What is Specific about Modern Industry? Sample Clauses

What is Specific about Modern Industry?. In the Manuscripts, Xxxx considers the historical development of economic systems largely in terms of their corresponding economic theorisation. He considers the crude “metal-fetishism” of the Monetary system [EW, p.364], which evolves through Mercantilism, Physiocracy, and Political Economy (Xxxxx). This in turn develops into a more “consciously estranged” or “cynical” Political Economy (from Say, to Xxxxxxx and Xxxx) [EW, p.343]. This understanding is organised around a single unified theme, the logical unfolding of the forms of private property. The consequence of this, arguably teleological, theory is that history has arrived at the final form of private property, whose internal contradictions are driving it towards a resolution, the positive super-session of private property. This contradiction, in its limiting form, argues Xxxx, is “necessarily the limit, the culmination and the decline of the whole system of private property” [EW, p.337]. Once all wealth has become “industrial wealth, wealth of labour”, Xxxx argues, we have arrived at “the fully developed objective form of private property” [EW, p.345]. In this context, the working out of the inner nature of the relationship of private property appears as a progression of the conflict between immovable and movable private property, between landed property and industry, in which the latter is ultimately victorious. I will now elaborate this problem in more detail. In the Second Manuscript, Xxxx begins to employ the concept of industry for himself, and does so in the sense of both aspects described above: as industry’s struggle against landed property, and as modern industry’s appearance as an agent with non-human subjective properties. These two senses appear to be under an internal tension with each other, and yet the first is seen as logically and historically impelled towards dissolution in the second. On the one hand, Xxxx sets up an opposition in which two forms of private property, movable and immovable, represented in the forms of industry and landed property, develop together in a symbiotic relationship. In this relationship, industry is associated with “town life”, and defined in its opposition to landed property, which is in turn associated with “aristocratic feudal life” [EW, p.337]. The “town life” aspect of industry is marked by its immaturity, since it still bears the “feudal characteristics of its opposite”, under which labour retains an “apparently social meaning, the meaning of genui...