Re: dialectics, etc.

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, James Devine wrote:

> right; as usual Ajit is erudite in his knowledge of Marx's writings. I
> didn't make it as clear as I should have that I meant that he never
> repudiated its _content_, specifically the analysis of what capitalism does
> to workers in production. His analysis did change in a lot of ways, but in
> CAPITAL, he still says a lot about alienation without using that word. As
> with most things in Marx, he built on his youthful writings and became more
> and more empirically-oriented and engaged with political economy (to
> Ricardo's dismay).
>
> I think the MANUSCRIPTS are very important. He has some interesting things
> to say about communism. In that book, communism can be a bad thing, though
> it need not be so.
>
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
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Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
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