Re: dialectics, etc.

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

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