Carrol Cox wrote: > This touches on a matter I was somewhat lazily thinking of this morning. > > Marx tried two different labels for the social relations capitalist > commodity exchange generates: alienation (early work) and commodity > fetishism (later work). Both I think were unfortunate choices. They name > or are intended to name an objective feature of the capitalist world, > NOT ways of thinking about or responding to that world. Yet the > 'dictionary' sense of both terms is completely subjective. The fetishism > Jim writes of here belongs, as he notes, to ideology; to the way in > which neoliberals think. And I have seen users on this list andthe > marxism list use "commodity fetishism" in a subjective sense, meaning > too much emphasis by a consumer on the commodities he/she can buy. That > is a perfectly good English use of the phrase; it has no relationship > whatever to Marx's use. And there has just been a long thread on lbo in > which "alienation" was used in a rather mystical sense, but still linked > (vaguely) to what capitalism does to people. > > Too bad Marx didn't select terms that had such useful non-Marxist meanings.
I think this misinterprets Marx's own usage. For him, "alienation"/"self-estrangement" means the treatment of what are in fact human powers as non-human. In this sense, it's a developmental category, i.e. it is through self-estrangement that these powers - constitutive of human "species being" - develop. Development ends in the full actualization of "species being" as the fully rational self-consciousness able to know and actualize the "good" life, this life being, in the tradition to which Marx belongs, "freedom." This usage is found both early and late. Ted _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
