The commodity fetish infuses things-commodities with people like qualities, and people with thing like qualities. It is an inverted form of consciousness. Alienation is also treating people like things - inverted consciousness. Alienation and commodity fetish both involve inverted consciousness with respect to people and things. People become things , objects, controlled by things that "become" like people, subjects.
Anyway, in _Capital_ Marx still seems to discuss alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor. The workers' work produces capital which oppresses them. They become objects to their products as subjects. The more they produce , the more they are oppressed by their product. It's analogous , still, to God as alienated man. To say _Capital_ does not detail a process of alienation doesn't ring true.
Charles
>>> <wrobert at uci.edu> 07/28/2008 3:29 PM >>>
If one were interested, Althusser's essay "The Humanist Controversy"
would be a good place to go. According to Balibar, Althusser wound
up shifting his position as he got older and thought that Marx never
fully made the epistemological leap that was emphasized in his early
work (although their was a profound shift in his thinking. Balibar's
Philosophy of Marx is another interesting essay dealing with this
question. He links up this question with the shift to fetishism.
robert wood
>>>> negative potential
>
> The epistemological break between the Parisian
> Manuscripts and the German Ideology has been
> demonstrated convincingly and conclusively.
> ^^^^^
> CB: To make such a big claim, perhaps you should quote Marx, rather than a
> mere conclusory assertion.
>
> What about the alienation of the worker from the land as his/her natural
> laboratory, in Marx's later (than The German Ideology) discussion of
> pre-capitalist formations ?
>
> ^^^^
>
> 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.â€
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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