Seth Ackermann:
> I'm not embracing this binary myself, I'm
> attributing it to Marx. That's what false
> consciousness means, no?
Perhaps instead of attributing things to Marx, you should try reading him.
The phrase "false consciousness" ("falsches Bewußtsein") does not appear *anywhere* in Marx's critique of political economy.
The epistemological break between the Parisian Manuscripts and the German Ideology has been demonstrated convincingly and conclusively. The alienation problematic is *entirely* absent from Marx's mature work, so your attempt to sneak "Gattungswesen" into the conversation is just as bad.
Stop it, already. It is intellectually dishonest. An immanent critique of Marx would involve criticizing him on the basis of the words and concepts *he* uses, not the ones you falsely attribute to him.
“the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.”
Notice the key phrase: "as what they really are". The distribution of social labor really *is* mediated by things. It's not some fog masking the "real" relationships.