At 07:52 PM 11/02/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Isn't the point of abolishing capitalism to create the world in which we
>aren't governed by the "law of motion"? Marx wrote: "This fact simply
>means that the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to
>it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The
>product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is
>the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its
>objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this realization of
>labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as
>loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as
>alienation" .... When products of our labor cease to confront us as
>"something alien, as a power independent of" us, as if it were "a law of
>nature," we will bid farewell to the "law of motion."
right. I would argue that bureaucracies can be just as alienating -- in the
sense of dominating human consciousness and action (rather than the
reverse) -- as the market, commodity production, and capitalism. Though
maybe there are some pure "Weberian" bureaucracies out there (where the
people at the top totally dominate the organization), in the end it seems
that even the top bureaucrats become merely privileged cogs in the machine
(as with Andropov or Chernenko in the old USSR).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
