For Marx, this development toward a disenchanting "science" was theoretically and historically progressive. Adorno may have said more than he realized when he sardonically accused Marx of wanting to turn the whole world into a factory. For Marxian theory, the reduction of concrete labor into abstract labor is a historical as well as theoretical desideratum. Abstract labor may be a creature of capitalism but, like capitalism itself, it is a necessary "moment" in the dialectic of history. Not only is it a medium for rendering exchange ratios possible on an extensive scale, but, from an even larger perspective, it becomes part of the technical substrate of freedom. By its very plasticity, abstract labor renders human activity interchangeable, the rotation of industrial tasks possible, and the use of machinery flexible. Its capacity to flow through the veins of industry as mere undifferentiated human energy renders the manipulation and reduction of the working day possible and, con currently, the expansion of the "realm of freedom" at the expense of the "realm of necessity." If Marx's communism was meant to be a "society of artists," he was not prepared to recognize that the colors on their canvases might be limited to varying tints of gray.
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.230
To Marx, both the labor process and the cerebral design that guides it are essentially utilitarian: they have an irreducible technical ground, a modus operandi, that acquires the neutrality and rigor of scientific lawful ness. While their effectiveness may be enhanced or diminished by his tory, the design and the labor processes that execute it are to him ultimately a physical interaction. Indeed, without such an underlying, socially neutral interaction, Marx's theory of "historical materialism" with its deus ex machina called the "means of production"- would be as meaningless in Marxian social theory as Hegel's ruthless teleological system would be without the Hegelian notion of "Spirit." Both systems must be moved by something that is not itself bogged down in the contingent. Hence the design process and the labor process are necessarily equipped with a suprahistorical refuge from which they can preside over history-and into which Marx retreats from time to time with all the second thoughts that riddle so much of his theoretical corpus.
That Marx and many of his Victorian contemporaries disparaged "nature idolatry" in extremely harsh terms is not accidental. The Ro mantic movement of the nineteenth century echoed a much broader and ancient sensibility: the view that production should be a symbiotic, not an antagonistic, process. Although the movement was primarily aesthetic, it combined with anarchist theories of mutualism - notably Kropotkin's extraordinarily prescient writings-to ferret out a much broader "natural design": a "marriage" between labor and nature that was conceived not as a patriarchal domination of "man" over nature but as a productive relationship based on harmony, fertility, and creativity. Libertarian and aesthetic movements in the nineteenth century were still heir to the image of a fecund interaction between humanity's craft and nature's potentialities. But labor was seen not as "fire," or industry as a "furnace." The imagery of these movements was drastically different. Labor was viewed as the midwife, and tools as the aids, in delivering nature's offspring: use-values.
Such a view implied that the very "imagination" in which the "architect raises his structure" is socially and ethically derivative . Perceived reality involves an epistemology of domination-or liberation-that cannot be reduced to technical grounds alone. Hence the design images of production, the very figures reared in the minds of engineers, architects, artisans, or laborers, are not socially or ethically neutral. There is no irreducible technical ground from which to formulate a value-free theory of technics and of labor. The images of labor as "fire" and of natural phenomena as enshrouded by a "death-sleep" are formed from the visual reservoir of a highly domineering sensibility. The imagery of modern technical design has its origins in the epistemologies of rule; it has been formed over a long period of time by our very specific way of "knowing" the world-both one another and nature-a way that finds its ultimate apotheosis in industrial agriculture, mass production, and bureaucracy.
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.227-228
"Natural scarcity," "property," and "rule" thus persist in the very name of the critique of class society, exploitation, private property, and the acquisition of wealth. By veiling the primordial blood oath that constrains the development of hierarchy and domination into class society, economic exploitation, and property, the class critique merely replaces the constraints of kinship with the constraints of economics instead of transcending both to a higher realm of freedom. It reconstitutes bourgeois right by leaving property unchallenged by usufruct, rule unchallenged by nonhierarchical relationships, and scarcity unchallenged by an abundance from which an ethical selectivity of needs can be derived. The more critical substrate of usufruct, reciprocity, and the irreducible minimum is papered over by a less fundamental critique: the critique of private property, of injustice in the distribution of the means of life, and of an unfair return for labor. Marx's own critique of justice in his remarks on the Gotha Program remains one of the most important contributions he made to radical social theory, but its economistic limitations are evident in the tenor of the work as a whole.
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.87