re: reification and commodification

Paul H. Dillon (dillonph who-is-at tidepool.com)
Thu, 19 Sep 1996 08:40:53 -0700

Michael,

Your comments on Levy-Bruhl's relation to Durkheim and Vygotsky's relation
to the Bolsheviks is somewhat obscure to me, could you expand that one a
little?

With regard to the second point it should be pointed out that for Marx, as
well as most marxists, "alienated labor" is not a result of the capitalist
mode of production; it is the fundamental condition of human social
activity. Marx developed the notion of "alienated" or "estranged" labor in
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Here, in discussing the
possibility of worker's estrangement from the product of their labor, Marx
wrote, "How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a
stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging
himself from himself?" This is not true simply in capitalist society but in
all societies. "It is just in the working-up of the objective world,
therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a sepcies being. This
production is his active species life."

The specific form that alienated labor assumes in any historical period is
the result of what some Marxist theorists have called "the social relations
of production", which most simply could be called the pevailing, property
relations. For example, when the Tlingit, Kwakiutl, Karok, Yurok, and other
tribes prevailed throughout the great redwood forests of the Pacific
Northwest, no individual owned the salmon streams, the hunting grounds, or
any of the other natural resources, nor did any individual own his own
house. These were owned by collectivities into which an individual was
born, lineages, clans, and tribes. The economic goods produced through
social labor, e.g., salmon weirs, were distributed throughout the group
according to the general form these kin relations assumed. There was no
money mediating the distribution of these social products. Expanded access
to these resources might be achieved through marriage strategies or other
social activities such as potlatch ceremonies. How different from today,
when one individual, Charles Hurwitz can obtain tens of thousands of acres
of old growth redwood forest on the basis of a leveraged buyout of the
Pacific Lumber Company using funds he raised by perpetrating a Savings and
Loan swindle that left thousands of retired people bankrupt and was in fact
finally paid off with your tax dollars. Furthemore, the distribution of the
social product from the timber milled as he clear cuts these forests down is
certainly not through the kin networks of the lumberjacks out there working
for a wage.

Social relations of production are conditioned by technical relations of
production which is probably a point of departure for situating the analyses
that involve the mediation of social action through artifacts, from this
perspective.

Paul