re: dialectics, etc.
Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:06:37 -0800 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: James Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:re: dialectics, etc. Ricardo writes: ..."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". While I generally agree with what Louis said about this, I want to add an additional addendum: What did Louis, that indispensable reporter of pen-l, say? Except for his usual invectives, there was nothing to his remark. The idea of creating a "New Man" is very old. For example, Plato (pretending to be Socrates) wrote in his REPUBLIC about structuring a society that creates what he considers to be the very best men (and women) to be the Guardians of his ideal society. Since then, the idea of educating people to be better than they currently are (educating in the broadest sense of the word) has shown up on all spots of the ideological spectrum from Robert Owen's utopian socialism to the conservatives efforts to push "family values" (i.e. patriarchy and anti-abortion) in the schools. Marx's idea of the creation of the "New Man" is quite different. Whereas Plato asked the question about "who watches the watchers (Guardians)?" and came up with the idea that they should be educated, Marx asks "who educates the educators?" (in the THESES ON FEUERBACH). He rejects Owen and the like: their "doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is [seen as] superior to society" (thesis 3). Plato, Owen, and the like lord themselves over the masses, becoming the "condescending saviors" referred to in the Internationale. Certainly, in saying "pretending" you don't mean he was trying to deceive his readers? In Marx, as Hal Draper documents in KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (4 volumes), it is the workers who educate themselves. Capitalism propels them into situations where they have little choice but to self-organize and self-educate, creating themselves as potential replacements for the bourgeois rulers. That's just what Marx hoped for, but the fact is that workers have shown little inclination to "create themselves" into Marxists. That's why Lenin wrote What is to be done? BTW, Pol Pot made no effort to create a "New Man." He just forced people to obey his crazy ideas. Rather than being an effort at education, it's more like Sukarno's slaughter of a million suspected communists in 1965 and his slaughter in East Timor since 1973 or so. (These dates seem wrong. I am sorry if my memory is fading.) The difference is the US never treated Pol Pot as an official ally so we heard about all his sins in the official "free press." (Pol Pot was an unofficial ally of the US after he was ousted from power, but that's a different issue.) My short remark above in no way says that Pol Pot and Che were the same, as Louis concluded. One would expect such a conclusion from someone who has a purely emotional understanding of marxism, or someone who is emotionally angry at me because they were proven wrong in a previous debate. ricardo in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
re: dialectics, etc.
Ricardo: That's just what Marx hoped for, but the fact is that workers have shown little inclination to "create themselves" into Marxists. That's why Lenin wrote What is to be done? This is silly. Lenin wrote this in order to help construct a socialist party in Russia based on the German model. He and Plekhanov struggled with the Economist tendency which resisted a national organization. There is nothing really new in this article, as scholars such as Neil Harding have pointed out. All of the ideas are imported from Western Europe and adapted to Russian conditions. For example, Lenin's concept of a vanguard represented orthodox social democratic thought.. George Plekhanov, eighteen years before the publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898, Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social Democrats, may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and somnolent force in respect of its political development." The Austrian Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness is something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the outside, not something that organically develops out of the class struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, stated that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge." Lenin was responsible for many positive innovations in Marxist thought such as his understanding of the national question, but "What is To Be Done" contains no new ideas. Louis Proyect
re: dialectics, etc.
At 08:49 8/12/97 -0800, Jim Devine wrote:
Concerning the Marx's early 1844 EPM on alienation vs. his later CAPITAL,
Ajit Sinha writes:
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?
I think that Marx's views definitely changed between the EPM and CAPITAL,
especially with his theses on Feuerbach and his (with Engels) GERMAN
IDEOLOGY, where German idealism and Feuerbach are criticized and
transformed. However, I don't think that the idea of self-realization is
abolished as much as transformed.
In the EPM, disalienation ("self-realization of Man") seems almost an
individual process, with the distinction between individual and class fuzzy
(at least to me). On the other hand, in later work, it shows up as a
clearly collective process, the collective self-liberation of the working
class as a whole as summed up by Marx's slogan that "the emancipation of
the working class must be won by the working class itself." See Hal
Draper's KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (especially vol. II, 1978: ch. 6)
for exegesis of Marx's (and Engels') political ideas. Once workers liberate
themselves, as noted in the 1848 MANIFESTO (again with Engels), "the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (p.
491 of the second edition of Tucker's MARX-ENGELS READER). It's clear (to
me) that Marx envisioned some kind of collective disalienation,
self-realization.
_
Just a few brief points:
1. In the passage quoted from *Capital* by Harry it is quite clear that the
*cause* of so-called 'alienation' or rather dehumanization is capital. In
the EPM, however, it is the alienation that is the cause of capital--
Capital comes into being due to alienation rather than the other way round.
