Avatar does speak a little bit of truth, as far as I'm concerned. It's that any revolution against capitalism worth its salt will have included nonhumans.
Marx definitely means a qualitative distinction between humans and nonhumans when he says that there is a bright line separating “the worst of architects” from “the best of bees.” Nuts to that. If anything the distinction is only quantitative. And sometimes humans are worse than nonhumans on a quantitative reckoning.
Nonhumans are already on “this” side of social space. What does this tell us? Simple. Social space was never totally human.
Indeed sir. you'd think this much would, by now, be obvious non?
ReplyDeleteI don't think you're honestly representing the passage where that quote is drawn from. In it, Marx makes the point that the worst of architect is different to the best bees in that the shoddy architect plans, where the bee runs on instinct.
ReplyDeleteWe are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.
As for the main point of the entry: That any overthrow of capitalism will include non-humans, the question you have to answer is 'how will they be included, and to what ends?' Given the current nutritional requirements of all of humanity, cows and pigs and chickens, and even the little bees will remain enslaved to humanity for some time.
Thank you. You just made my point for me. This is precisely the sense in which Marx is anthropocentric. You have seen cats hesitating, yes? Now biologists see ants looking around before they do something like climb a little ladder. Human "imagination" is nowhere near a unique commodity. Humans are only unique at sweating--read Darwin.
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