Sorry if this is a duplication my mail server went down and I am not sure if it went through. The passage I was thinking of talks of equality of wages not of wealth.
Here are the relevant passages from the Manuscripts.. It, therefore, follows for us that wages and private property are identical: for there the product,the object of labor, pays for the labor itself, wages are only a necessary consequence of the estrangement of labor; similarly, where wages are concerned, labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages. We intend to deal with this point in more detail later on: for the present we shall merely draw a few conclusions. An enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) would therefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an increase in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labor. Even the equality of wages,which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other must fall too. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-EPM/1st.htm#s1 The passages are some of the conclusions of a section that deals with Estranged Labor. It has nothing to do with commercialism but with the relationship of labor to capitalist and the products of labor in the capitalist mode of production.. Here are some relevant passages: The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Labor not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general. This fact simply means that the object that labor produces, it product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labor. The realization of labor is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [Entausserung]. So much does the realization of labor appear as loss of reality that the worker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomes an object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the workers is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The externalization [Entausserung] of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and beings to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien Comment: So the critique is not of commercialism or of markets but of capitalist relations of production. No form of capitalism even one with equality of wages overcomes the basic forms of alienation of the system of wage slavery. Some commentators think that Marx abandoned this concept of alienation in later works because it is not particularly mentioned as such but this is not true. Similar passages and concepts occur in the Grundrisse. The usual criticisim of the Manuscripts is that it involves idealist concepts that he later jettisoned in his "mature" works But the Grundrisse shows that is incorrect. Cheers, Ken Hanly ----- Original Message ----- From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 11:25 AM Subject: Re: Profit making under capitalism Ken writes: >I recall somewhere in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that Marx claimed that equality of wealth under capitalism although not possible would not change the essential nature of the system even if it could occur. < if I remember correctly, the EPM is part of Marx's anti-commercial, anti-market, phase. (So that there can be a "capitalism" with egalitarian distribution, otherwise known as simple commodity production.) Later, he shifted to anti-capitalism, with anti-commercialism being part of that. Even so, CAPITAL wasn't a critique of markets as much as one of capitalism.
