re: dialectics, etc.

[Ajit Sinha <ecas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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