why he had to logically assume the disparity between rich and poor would necessitate
revolution and revolutionary movements could facilitate the speed at which this would occur. Having failed to find a means to quantify the metaphysical nature of goods (individual
thoughts produced during the activity of thinking, for example) outside of the quantified
notion of “exchange value” which is tied to particular products, Marx wrongly assumed all operated within a zero-sum framework – whereby the increased understanding on the part of the workers would ultimately gain them a position of power over the capitalists and finally overthrow the system.
This finally points to a fundamental problem Marx was never able to address, let alone overcome: the inability to quantify the value of mental thoughts and products (ideas), as this creates an environment within which true nature of “exchange value” cannot be understood or quantified. One can hear, of course, the critics arguing that is why leisure time is so important to Marx. And, granted, Marx defined and spoke to the concept of leisure time (that time taken away from laboring or engaging in the means of subsistence). Marx worried about capitalism constantly chipping away from the time individuals need for basic survival (eating, sleeping, etc.), because this required people to labor longer and longer to make ends meet.
He also worried that developed forms of capitalism and labor itself – when fully manifest – would attempt to eliminate free time (or what is often termed leisure time), because free time reestablishes the personhood of man as he or she reveals things important to their
understanding of identity and character. Free time stands in complete opposition to man, as he is defined as a commodity through labor.
“Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this
different subject.”55 But arguably, Marx never found or articulated a means for quantifying it: it was merely stated as important, and quite honestly as truly representing what ‘absolute value’ would constitute if the capitalist had not extracted it in its entirety from the worker.
More importantly, Marx never found or defined an even more abstract but quite possibly an even more important thing having value: namely, individual thoughts and thinking that take place but which may not – either in work, or labor, or leisure – ever find stasis in a final product or commodity. In other words, those things produced in individual thoughts and thinking. These things may, in fact, be the most valued component of human identity or personal character, as they are things which not only reside in the one space that is truly private
There is literally no distinction between those things possessing a physical nature and those things possessing an abstract nature. They simply are bundles of reorganized energy, products or commodities, undifferentiated except by perspective and definition, generated through labor, the means of production, being exercised upon the material of the world (things and thought things) through the act of appropriation (differentiating and naming.)
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