> Date sent: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 23:12:17 -0600 (CST)
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: dialectics, etc.
Cleaver writes:
> Jim: Not only was the analysis of alienation not repudiated (contra
> Althusser) but the analysis in CAPITAL can be seen as a vast elaboration
> on the concepts. Chapters 7-15 vastly expand on the alienation of workers
> from their labor, from each other and from their species being. The whole
> discussion of commodities and the circuits elaborate and give substance to
> the notion that workers are alienated from their product and
> in fact in Chapter 25 there is a passage which virtually replicates the
> Manuscripts:
>
> "all methods for raising the social productivity of labor . . . distort
> the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an
> appendage of a machine, they destroy the atual content of this labor by
> turning it into a torment; they alienated from him the intellectual
> potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is
> incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions
> under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism
> the more hateful for its meanness; they transorm his life-time into
> working time and drag his wife and child behneath the wheels of the
> juggernaut of capital . . . It follows therefore that in proportion as
> capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or
> low, must grow worse." p.799 (Penguin edition)
>
> The real sense of "immiseration" is never seperated from that of
> alienation.
>
Certain lines of continuity may always be found between
the early and late Marx. To conclude from this, however, that there is
no difference between the two is plain wrong. The early Marx always
remained strongly attached to the German philosophical tradition.
Admittedly he was never confortable with that
tradition, and argued strongly in the EPM against Hegel's idealistic
phenomenology in favor of a concrete human species who reproduces his
life under natural conditions. Nonetheless the early Marx
(perhaps excluding the EPM) always conducted his critique of the
actual conditions of men from the point
of view of the realization of moral reason (in the
Kantian- Hegelian sense, which has little to do
with the not personalistic ethics so common in the Anglo-Saxon
world). And as I stated in another missive, this critique was
immanent.
The late Marx moves away from this moral-philosophic critique toward
an analysis of the `objective' necessity of capitalism. The passage
you cite above from Capital is in line with the concept of `species
being' as formulated in EPM. This concept was introduced against
Hegel's idealistic conception of history. For Marx, the species being
of man was labor, "the material exchange between man and nature"
was the process by which man created his own history.
But this concept of "species being" was also used a moral critique, of
what work *ought* to be measured against the actual social conditions
of workers. The late Marx retains this moral crtique, as your passage
shows. But this is not a moral critique in line with the German
philosophical tradition, particularly with that of Hegel. Hegel's
sees ethics as something which one arrives at intersubjectively among
social individuals. The concept of species-being, on the other hand,
is purely subjective; simply Marx's own notion of what labor
*ought* to be.
I also say that it is not in line with the German philosophical
tradition, in that Marx does not have a systematic theory of what
labor ought to be; unlike Kant, for example, who wrote a Critique of
Practical Reason. The late Marx was not interested in such critiques.
ricardo
> ............................................................................
> Harry Cleaver
> Department of Economics
> University of Texas at Austin
> Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA
> Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427
> (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510
> E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cleaver homepage:
> http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
> Chiapas95 homepage:
> http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
> Accion Zapatista homepage:
> http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
> ............................................................................
>
>
