>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 02/22/00 02:01PM >>
I think that for the mature Marx the notion of self-alienation entailed not alienation from "human nature" conceived of in ahistorical left Hegelian terms but rather the alienation of people (especially workers) from their potentialities as those had been unveiled and developed by capitalist society. I think the notion referred to the growing contradiction between potentiality and actuality as capitalism developed the forces of production while impeding their deployment in ways that would enhance human existence.
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CB: Don't you think for the mature Marx, the concept of alienation is still rooted in the idea of alienation from the fruits of one's labor, i.e. exploitation. This is a fully material concept of alienation in both the young and the old fellow.
I still think that Marx did have a notion of alienation as alienation from human nature, in that the blues that workers get in private property regimes (from slavery to capitalism) is an instinctive response to not controlling and using the fruits of one's own nature, as is the urge to class struggle which is described as transhistorical (though not universal and "ahistorical") in _The Manifesto_. The fact that Engels and Marx use the same term "class struggle" to describe what goes on in the different historical epochs -slavery, feudalism and capitalism - implies that "class struggle" is a transhistorical category. In other words, it is human nature to want to control and use the fruits of one's own labor, and to struggle and fight if you get ripped off of what is instinctively yours. _Capital_ contains transhistorical propositions on labor.
This instinct to fight back when you get ripped off breaks through anew in each historical epoch. Yet it is not likely to be taught in each historical epoch, because the ruling, exploiting class by and large controls what gets taught ( the ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling classes). So, instinct has to be the source of each epoch's working/exploited class's motivation to class struggle. It doesn't get passed on from the exploited class of one epoch to the next, i.e. it is not "historical" or "cultural".
CB