The existentialist notion of alienation (original) (raw)
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Dokuz Eylul University The Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences, 2022
Marx’s conceptualization of alienation is influenced by his predecessors Hegel and Feuerbach. However, Marx neither accepts these conceptualizations as they are nor makes a synthesis of them. Instead, he builds his original theory of alienation on the criticism of his predecessors’ views on the subject. As a result, Marx’s theory of alienation becomes materialistic, historical and social. The historical and social conditions Marx was in pointed to the capitalist mode of production and the alienation of the working class caused by it as the causes of unfreedom. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he focuses on the wage worker’s alienation stemming from the labour process. The purpose of this article is to present Marx’s critique of his predecessors in grounding the concept of alienation and his original contribution. For this, first of all, Marx’s criticisms of Hegel’s and then Feuerbach’s alienation theories will be explained. In this context, three points of criticism will be identified for each of them. Then, Marx’s theory of alienated labour will be discussed and the four aspects of the alienation of the worker will be examined. Based on Marx’s definition of alienated labour as forced labour, it will be argued that what causes alienation to productive activity, which Marx attributes a principal role compared to other aspects, is not division of labour or unpleasant work—or working conditions—but rather forced labour, which is a characteristic of the modes of production based on private property. The question of whether alienation is specific to capitalism, which arises with this determination, may be a precursor for future studies.
Alienation as a Critical Concept
International Critical Thought, 2011
This paper discusses Marx's concept of alienated (or estranged) labour, focusing mainly on his account in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This concept is almost invariably taken to be a moral notion based on a concept of universal human nature. I criticize this view and argue that the concept of alienation must rather be interpreted in the light of Hegelian historical ideas. In Hegel, alienation is not a purely negative phenomenon. Human development must go through a stage of alienation. Marx's account of alienated labour must be understood in similar terms. It is not a merely subjective discontent with work, it is a objective and historically specific condition, a necessary part of the process of historical development. Marx usually regards it as specific to capitalism. The criticism of capitalism implied in the concept of alienation, it is argued, does not appeal to universal moral standards, it is historical and relative. Overcoming alienation must also be understood in historical terms, not as the realization of a universal ideal, but as the dialectical supersession of capitalist conditions of labour. Marx's account of communism as the overcoming of alienation is explained in these terms.
Labouring Marx: Alienation and Wage Labour
Labouring Marx: Alienation and Wage Labour
Alienation is wage-labour, as wage-labour is alienation. The raison d’être of the capitalist mode of production is to consume every last drop of blood, to drink every last tear, and to collect every last drop of sweat from the wage-labourers. According to Allen Wood, the terms Entfremdung (‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’) and Entäusserung (‘externalization’ or ‘alienation’) that Karl Marx utilizes in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 evoke “images: they suggest the separation of things which naturally belong together, or the establishment of some relation of indifference or hostility between things which are properly in harmony.” Wage-labour itself necessarily entails the continual degradation and dehumanization of humanity, as it constitutes the loss of life of the worker. In the historical development of humankind, labouring activity has always formed part of the lives of human beings; however, this labouring activity has become a perversion due to capitalism, in that it conquers and enslaves the human being to a wretched and miserable existence. This perverted labouring activity, wage-labour, is undeniably unnatural as the object or the external world imposes itself as the reality of the worker (human being), which leads to his/her limited and unbearable existence. Through the coerced sale of his/her labour power, the worker belongs to a mystical, obscure being, the capitalist, and not to himself/herself. As a result, the life of the worker ceases to be in his/her hands, and remains in the hands of his/her executioner. Therefore, the worker’s being, essence and conscious life activity is debased and distorted to comprise solely the means of his/her physical existence, rather than being an end in and of itself. As such, wage-labour alienates the worker to live his/her life wholly individually. In other words, the worker’s ties with his/her fellow human beings are lacerated, and thus, the worker loses his/her natural character as a species-being, and is immersed into a world of nightmares as his/her soul and spirit is engulfed by the capitalist voracious egocentric id. No longer is the worker able to create the world through himself/herself, and thus create himself/herself through the world, as through wage-labour, the worker is forced to sell his/her soul and spirit so that they become the playthings of the capitalist. No longer does the individual encapsulate the species, as the species encapsulate the individual, but rather, in the process of production, the worker (the human being) is consciously cut off from his fellow human beings, and is thus oblivious to not only their existence, but to his/her own existence as well. The capitalist is the root of all evil in bourgeois society, as his/her arms – private property, wage-labour, the division of labour, and capital – seek to exterminate the entire human race. Due to the process of production of capital, the capitalist places himself/herself as the godhead of the entire production process, and subsequently, he/she coercively becomes the god of other human beings, of his/her wage-slaves. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to restore dignity and integrity back to the human being by means of the unification of the human being with his/her being and essence through free, associated labour/life activity. As inspired methodologically by Bertell Ollman in that “Marx’s subject matter comprises an organic whole; the various factors he treats are facets of this whole; internal relations exist between all such factors; reciprocal effect predominates and has logical priority over causality; laws are concerned with patterns of reciprocal effect; the concepts Marx uses to refer to factors convey their internal relations; this makes it possible to speak of each factor as an ‘expression’ of the whole (or some large part of it) or as a ‘form’ of some other factor,” this paper on wage-labour and alienation is divided into the following four sections: Alienation as a result of and inherent within Wage-Labour, Capital and its Process of Production thereof; The Commodification of Alienation; The Machination of Alienation; and The Essence of Alienation: Wage-Labour, Private Property, and Capital.
