At 23:12 7/12/97 -0600, Harry Cleaver wrote:
>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.
>
>Harry
_________________
But i think there is a difference here. In the *Manuscript* alienation is
seen as a natural process of Man realising his potential, reappropreating
himself. It is kind of a jurney of self realization. As a child recognizes
himself first in the face of his father, similarly Man in the very process
of reproducing his life alienates himself from nature, then society, and
then his creativity in the process of history only to regain his species
being--which is being a natural being, a social being, and a creative
being--at the historical third stage of communism. The fact that Capital
dehumanizes workers and turns them into an appendage to the machine will
not be denied or protested against either by Althusser or myself or any
variety of Marxists. The question is that, whether this is seen as an
essential process of Man's self-realization? The question is whether the
problematic in *Capital* is a humanist problematic, concerned with
self-realization of Man? Cheers, ajit sinha
>............................................................................
>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/
>............................................................................
>
>
