire religion through the positing of an essential 'core', nothing more.
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This is circular logic. You are using the assumption that your assertion is true in order to support its truth.
Marx never claimed to.
Except I'm quite obviously not. Once more: does labor magically organize itself, without communication, no matter how crude, on some level? Do individual human beings mysteriously join together in holy harmony tilling fields and planting seeds?
Absolutely not.
Of course he did. The little journalist adopted the Left Hegelian imbecility hook, line and sinker, 'atheizing' it as was fashionable in his day but nevertheless retaining such absurdities as a tranquil, primordial, bygone 'lost age' which will be returned to following a cataclysmic war. Hence the hubub about 'Young Marx', who was just as senile as Old Marx and not even as entertainingly cantankerous.
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Sacrifice has still not sourced this quote.
Anyway, communication is an instrument of labour. It doesn't just spontaneously exist, but emerges from systematic and practical forms of interaction (labour).
There's no scientific evidence to suggest that human material needs were ever met by. This is a historical fiction of the Enlightenment and one Marx was keen to dispel.
If communication does precede labour then you need to explain how and why it emerged in the first place.
Then, even when this has been proved, the next question, "So what?", needs to be answered.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
I dug it up from a file of quotes I've collected over the years on various philosophers. Perhaps it is a misattributed quote; nevertheless, quotes such as
I absolutely agree with. This, however
I do not. For communication (including the most rudimentary and barely-detectable forms of such, like body language) always precede everything else within a culture; and no methods of organization are possible without it: man without language is like an infant who cannot control his own arms and legs because he lacks any method by which to make them comprehensible to himself. Thus, insofar as communication is the chief activity of human existence - it precedes everything else in man's life, which is his social life - we must therefore draw the inference that communicability and knowledge are of a greater importance than productivity, which is itself simply one more form of reproduction.
Dealt with above. Language does not arise from labor; labor, by virtue of its organization, necessarily arises from language.
Of course there is. I refer you to the ossified remains of shrubbery found in Lucy's gullet several decades ago: she and hers were foragers, not laborers. Once again, foraging is not laboring: it involves neither organization, nor goal-deference in favor of the collective or the self (storing up food for use at a later date, etc.). That Marx appealed to the Rousseauian 'noble savage' does not bode well for his own logistical capabilities.
Why did language arise?
Just as productivity did: to fulfill man's needs. Marx himself understood this - most of his apostles do not:
Man has needs which are not immediately material - many of which he should rather die than surrender. Among these are companionship. And understanding. And even dominance and exploitation: I've always found it humorous that such staunch 'materialists' have such a thoroughly Christian - thoroughly puritanical - conception of morality, going so far as to invent 'rankless games' (an absurdity). Communication allows for the fulfillment of these needs, as well as permits man to make his more immediate needs known: there is no reason at all to assume early man such a potent mind that he should know that other individuals experience the self-same hungers and drives that he does.
Realizing that there is no society without communication makes men more modest in their claims: chiefly, the absurd notion that the woes of the proletarian are so much greater than those of other oppressed minorities by virtue of their mystic connection to reality itself that they become world-historical is hereby abolished. Such egoism is anathema.
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Economic Left/Right: -8.88
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Perhaps, under your narrow concept of the term.
But Marx didn't use the term in such a manner, so your criticism of him - which was already extremely weak - is clearly wrong.
If I say "I support freedom" and "Genocide is unacceptable," you may think the statements are contradictory if you think that freedom is universal in scope; that is, that freedom means to be able to do anything at all.
But if you have any sense of communication, (which you love to talk about so much) you would recognize that people have different meanings for terms, and that my concept of freedom is individually more limited than yours is. If freedom for me is to have power to do things which do not infringe on the similar powers of others, it would become clear quite quickly that I am not, in fact, making a fallacious point.
Just as in your base criticism of Marx. You think that, because you have an extremely narrow sense of a term Marx uses in a manner inconsistant with your definition, you have somehow "proven him wrong." I wont pretend to think that Marx was right on everything, but here you have shown more nonsense in your own mind than in the thoughts and ideas of Marx.
