In my mind, your work is too good not to care about it. After reading your essay No Reforming the Capitalist State: The Fight for Genuine Socialism I got to thinking people are so programmed for capitalism and against socialism, they might not have actually read any of the work by the founders of modern economics. It took a while, but I found a good essay that helps connect some dots and pasted a couple excerpts below.
Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx
Sean Sayers
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.405.9468&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“Marx’s account of alienation is a critical and radical version of the Hegelian ideas that I have been describing. Under conditions of alienation, ‘labour, life activity, productive life itself’ is perverted so that it is,
“external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. . . . His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced.”
Free artistic activity. For Marx, too, art is the highest form of creative activity, free creative activity, the highest form of work. Animals are not capable of such activity, they are not free. In so far as they produce, they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need . . . hence man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty. These passages are from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but the same thought recurs later in Marx’s work. In the Grundrisse, he describes composing music as ‘really free labour’, which can constitute ‘attractive work, the individual’s self-realisation’. In the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ he envisages a time when work will become an end in itself, ‘life’s prime want’.
These ideas are also at the basis of Marx’s almost universally misunderstood distinction between the ‘realms’ of ‘necessity’ and ‘freedom’ in Capital, Volume 3.
“The realm of freedom . . . begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. . . . Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants . . . 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. . . . 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.”