2. The big problem we need to solve is whether the concept of *class* can
be reduced, at some level, to the concept of *Man*. If not, then there is a
theoretical problem in drawing a direct link from the EPM to *Capital*. As
you have suggested above, in EPM the distinction between individual and
class is fuzzy. I think this fuzzyness exists in the *German Ideology* as
well. Apparently, the fuzzyness is between the concept of social division
of labor and class division. Since social division of labor is explained on
the basis of the natural individual division of labor, the conflation is a
serious one. In *Capital* the social division of labor and the class
division are defined on very different footings. And this leads to the
theoretical question I have been raising. I have discussed this issue in my
recent paper in *Research in Political Economy* as well. Cheers, ajit sinha
re: dialectics, etc.
Ajit writes:1. In the passage quoted from *Capital* by Harry it is quite clear that the *cause* of so-called 'alienation' or rather dehumanization is capital. In the EPM, however, it is the alienation that is the cause of capital-- Capital comes into being due to alienation rather than the other way round. that's my impression from my reading too. But causation can go both ways as part of a dynamic (dialectical) process. Capitalist exploitation and the production of surplus-value -- the developed form that alienation takes in CAPITAL, which is based on the domination of labor by capital in production, which dehumanizes labor -- allows the expansion of capital. Then, the expansion of capital allows the further dehumanization of labor. To my mind, much of the EPM and CAPITAL are complementary rather than in conflict. 2. The big problem we need to solve is whether the concept of *class* can be reduced, at some level, to the concept of *Man*. If not, then there is a theoretical problem in drawing a direct link from the EPM to *Capital*. the theoretical link would involve Marx breaking with Feuerbach, studying the empirical world in much greater detail, reading and criticizing political economy, etc. Marx's vision became clearer over time, as he preserved some of the aspects of his earlier works and expunged or transformed others. But as far as I can tell, there is no complete rejection of the EPM's conceptions. I don't see humanism -- which centers on the concept of "Man" (abstract humanity) as conflicting at all with Marx's later perspective, in CAPITAL and the like. This can be seen in the fact that he saw not only the workers, but the capitalists as alienated, so that all of humanity is alienated under capitalism: capitalists suffer from the fetishism of commodities, the illusions created by competition. Further, they are "accumulation machines" -- unless they want to drop out of their class. See Bertell Ollman, ALIENATION, 1976, ch. 23 for more on capitalist alienation. Clearly, the capitalists' alienation is qualitatively different from that of workers, but in the end they share the characteristic of being humans. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
Re: dialectics, etc.
Date sent: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 23:12:17 -0600 (CST) Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Harry M. Cleaver" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: dialectics, etc. Cleaver writes: 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. Certain lines of continuity may always be found between the early and late Marx. To conclude from this, however, that there is no difference between the two is plain wrong. The early Marx always remained strongly attached to the German philosophical tradition. Admittedly he was never confortable with that tradition, and argued strongly in the EPM against Hegel's idealistic phenomenology in favor of a concrete human species who reproduces his life under natural conditions. Nonetheless the early Marx (perhaps excluding the EPM) always conducted his critique of the actual conditions of men from the point of view of the realization of moral reason (in the Kantian- Hegelian sense, which has little to do with the not personalistic ethics so common in the Anglo-Saxon world). And as I stated in another missive, this critique was immanent. The late Marx moves away from this moral-philosophic critique toward an analysis of the `objective' necessity of capitalism. The passage you cite above from Capital is in line with the concept of `species being' as formulated in EPM. This concept was introduced against Hegel's idealistic conception of history. For Marx, the species being of man was labor, "the material exchange between man and nature" was the process by which man created his own history. But this concept of "species being" was also used a moral critique, of what work *ought* to be measured against the actual social conditions of workers. The late Marx retains this moral crtique, as your passage shows. But this is not a moral critique in line with the German philosophical tradition, particularly with that of Hegel. Hegel's sees ethics as something which one arrives at intersubjectively among social individuals. The concept of species-being, on the other hand, is purely subjective; simply Marx's own notion of what labor *ought* to be. I also say that it is not in line with the German philosophical tradition, in that Marx does not have a systematic theory of what labor ought to be; unlike Kant, for example, who wrote a Critique of Practical Reason. The late Marx was not interested in such critiques. ricardo 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/
Re: dialectics, etc.
Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:30:10 -0400 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Ricardo Duchesne" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: dialectics, etc. Date sent: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 23:12:17 -0600 (CST) Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Harry M. Cleaver" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: dialectics, etc. Just a minor correction to what I wrote below: I meant to say "personalistic" rather than "not personalistic". Cleaver writes: 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. Certain lines of continuity may always be found between the early and late Marx. To conclude from this, however, that there is no difference between the two is plain wrong. The early Marx always remained strongly attached to the German philosophical tradition. Admittedly he was never confortable with that tradition, and argued strongly in the EPM against Hegel's idealistic phenomenology in favor of a concrete human species who reproduces his life under natural conditions. Nonetheless the early Marx (perhaps excluding the EPM) always conducted his critique of the actual conditions of men from the point of view of the realization of moral reason (in the Kantian- Hegelian sense, which has little to do with the not personalistic ethics so common in the Anglo-Saxon world). And as I stated in another missive, this critique was immanent. The late Marx moves away from this moral-philosophic critique toward an analysis of the `objective' necessity of capitalism. The passage you cite above from Capital is in line with the concept of `species being' as formulated in EPM. This concept was introduced against Hegel's idealistic conception of history. For Marx, the species being of man was labor, "the material exchange between man and nature" was the process by which man created his own history. But this concept of "species being" was also used a moral critique, of what work *ought* to be measured against the actual social conditions of workers. The late Marx retains this moral crtique, as your passage shows. But this is not a moral critique in line with the German philosophical tradition, particularly with that of Hegel. Hegel's sees ethics as something which one arrives at intersubjectively among social individuals. The concept of species-being, on the other hand, is purely subjective; simply Marx's own notion of what labor *ought* to be. I also say that it is not in line with the German philosophical tradition, in that Marx does not have a systematic theory of what labor ought to be; unlike Kant, for example, who wrote a Critique of Practical Reason. The late Marx was not interested in such critiques. ricardo 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/
Re: dialectics, etc.
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
Re: dialectics, etc.
Ricardo Duchesne wrote: 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. For Foucault et Cie., there is no inner essence, so how could it be "liberated"? That's the point of the passage. Elsewhere, Foucault said that he rejected the notion of a "process of liberation" in favor of "practices of freedom," since "liberation" depends on the notion of something repressed yearning to breathe free. And, as he also argued, what we think of as "repression" (in both the political and Freudian senses) doesn't block the expression of the (nonexistent) inner essence: it produces subjects and desires. So these aren't two sides of the same coin; these are two inconvertible currencies. Doug
Re: dialectics, etc.
Date sent: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 14:29:36 -0500 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: dialectics, etc. Ricardo Duchesne: 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". I have sort of gotten used to deleting both Shawgi Tell and Duchesne's posts unread, since they are both so predictable. But since today is a slow day at work--near the holidays--I thought I'd see what's goin' on. I can't believe that somebody would try to write about Cuba and Cambodia in the same sentence in this way. This is reductionism to the nth degree. Could you imagine somebody who was an "expert" in the history of bourgeois revolutions writing in the same way? "There was a bloody revolt against the British aristocracy led by Oliver Cromwell. The results, as everybody knows, were disastrous. Next came the French Revolution which showed how innocent people can die when "enlightment" philosophy gets out of hand. Haiti too. Did I mention Italy? Garibaldi was totally intolerant, as was Bolivar in Latin America. How can anybody challenge the notion that philosophical rationalism leads to genocide and car commercials 16 times per hour during football games." Louis Proyect Yes, tell me about it.
Re: dialectics, etc.
Date sent: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 14:38:39 -0500 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: dialectics, etc. Ricardo Duchesne wrote: 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. Doug Henwood: For Foucault et Cie., there is no inner essence, so how could it be "liberated"? That's the point of the passage. Elsewhere, Foucault said that he rejected the notion of a "process of liberation" in favor of "practices of freedom," since "liberation" depends on the notion of something repressed yearning to breathe free. And, as he also argued, what we think of as "repression" (in both the political and Freudian senses) doesn't block the expression of the (nonexistent) inner essence: it produces subjects and desires. So these aren't two sides of the same coin; these are two inconvertible currencies. Doug That's precisely the point, since "there is no inner essence" liberating it MEANS producing a whole new subject. Otherwise why speak of "total innovation"? But let's not get bogged down over such semantic infelicities: talk of "producting new subjects" as of liberating our "essences" has been shown to be extremely repressive in their consequences. Of course, I am not saying you are making any such "talk". Nor do I want to question your reading of Foucault about whom I know too little. ricardo
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
re: dialectics, etc.
Concerning the Marx's early 1844 EPM on alienation vs. his later CAPITAL,
Ajit Sinha writes:
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?
I think that Marx's views definitely changed between the EPM and CAPITAL,
especially with his theses on Feuerbach and his (with Engels) GERMAN
IDEOLOGY, where German idealism and Feuerbach are criticized and
transformed. However, I don't think that the idea of self-realization is
abolished as much as transformed.
In the EPM, disalienation ("self-realization of Man") seems almost an
individual process, with the distinction between individual and class fuzzy
(at least to me). On the other hand, in later work, it shows up as a
clearly collective process, the collective self-liberation of the working
class as a whole as summed up by Marx's slogan that "the emancipation of
the working class must be won by the working class itself." See Hal
Draper's KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (especially vol. II, 1978: ch. 6)
for exegesis of Marx's (and Engels') political ideas. Once workers liberate
themselves, as noted in the 1848 MANIFESTO (again with Engels), "the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (p.
491 of the second edition of Tucker's MARX-ENGELS READER). It's clear (to
me) that Marx envisioned some kind of collective disalienation,
self-realization.
This also fits with Miller's analysis of Marx on morality, which links up
Marx's ethics (never collected in one place by Marx); Miller argues that
Marx's vision was similar to that of Aristotle, emphasizing morality as
part of the attainment of human potential.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let
people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
Re: dialectics, etc.
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/
