That „purposeful activity” criteria is so annoying and unnecessary, not to say philosophically and anthropologically weak. In the very first chapter he points out that Aristotle couldn't discover abstract labor because he was living in a slave society, so the society couldn't recognize the results of the work of a category of human as reducible in some way to the work of any other category of human. The purposeful activity is not imposed by the brain of the concrete human, but by the social subjectivity that dominates the workers. That's why some kind of work is active in the process of valorization (I think Rubin's formulations is the most appropriate, even if a mouthful), while other kinds of work aren't and appear unproductive: they are un productive according to the dominating social subjectivity, that of the capital.
I see “purposeful activity” as more emphasis on the idea that theres a goal of an end point, but I agree we should see things as related to the dominate social subjectivity
Yeah, the architect invisioning the building before even starting working on it while the bee or the spider naturally getting to work. The problem for me is that's an ideal type of human purposeful activity.
Related to that, tackling the problem of abstract human labor as the social substance of value Rubin said something to the extent that "we wouldn't exaggerat in saying that the commodity society created the [universal] human being". So that human beings being capable of this kind of purposeful directed activity has at least as much to do with the mode of production as it has with some (basically) immutable human biology. Maybe humans really are uniquely capable of this kind of directed purposeful activity, but we cannot know for sure and by not maintaining the uncertainty we run the risk of excluding from humanity categories of humans who don't display to our satisfaction the socially recognized purposeful activity. It's still claimed in some psychiatric circles that neurodivergent people don't have a theory of mind, for example. Already Levi Strauss talked about how various populations have a "bricolage" mode knowledge production that's much more ant-like than modern scientific, working bit by bit on a problem. Medieval masons mostly operated in the same way and you can see in castles and cathedrals that were accurately mainted how they grew organically, with fashions and micro-styles (so still within the Gothic tradition) changing with every generation. Even now, even for people whose job is to exercise their creativity, having purposeful directed activity is a moment in a work where we shift between it, bricolage and mimickry (and we know some animals are capable of mimickry), while the purposeful activity of people working in an intense division of labour or an assembly line, that works as intended, is not directed by the, but through them by the the manager and the engineer so at the end of the day by capital.
That „purposeful activity” criteria is so annoying and unnecessary, not to say philosophically and anthropologically weak. In the very first chapter he points out that Aristotle couldn't discover abstract labor because he was living in a slave society, so the society couldn't recognize the results of the work of a category of human as reducible in some way to the work of any other category of human. The purposeful activity is not imposed by the brain of the concrete human, but by the social subjectivity that dominates the workers. That's why some kind of work is active in the process of valorization (I think Rubin's formulations is the most appropriate, even if a mouthful), while other kinds of work aren't and appear unproductive: they are un productive according to the dominating social subjectivity, that of the capital.
I see “purposeful activity” as more emphasis on the idea that theres a goal of an end point, but I agree we should see things as related to the dominate social subjectivity
Yeah, the architect invisioning the building before even starting working on it while the bee or the spider naturally getting to work. The problem for me is that's an ideal type of human purposeful activity.
Related to that, tackling the problem of abstract human labor as the social substance of value Rubin said something to the extent that "we wouldn't exaggerat in saying that the commodity society created the [universal] human being". So that human beings being capable of this kind of purposeful directed activity has at least as much to do with the mode of production as it has with some (basically) immutable human biology. Maybe humans really are uniquely capable of this kind of directed purposeful activity, but we cannot know for sure and by not maintaining the uncertainty we run the risk of excluding from humanity categories of humans who don't display to our satisfaction the socially recognized purposeful activity. It's still claimed in some psychiatric circles that neurodivergent people don't have a theory of mind, for example. Already Levi Strauss talked about how various populations have a "bricolage" mode knowledge production that's much more ant-like than modern scientific, working bit by bit on a problem. Medieval masons mostly operated in the same way and you can see in castles and cathedrals that were accurately mainted how they grew organically, with fashions and micro-styles (so still within the Gothic tradition) changing with every generation. Even now, even for people whose job is to exercise their creativity, having purposeful directed activity is a moment in a work where we shift between it, bricolage and mimickry (and we know some animals are capable of mimickry), while the purposeful activity of people working in an intense division of labour or an assembly line, that works as intended, is not directed by the, but through them by the the manager and the engineer so at the end of the day by capital.