EDIT: I also don't appreciate your unsubstantiated passing criticism of Ludwig Feuerbach. He was an extremely insightful person, I think he deserves more than this passing criticism.
it depends what you class as labour and to an extent, communication. Mankind precedes linguistics, and had to work and hunt in order to sustain his own survival.
However, this was done primarilly on instinct, before the concept of one man working for another was thought up.
Sacrice:
I doubt modesty would be gained given that you manage to simultaneously hold this position and exhibit a high degree of immodesty in your claims.
Also you again mis-characterize the Marxist position. The working class are not prioritized because they suffer more acutely than other groups, but because of their location within the existing social and economic order.
The fact that you fail realize this illustrates how your ideas are useless to the revolutionary left.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Well this raises the question of when "Mankind" can be said to emerge as a distinct genus from earlier humanoid types. The archaeological record suggests that modern man has always been capable of symbolic communication and there is growing evidence to suggest the same of earlier human types.
So wherever homo sapien settlements are found there is also found evidence of culture. The question is whether human history can be made intelligible on the basis of an increasing faculty for symbolic communication, or on the basis of an increased mastery over nature through production and hence, labour. Marxism argues the latter. Sacrifice seems to be arguing the former. He argues that the ideal precedes the material and therefore his position is one of idealism.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
An utter mischaracterization of philosophical idealism. Idealism quite literally holds that, as Schopenhauer puts it, "the world is my idea". My position does not deny that that the world is material; what it does deny is that labor is the basic material activity of man. Communication necessarily takes precedence, no matter how rudimentary (gestures, 'body language', grunting, even screams of pain or laughter, and so forth). This is only 'idealistic' if you want to make out of materialism a religion, or if you'd like seriously to argue that the activities of apes and chimpanzees constitute 'labor' (and even there they have some forms of communication).
I know this. And the Marxist conception of history, which assumes (for no reason whatsoever) that man is a laborer above all else is, quite flatly, wrong. Labor is a social activity. There are no social activities without communication, e.g. sharing knowledge of where to pick the best berries or how to plant a certain species of crop.
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -8.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69
You can keep repeating this as much as you like. But there is also no point in communication without social activity to coordinate - and society is an act of labour - it has to be produced materially.
At best we're left with a chicken-egg problem. And it's just as scholastic.
As Marx pointed out, the point is to change the world and in order to do that we need to locate the real driving force of social evolution. If you conceive the driver as unfolding powers of communication, rather than increasing powers of production, then you are adopting an idealist position where the ideas in people's heads precede their material activity.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
No doubt of it. Hence, " where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly..."
I do not mean to deny that material necessity brought language into being. What I mean to suggest is that first men had need to organize, then developed the capacity for organization, and then set about organizing themselves and performing labor. It's quite common-sensical, and, once again, is not idealist.
Once again, you misuse the term 'idealist', which Marxists are generally wont to do to ascribe to all competing philosophies a certain air of superstition which they don't actually have. Philosophical idealism holds that the world is not only matter and energy, but that it is also - and usually primarily or only - thought. My position holds that the world is nothing but matter, but more importantly energy. I recognize that men do not undertake any socially-organized activity without first possessing the capacity to communicate.
The "real driving force of social evolution" simply doesn't exist, because the dialectic is a flawed way to conceive of social change. Society does not 'progress', we are no more advanced than our earliest ancestors. We are simply different. These differences can be attributed to material advances facilitated by communication. The 'facilitator' of social change, if you will, is communication; but I do not ascribe to it any objective value which it utterly lacks.
Hence my kinship with anarchism. I find on the whole that anarchists are far less dogmatic than Marxists, and refuse to systematize their philosophy (as if the world ought to pay heed to their desires).
As for 'usefulness', this philosophy is utterly useful in a postindustrial society, where individuals are far less inclined to sympathizing with an urban proletariat which no longer exists in the same way that it did in the England of the Industrial Revolution. If Marxists could only get with the times...
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -8.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69
