Thread by @aprudy

#Alienation #Marx - Land, Laborpower, Means of Production, Productive Self-Activity, the Product, Other People, Social Space, Species Being 1/

I am presenting my students with the 8 early moments and initial forms of alienation Marx materially abstracts from the emergence & reality of late 19th C capitalism. I started with alienation from the land forcing people-now-proletarianized to alienate their labor power. /2

So, you get private property and wage labor, capitalist class relations, labor contracts, labor law, separation of social reproduction, economic production and market exchange, and so on. 3/

But the land also becomes naturalized as estrangement from and privatization of it veils its historical ‘production’ via labor processes. Additionally, by means of this estrangement the land is naturalized as Nature… 4/

as other, as natural resource, understood not through meaningful metabolic labor but by rationalized scientific abstraction most often in laboratories off the land. (A parallel occurs with laborpower, but more on that in a moment.) 5/

But even more than that, lands not held privately – or even private lands where production is not practiced – becomes Nature, other. Because production is not practiced on those lands, and Nature is other than Society, people who do the work of production, don’t belong… 6/

that nature is objectified as God’s creation, for transcendental/aesthetic/sublime appreciation by those capable of such elevated pursuits. 7/

The generation of national parks and wilderness for capital and elites, not proletarians and dirt farmers, by means of the deadly removal of indigenous people obviously fits here. 8/

Relations are somewhat different when it comes to private property where reproduction of laborpower and workers takes place but, here again as a million feminists have shown, naturalization occurs in ideological and “scientific” practices oriented to… 9/

the “nature” of women’s bodies, emotions and mental capacities and all manner of mandates orienting and restricting women’s work at home, in public and in the workplace. 10/

The masculinist flip side of this is of course the “scientific” class-ification of “natural” ethnoracial capacities around intelligence, sexuality, violence, criminality, drug consumption and so on… 11/

all associated and elaborated along lines interwoven with laborpower, reproduction, public space, material and performative culture, etc. 12/

All of which is a prelude to what initiated this thread… the ‘second’ pair of moments and forms of alienation in the conventional Marxist narrative is alienation from means of production and productive self-activity. 13/

Yet, the material estrangement of people from the land not only coerces the sale and purchase of people-turned-laborers’ laborpower but also, quite quickly, alienates laborers from tools, instruments and other technical means of production owned by that capitalist. 14/

But, less often told is that this process increasingly alienates means of production from land/soils as an instrument of production given urban industrialization on, but not by, means of the land (which changes the meaning of land, further objectifying it as property). 15/

This process is doubled-down upon given the increasingly scientific conceptualization, design and manufacture of means of production in forms intended to be generically productive across diverse lands, whether agricultural or industrial or service properties. 16/

Of course, the generation of ever-more financially efficient and labor-extruding technological means of extracting relative surplus value becomes a structural necessity given the crisis-ridden and crisis-dependent nature of capitalism as well. 17/

So, here, the alienation of productive self-activity isn’t only leaving labor markets for production – leaving the realm “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” for a world where a mind-body dualism is imposed such that capital/management… 18/

dictates the patterns of when, where, how hard, with what, with whom and for how long workers work and get a hiding if they don’t just do the fragments of the work process assigned them – it is alienation from the ‘basic science’ and ‘applied technologies’ in/of production. 19/

But we need to be complete; productive self-activity is also alienated from the land given that even agricultural workers neither own, have unmediated access to or are in control of their work on and with the land. The land, objectified by capitalists as (productive)… 20/

property becomes a repressive object for the worker – whether the land and soils are an instrument of productive activity for the laborer or a material substrate – their activity relates to it as other, as alien. 21/

And, of course, not only is this thread beyond incomplete, there are four moments and forms in alienation to go… 22/fin

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