> The "labour" that's distributed between various activities in
> capitalism is, in Marx's theorization of it, "alienated" , i.e.
> it's labour lacking the qualities constitutive of the activity
> (both instrumental and end in itself) of the "universally
> developed individuals" who will, again according to Marx,
> create and live in the realms of necessity and freedom that
> will constitute "a workable communist society."
I think this is right. My point is that, to practically and definitively overcome the alienation of labor (say, in its form as "value" embedded in wealth as a collection of commodities, or in its form as "political power" embedded in the state or the overall polity, etc.), we do need to understand how the alienation occurs, how these social forms emerge, wherein the necessity lies. So we need theories of these forms -- a theory of value (or of commodity production and exchange), a theory of the state, etc. Because we need to build intentional social structures to overcome these alienated forms and aptly channel (albeit in a direct and transparent manner) the "material" processes that until now those forms have channeled, namely the allocation of social labor time among different uses to meet the needs of society and allow it to reproduce itself altogether. For the purpose of transcending commodity production, a mere theory of what determines the fluctuations of prices -- as good as such theory could be if well refined -- would be entirely insufficient.