> Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 13:02:56 -0500
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: dialectics, etc.
> Harry M. Cleaver wrote:
>
> >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[....]
>
> Hmm, interesting. The pomos criticize what they think of as the Marxian
> concept of alienation because it assumes some essential subject from which
> the alienated subject is estranged. For example, Foucault says in his
> interview with Duccio Trombadori (Remarks on Marx, pp. 121-122):
>
> "Schematically one can affirm that the conception of the 'subject' that was
> adopted by the Frankfurt School was quite traditional, was of a
> philosophical character. Then, it was noticeably impregnated with humanism
> of a Marxist type.... I'm convinced that given these premises, the
> Frankfurt School cannot by any means admit that the problem is not to
> recover our 'lost' identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest
> truth; but instead, the problem is to move towards something radically
> Other. The center, then, seems still to be found in Marxi's phrase: man
> produces man.... For me, what must be produced is not man identical to
> himself, exactly as nature would have designed him or accoring to his
> essence; on the contrary, we must produce something that doesn't yet exist
> and about which we cannot know how and what it will be.
> Secondly, let's think about the verb 'to produce.' I don't agree that
> this production of man by man occurs in the same way, let's say, as that of
> the value of riches, or of an object of use, of the economic type. It's a
> question of what we are, of the creation of something entirely different,
> of a total innovation. Now it seems to me that the idea that they had of
> this 'production of many by man' basically consisted in the need to free
> everything that, in the repressive system connected with rationality or the
> repression of exploitation linked with clas society, had been experienced
> at a distance from man and his fundamental essence."
>
> There's a good bit of truth here, about "producing" something radically
> other, rather than liberating some inner essence we could never name. But
> it seems that the only kind of production that Foucault et Cie. can talk
> about is the production of subjects; the kind of alienation in labor that
> Harry & Marx are talking about doesn't appear.
>
> Doug
>
These are just two sides of the same coin: if is is an "inner essence
we could never name", liberating it means producing a whole new
subject. And "the production of subjects" is nothing new; it was
tried, with very grievous consequences, by the Soviets. Che's "New
Man" was a similar attempt. A more extreme example is Pol
Pot's experiment, which should
end all such talk about "producing" humans, "total innovations".
ricardo
>
