The ingenious essence of Marxism that you don't know about!! Part 2
III. Non-Marxist conceptions of alienation
Much time would elapse, however, before a historical, non-ontological, conception of alienation could take hold. In the early 20th century, most authors who addressed the phenomenon considered it a universal aspect of human existence. In Being and Time (1927), for instance, Martin Heidegger approached it in purely philosophical terms. The category he used for his phenomenology of alienation was ‘fallenness’ (Verfallen): that is, the tendency of Being-There (Dasein - ontologically constituted human existence) to lose itself in the inauthenticity and conformism of the surrounding world. For Heidegger, ‘fallenness into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity’ - something truly quite different from the condition of the factory worker, which was at the centre of Marx’s theoretical preoccupations. Moreover, Heidegger did not regard this ‘fallenness’ as a ‘bad and deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves’, but rather as an ontological characteristic, ‘an existential mode of Being-in-the-world’. [13]
Herbert Marcuse, who, unlike Heidegger, knew Marx’s work well, identified alienation with objectification as such, not with its manifestation in capitalist relations of production. In an essay he published in 1933, he argued that ‘the burdensome character of labor’ [14] could not be attributed merely to ‘specific conditions in the performance of labor, to the social-technical structuring of labor’[15], but should be considered as one of its fundamental traits:
‘In laboring, the laborer is always “with the thing”: whether one stands by a machine, draws technical plans, is concerned with organizational measures, researches scientific problems, instructs people, etc. In his activity he allows himself to be directed by the thing, subjects himself and obeys its laws, even when he dominates his object…. In each case he is not “with himself” … he is with an “Other than himself” - even when this doing fulfils his own freely assumed life. This externalization and alienation of human existence … is ineliminable in principle.’ [16]
For Marcuse, there was a ‘primordial negativity of laboring activity’ that belonged to the ‘very essence of human existence’. [17] The critique of alienation therefore became a critique of technology and labour in general, and its supersession was considered possible only in the moment of play, when people could attain a freedom denied them in productive activity: ‘In a single toss of a ball, the player achieves an infinitely greater triumph of human freedom over objectification than in the most powerful accomplishment of technical labor.’[18]
In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse took an equally clear distance from Marx’s conception, arguing that human emancipation could be achieved only through the abolition of labour and the affirmation of the libido and play in social relations. He discarded any possibility that a society based on common ownership of the means of production might overcome alienation, on the grounds that labour in general, not only wage labour, was
‘work for an apparatus which they [the vast majority of the population] do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes…. They work … in alienation [… in the] absence of gratification [and in] negation of the pleasure principle.’[19]
The cardinal norm against which people should rebel was the ‘performance principle’ imposed by society. For, in Marcuse’s eyes,
‘the conflict between sexuality and civilization unfolds with this development of domination. Under the rule of the performance principle, body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labor; they can function as such instruments only if they renounce the freedom of the libidinal subject-object which the human organism primarily is and desires…. Man exists … as an instrument of alienated performance.’ [20]
Hence, even if material production is organized equitably and rationally, ‘it can never be a realm of freedom and gratification…. It is the sphere outside labor which defines freedom and fulfilment.’[21] Marcuse’s alternative was to abandon the Promethean myth so dear to Marx and to draw closer to a Dionysian perspective: the ‘liberation of eros’. [22] In contrast to Freud, who had maintained in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) that a non-repressive organization of society would entail a dangerous regression from the level of civilization attained in human relations, Marcuse was convinced that, if the liberation of the instincts took place in a technologically advanced ‘free society’ [23] in the service of humanity, it would not only favour the march of progress but create ‘new and durable work relations’.[24] But his indications about how the new society might come about were rather vague and utopian. He ended up opposing technological domination in general, so that his critique of alienation was no longer directed against capitalist relations of production, and his reflections on social change were so pessimistic as to include the working class among the subjects that operated in defence of the system.
The two leading figures in the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, also developed a theory of generalized estrangement resulting from invasive social control and the manipulation of needs by the mass media. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) they argued that ‘a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.’ [25] This meant that, in contemporary capitalism, even the sphere of leisure time - free and outside of work - was absorbed into the mechanisms reproducing consensus.
After World War II, the concept of alienation also found its way into psychoanalysis. Those who took it up started from Freud’s theory that man is forced to choose between nature and culture, and that, to enjoy the securities of civilization, he must necessarily renounce his impulses. [26] Some psychologists linked alienation with the psychoses that appeared in certain individuals as a result of this conflict-ridden choice, thereby reducing the whole vast problematic of alienation to a merely subjective phenomenon.
