Still, how sure are you that *everyone* suffers from this sort of alienation? Hamar
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Remember I qualified the observation:
`` *Where we or rather I* recognized somebody else, not me would own, possess, and gain all I gave in my labor...''
I was writing about my experience. When I had that experience I actually did not have the term `alienated labor' in mind, because I had not yet read any Marx.
Back then (1972) the concept of alienation for me came from the existential works I was reading---which it turned out were heavily influenced by Marx. What this form of alienation refers to is usually associated with a psychological state of feeling estranged from the world. Later I was reading Marx (I can't remember which work), in order to understand a lot of it, I had to use experiences in my own life.
So in Tamas's terms I am a Rousseauian through and through. The reason is (I think) that I interpret the world through my sensibility and mythopoetic imagination, which actually does characterize Rousseau's life and his writings.
In contrast, I think what Tamas is saying is that following that path of understanding, obscures or hides the more formal systems of the world that actually account for its social phenomenona and events, the concrete relations, and how they are constructed and how they work.
Both sides agree on only on one front, that the machine produces smog, which is killing us and the planet. Putting different fuel in the gas tank, adding catalytic converters and all the rest of the fixes does not stop the machine from running. These fixes just produce a different kind of smog. The whole problem is the machine itself. It has to be stopped.
Now getting back to the `everyone' or `someone' question you raise. In theory, the machinery constructs all of us just by the way the system is made. The system is a universal. So in the logic of universals, each example of a particular is supposed to imply the universal. And this is true whether we understand it or not. This is an independent truth that does not depend on our understanding or our agreement. This kind of philosophical discussion and using it, comes from Hegel, and was part of the intellectual milieu that Marx knew from his university days.
I am not so sure I really believe any of these conclusions. That is one reason why I like to use personal examples. I feel on much safer intellectual ground if I can find examples within my own experience.
OTHO, the personal focus can lead to serious mistakes if these experiences are generalized enough to become theoretical results. So it is an open game. Anyone is free to come along and say I am full of shit. In fact, that has happened enough, so I don't mind too much anymore. I think I've even learned to how to learn from some of the foolishness I write, when it gets laughted off stage. In a way, it is a form of intellectual laziness. Let somebody else do the editing...
CG