MARXIAN NOTION OF ALIENATION – A PHILOSOPHICAL OVERVIEW
IAEME PUBLICATION, 2021
Alienation constitutes one of the little known aspects of the political theory of Karl Marx, because it was without any significance as far as Marx’s theory was concerned. The idea of alienation is mainly drawn from “Marx’s Economic and Political Manuscript” (1844) which is known for its humanist content and written by Marx when he was in his mid-twenties. Alienation occurs prominently as a term in the 20th century social theory and criticism. It is characterized as socially harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation. Alienation translates into two terms which means estrangement and externalization. Alienation occurs when a person withdraws or becomes isolation from their environment or from other people. People who show symptoms of alienation will often reject loved ones or society. In everyday life the term ‘alienation’ has been variously used. The made is at variance in religion, in sociology, in science, in psychology or in philosophy. It is very difficult to understand this term because it is a multi-dimensional phenomena. In simple words, alienation is powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement. It involves a view of human relationship not based on the principle of equality but of one man a master and another man a salve.
Desiring Alienation in Capitalism. Zeal to De-alienate in Socialism (Crisis&Critique7.11.17)
One of the syndromes of the anti-capitalist critique of alienation, both in politics and aesthetics, has been a strange aberration cases what is criticized is simultaneously desired and accepted as the condition of vicious contemporaneity; so that repulsion to it overlaps with the fascination with it. The unconscious acceptance of vicious capitalist contemporaneity along with its fierce critique is inevitable in the conditions of impossibility of its sublation. Therefore the resisting strategy against alienation often resides in exaggerating and intensifying what is vicious. Consequently, radical tools of imagining or installing de-alienation are rejected as redemption. Such paradox is often manifested in the contempt to the philosophic and artistic contexts of historical socialism. Meanwhile, research of Soviet Marxists (Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, Leontiev) in psychology, philosophy and political economy reveals concrete cases of accomplished de-alienation and its continuity with the polit-economical achievements of October Revolution. The question then is whether we, the capitalist subjects, are able to share such onto-ethics.
Reconsidering Marx's Theory of Alienation in the Post-Industrial Context
explores Marx’s theory of alienation in the context of contemporary mass commercial society and argues that the general social processes, consumptive trends, and cultural mechanisms generated by the productive relations of post-industrial capitalism are predicated on totalizing modes of estrangement and reification.
The Concept of Alienation and the Development of Marx’s Thought
[contribution to a planned Festschrift for David McLellan] One of David McLellan’s most important contributions to Marxist scholarship is his insistence and his demonstration, particularly in his edition of Marx’s Grundrisse, of the continuity between Marx’s early and later work. He shows that the Hegelian influence on Marx extends into his later work, and that the concept of alienation continues to play a major role in his thought. In this chapter I will extend this argument by showing that, even where the language of `alienation’ is not explicitly used, the concept is present in Marx’s later works. The idea of a sharp break in the development of Marx’s philosophy leads to a seriously distorted understanding of it. It is wrong to see the concept of alienation in the early works as purely ethical. On the contrary, it embodies the beginning of Marx’s attempt to understand and analyse the nature of capitalism in economic and social terms. In his later work the language of alienation is for the most part discarded, but not the fundamental ideas first expressed in 1844. In particular, the theme of alienation and its overcoming is embodied in the concepts of abstract labour and fetishism which have a prominent place in Capital and play a central role in the critique of capitalism in that work.
Alienation in the 21st century
The classical formulations of Marx concerning alienation (objectification/estrangement) described in the 1844 Manuscripts moved the concept from Hegelian idealism to material conditions, the consequences of wage labor and private property. For Marx, when people worked for wages, they alienated their labor power, selling their labor as a commodity that was embedded in the commodities they produced while they themselves became commodities. They were rendered powerless, dehumanized and estranged from their species being, their communities were rent asunder, and their lives were meaningless. Although the 1844 Manuscripts were not available for 80 years, they would have a major influence in social and political theory. This was evident in classical critiques as those of Mezaros, Israel, and Ollman. But since the 1970s we have seen major transformations of capitalism, now a de-territorialized globalized system dependent on mass consumerism, branded identities, mass media and computer medi...
The Metamorphosis of the Alienation Concept
2020
This article touches the notion of alienation from Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and young Marx’s perspective, Althusser’s critique being its offset, which, according to, this concept stems from an abstract, metaphysical view of history and human agents’ activities. According to Althusser, alienation is indeed the humanistic expression of a back-to-origins philosophy and of lost human essence retrieval. Hence, the philosophy of contractual alienation (as a foundation of political community as per Rousseau), the interrogation of historical positivity from young Hegel’s writings and, last but not least, the alienated work critique elaborated by young Marx in Manuscripts of 1844 can be interpreted as variations around the same essential concepts of human history. In the attempt of overcoming such an undifferentiated approach, the study tries to highlight the original and particular reflection that each of these authors develop on the subject and highlights, at the same time, what they have in co...