> No, the terms
> "self-estrangement" and "self-conscious reason "are not in what I
> quoted from the Preface to the Contrib to critique of PoliEcon. "Last"
> time Marx used those terms was in "The Economic and Philosophic
> Manuscripts of 1844" or something.
The reference is to the statement of mine you quoted about which you claimed:
> Your statement here doesn't say why evidence/expression of
> rational self-determination and self-conscious reason is "basic" in
> the economic structure, but not basic in superstructure.
I've since indicated how the passage in the preface can be made consistent with the interpretive claim I made.
How do you make your alternative interpretation consistent with the passage from Capital I quoted. That passage makes the labour process developmental of human nature and portrays this development as the development of "slumbering powers" and the substitution of determination by these developed "powers" for instinctive determination, i.e. for the determination Marx claims characterized the beginning of human history?
"By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#2
The "slumbering powers" that the labour-process develops is explicitly specified in the German Ideology and in many texts afterwards, e.g.
"the workers assert in their communist propaganda that the vocation, designation, task of every person is to achieve all-round development of all his abilities, including, for example, the ability to think" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03g.htm#c.1.2.3
"what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics -- and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds -- this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm
That the labour process that brings about this development is a process characterized by "self-estrangement," in the sense that individuals are in that process "estranged"/"alienated" from "powers" that are in fact human "powers" which they will eventually "appropriate" and make their own individual "powers" when the individual development this "appropriation" requires is complete, is claimed implicitly and explicitly in many post-1844 texts as in this Grundrisse passage. Another instance is the following from 1861-1863 Theories of Surplus Value.
"But in the same measure as it is understood that labour is the sole source of exchange-value and the active source of use-value, 'capital' is likewise conceived by the same economists, in particular by Ricardo (and even more by Torrens, Malthus, Bailey, and others after him), as the regulator of production, the source of wealth and the aim of production, whereas labour is regarded as wage-labour, whose representative and real instrument is inevitably a pauper (to which Malthus’s theory of population contributed), a mere production cost and instrument of production dependent on a minimum wage and forced to drop even below this minimum as soon as the existing quantity of labour is 'superfluous' for capital. In this contradiction, political economy merely expressed the essence of capitalist production or, if you like, of wage-labour, of labour alienated from itself, which stands confronted by the wealth it has created as alien wealth, by its own productive power as the productive power of its product, by its enrichment as its own impoverishment and by its social power as the power of society. But this definite, specific, historical form of social labour which is exemplified in capitalist production is proclaimed by these economists as the general, eternal form, as a natural phenomenon, and these relations of production as the absolutely (not historically) necessary, natural and reasonable relations of social labour. Their thoughts being entirely confined within the bounds of capitalist production, they assert that the contradictory form in which social labour manifests itself there, is just as necessary as labour itself freed from this contradiction." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
Ted