> Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:30:10 -0400
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: "Ricardo Duchesne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: dialectics, etc.
> > 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.
Just a minor correction to what I wrote below: I meant to say
"personalistic" rather than "not personalistic".
> 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/
> > ............................................................................
> >
> >
>
