I can't remember all the types of alienation in the Economic Manuscripts but in a sense it does involve alienation of human selves from their essence.. However, this alienation is not understood ahistorically. In historically specific capitalist relationships of production workers' products are alienated from them and appropriated as private property of capitalist owners of the means of production. Workers are also alienated from the products of their own labor by the commodity form of production. The value of their products lies not in their creative expression of their labor but in their exchange market value. Also in a mass production system, labor is often fragmented and expresses only a very narrow,.truncated range of the powers of labor.
Human self-realisation is dependent upon the creative transformation of nature through labor, a transformation not restricted to instinctual patterns such as bees building hives, birds nests etc. This labor is not instrumental but an inherent part of self-actualisatiion. The power of labor to actualise the human essence is blocked under capitalism. Labor becomes a means to an end, the end of profit for capital and to satisfy basic animal needs for workers. Marx hence speaks of species alienation.
The essence of humanity expressed by human transformation of nature will reflect historical conditions. Hence under capitalism the human essence expresses itself in transformations of nature that reflect human greed, egoism, and an instrumental view of nature to serve this deformed human nature well portrayed by neoclassical economic man and valuation of nature in purely commercial terms. Man is hence alienated from nature or as Marx called it "man's inorganic body".
Although the process of production is increasingly socialised the products are not distributed on a socialised basis but on the basis of individual ownership and based on market demand. Not need or socially planned distribution rules but the market and consequently money and effective demand. Hence, for example, when farmers do as recommended and increase production their own increased production can face them as a negative since overproduction drives prices below the cost of production.
Workers are alienated from other workers because they must compete for jobs and wages and capitalists too are alienated from competitors. I am sure there are other senses in which alienation is spoken of in the Manuscripts but I haven't them at hand. My characterisation of Althusser was perhaps a bit unkind but I agree with most points made by others on Althusser The concept of overdetermination is useful, and he did awaken some Marxists from their Stalinist dogmatic slumbers.
CHeers, Ken Hanly
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Hi Ken H.:
>
> >It is surely Althusser who is responsible for the break nonsense. Not only
> >could Althusser not write, but he couldn't read either. Or maybe his local
> >library did not have the Grundrisse.
>
> I agree that Althusser's prose is hard on the eyes. And he tried to get
> too much mileage out of select few statements of Marx in order to argue for
> the existence of an epistemological break. Many postmodern philosophers
> have inherited Althusser's reading habit (hence my remark on de-skilling).
>
> That said, Marx did mature in his thinking, through his own criticism of
> the Feuerbachian problematic that he had used before (e.g., Theses on
> Feuerbach, The German Ideology, etc.). It's just that it's impossible &
> unnecessary to posit a clear & clean "break" anywhere in his political
> career.
>
> Rob wrote:
>
> >As for 'the break', Part 1 section 4 of Capital is, for instance,
> >no less about alienation (which he now calls fetishism in the particular
> >context of the commodity form) and no less metaphysically humanistic than
> >anything the young Hegelian Marx wrote in 1844. And 'The Working Day' (Ch
> >10) is as choc-a-bloc full of old fashioned unscientific moral outrage as
> >it is of scientific fact-mongering.
>
> Marx didn't change in the sense of ditching the idea of alienation (or
> moral outrage, for that matter) altogether. The question is, what is
> alienation? Alienated *from what*? Certainly *not* from "human nature"
> (or Man) ahistorically conceived in a left-Hegelian fashion.
>
> Yoshie