Did Marx drop the theory of alienation?

Jack: stop being such a fucking ringpiece. Someone has asked a question about Marx, in Introductory Thought no less. The least you could do is give a decent response. Or just keep your mouth shut.

Either way, there's no need to be a cunt.

You're reading it, been on the sherry have you?

You don't know how much this discussion has cheered me up after failing to avoid the last twenty minutes of Strictly Come Dancing earlier.

the answer you are looking for is that the symbolic order is not a self contained system but always interupted by the real, in it's gaps and contradictions. Therefore whilst there is no essential self and the subject is a product of ideology it is an incomplete, contradictory subject. Our alienation is therefore not from a core self, but rather from the very contradictions and fissures in the social relations that give brith to us as subjects.

And the mode of production is not some forze historical stage, but rather a moment in a process.

anyways i'm tipsy and will get back to this in more detail tommorrow.

The article on this link, from our series on communism in the International Review, argues precisely that Marx in the Grundrisse did not drop the concept of alienation, but developed it in the light of a clearer historical method. Hope it's of use, and a merry christmas to all our readers

http//en.internationalism.org/taxonomy/term/338

Jef - I just tested it and it did work; perhaps you have to wait till Christmas morning for your presents

The notion of alienation appears not only in the Paris manuscripts of 1844 but also in Grundrisse and Capital. However it would be a great mistake to take the alienation presented in the later works for the same notion as that in the earlier works. There is indeed a connection, the Feuerbachian ideology which the Paris manuscripts was to a large extent based on is the starting-point of the critique around which Marx builds up his later theory of value in self-motion (capital).

However, it is quite obvious that Marx abandons the notion of human nature or essence as the starting-point of a critique of capital. Alienation in the later works is therefore not to be understood as a concept of a human essence from which humanity has gone astray.

Instead we must understand alienation as a notion deeply embedded in the movement of capital, where human activity becomes a "beast" which is self-presupposative and self-generating, the dialectical and fettering movement of capital. This is however embedded already in the capitalist commodity (see the part on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital).

This was perhaps too short, but it's hard to specify with such a broad question.

I'll write it proper as soon as I get bored of Liberty City Stories.

But basically... Read the stuff in the Grundrisse. That's the same shit he's talking about in 1844, except he's no longer about 25, not in the paradigm of left-hegelianism and writting more as a 'revolutionary' than as an 'academic'.

You're just taking too much of a wanky sociology view of Marx's theory of alienation (which is how it generally gets taught) - however it's not so much he dropped his earlier ideas, but more that he said the same sorta shit but with maturity, and from a more 'Marxist' mindset.

So, as I said, he didn't drop it.

Alf: I don't see how one can argue that there isn't a qualitative break (or several, actually) in Marx's thought. This is not an affectionate statement, but it comes down to the fact that there was actual development in Marx. There are breaks from his Feuerbachian period, from his Manifesto-period and even in Grundrisse there are certain qualitative breaks in the analysis of capital.

I like some of Bordiga's work (definitely Murdering the Dead on Antagonism Press and some other texts which I have translated/am translating to Swedish), however to ideologise his thought would be a mistake as big as identifying Marx's concepts pre-Grundrisse and post-Grundrisse. Of course we shouldn't discard all of the "young Marx", those were the roots of his theory, but the problematic of the Feuerbachian Marx is entirely different from the problematic of Capital, therefore we cannot equate notions in the 1844 manuscripts with notions in Capital without falling into either eclecticism or some deterministic notion where the seeds were already planted in the early manuscripts with an entirely determined end result (ie. the Manuscripts were Capital in a rudimentary form, which I would say is nonsense).

Jack: As I have argued there is an actual difference in the notions of a "species-being" which has lost its way (1844 type of alienation) and the notion of an objectified structure which dialectically imposes itself on the humans which created it (Grundrisse/Capital type of alienation). They are not the same notions, but their names are alike, since Marx took his transhistorical and ideological notions and from a critique of those exact notions he proposed a historical analysis of the self-movement of capital.

Of course we can't abandon the 1844 manuscripts to sociology academics, but we need to historicise its actual meaning and the problematic (framework as you would put it) in which it was written and see that there is a significant difference, a break, rather than just a pre-determined evolutionary process. There are of course parts of the Manuscripts which are valuable, but they must still be put in context and worked into our problematic (and thereby often radically altered). The fact that the large difference is the transhistorical/historical aspect of the notion makes the notions qualitatively different, even if they bear some resemblance.

Alf: He said Borg (as in Star Trek), not bourgeois. I'll make a longer reply later since I'm too tired right now, but I can shortly say that I still disagree with your position.

Thanks to the last two posts for the clarification. I was probably being oversensitive due to previous criticisms of the ICC. I kind of kept up with Star Trek in the Kirk era, but it started getting too complicated after that.

The question of collective organisation - of revolutionaries speaking with a common voice - is obviously important, but it's not the focus of this thread.