What in the hell …

I really want a name for the Marx that Althusser doesn’t like. “Hegelian” doesn’t work for me. What’s the opposite of aleatory?

Marx writes in the Grundrisse that “[t]he great historic quality of capital is to create (…) superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence.”

He continues, saying that this function (”historic destiny”) of capitalism is no longer needed and no longer occurs once “the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness (…) and (…) when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth (…) have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. (…) Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is (…) an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces.” (325.)

I take this to mean that for Marx humanity achieves/achieved through capitalism a condition whereby more freedom is possible, freedom from, for lack of a better term, economic necessity. I’m amenable to that, but I think Marx means this more strongly: not only has this become possible through/under capitalism but also that this could not otherwise have happened. I take this to be the point of Marx’s remark on 326 that “autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour,” that is, that autonomous or social surplus wealth which lays the groundwork for a general reduction of labor, is possible only on the basis of some form of imposed labor.

I think in this passage Marx is treating society as one entity (a “population” as an abstraction, as he terms it on page 100) rather than as divided into contending classes, or, that he is “regard[ing] society as one single subject” and thus “look[ing] at it wrongly.” (94.)