>why is it necessary to
>reformulate what is an immanent contradiction within the form of labour (or
>of value) into a contradiction between nature/society or present/past or
>even present/future (as a kind of utopian projection)?
>
I think a sophisticated anarchist (i'm thinking of, for example, Mike Watson (aka George Bradford) of the Fifth Estate) would avoid this and simply argue that the alienation of labour power arises not from capitalist relations but more generally from modern industrial society. Or to perhaps be more precise, that the characteristics of capitalist social relations, such as commodification and fetishism, the instrumental logic of the Frankfurt school, etc., are inescapable in industrial society even if the economic structures were not capitalist in the Marxist sense.
For example, I'm writing this on a plane using my laptop computer -- think about every that goes into making this possible. Sure, I could imagine an alienation-reducing airline collective with participatory input from all where the pilot shares the duty of cleaning the toilets but this is not the natural tendency of the demands of the incredible complex infrastructure that goes into making all this work.
To put it another way, our airline collective is inefficient not just by the measure of (capitalist) profitability but more generally by the demands of technology -- for example by the rigorous checks and balances and accounting needed to reduce the risk of this plane crashing. Or consider the thousands of parts and millions of transistors in my laptop -- to be able to build anything like this in mass quantity -- a tremendous amount of things (and social relations) need to be commodified.
-- adam