9.13.2012

Obama & the Collectivity of Labor

Obama:  'You didn't build that."

From Hegel to Marx by Sydney Hook (a critique of collectivist thinking): No man working together with others, dependent upon the funded store of social knowledge and material can make a claim for what is exclusively his own. Even when working alone he finds that much more than his own "unaided" efforts have gone into the productions of the specific goods he creates, e.g. the techniques, traditions, language, and science without which he could do nothing.

The nature of the social productive process is such that it makes the absolute slogan "each is to receive the full product of his toil" inapplicable. Whatever is product is a collective productive product. It is only the collectivity of the labour, as Marx later showed in Das Capital, which can claim exclusive right to what is produced.

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