The author who dealt most with alienation from within psychoanalysis was Erich Fromm. Unlike most of his colleagues, he never separated its manifestations from the capitalist historical context; indeed, his books The Sane Society (1955) and Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) used the concept to try to build a bridge between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Yet Fromm likewise always put the main emphasis on subjectivity, and his concept of alienation, which he summarized as ‘a mode of experience in which the individual experiences himself as alien’, [27] remained too narrowly focused on the individual. Moreover, his account of Marx’s concept based itself only on the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and showed a deep lack of understanding of the specificity and centrality of alienated labour in Marx’s thought. This lacuna prevented Fromm from giving due weight to objective alienation (that of the worker in the labour process and in relation to the labour product) and led him to advance positions that appear disingenuous in their neglect of the underlying structural relations.
‘Marx believed that the working class was the most alienated class…. [He] did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people…. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter’s functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his “personality”, his smile, his opinions in the bargain.’[28]
One of the principal non-Marxist theories of alienation is that associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French existentialists. Indeed, in the 1940s, marked by the horrors of war and the ensuing crise de conscience, the phenomenon of alienation - partly under the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s neo-Hegelianism[29] - became a recurrent reference both in philosophy and in narrative literature. Once again, however, the concept is much more generic than in Marx’s thought, becoming identified with a diffuse discontent of man in society, a split between human individuality and the world of experience, and an insurmountable condition humaine. The existentialist philosophers did not propose a social origin for alienation, but saw it as inevitably bound up with all ‘facticity’ (no doubt the failure of the Soviet experience favoured such a view) and human otherness. In 1955, Jean Hippolyte set out this position in one of the most significant works in this tendency:
‘[alienation] does not seem to be reducible solely to the concept of the alienation of man under capitalism, as Marx understands it. The latter is only a particular case of a more universal problem of human self-consciousness which, being unable to conceive itself as an isolated cogito, can only recognize itself in a word which it constructs, in the other selves which it recognizes and by whom it is occasionally disowned. But this manner of self-discovery through the Other, this objectification, is always more or less an alienation, a loss of self and a simultaneous self-discovery. Thus objectification and alienation are inseparable, and their union is simply the expression of a dialectical tension observed in the very movement of history.’[30]
Marx helped to develop a critique of human subjugation, basing himself on opposition to capitalist relations of production. The existentialists followed an opposite trajectory, trying to absorb those parts of Marx’s work that they thought useful for their own approach, in a merely philosophical discussion devoid of a specific historical critique.[31]
https://marcellomusto.org/revisiting-marx-s-concept-of-alienation/
Much time would elapse, however, before a historical, non-ontological, conception of alienation could take hold. In the early 20th century, most authors who addressed the phenomenon considered it a universal aspect of human existence. In Being and Time (1927), for instance, Martin Heidegger approached it in purely philosophical terms. The category he used for his phenomenology of alienation was ‘fallenness’ (Verfallen): that is, the tendency of Being-There (Dasein - ontologically constituted human existence) to lose itself in the inauthenticity and conformism of the surrounding world. For Heidegger, ‘fallenness into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity’ - something truly quite different from the condition of the factory worker, which was at the centre of Marx’s theoretical preoccupations. Moreover, Heidegger did not regard this ‘fallenness’ as a ‘bad and deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves’, but rather as an ontological characteristic, ‘an existential mode of Being-in-the-world’. [13]
Herbert Marcuse, who, unlike Heidegger, knew Marx’s work well, identified alienation with objectification as such, not with its manifestation in capitalist relations of production. In an essay he published in 1933, he argued that ‘the burdensome character of labor’ [14] could not be attributed merely to ‘specific conditions in the performance of labor, to the social-technical structuring of labor’[15], but should be considered as one of its fundamental traits:
‘In laboring, the laborer is always “with the thing”: whether one stands by a machine, draws technical plans, is concerned with organizational measures, researches scientific problems, instructs people, etc. In his activity he allows himself to be directed by the thing, subjects himself and obeys its laws, even when he dominates his object…. In each case he is not “with himself” … he is with an “Other than himself” - even when this doing fulfils his own freely assumed life. This externalization and alienation of human existence … is ineliminable in principle.’ [16]
For Marcuse, there was a ‘primordial negativity of laboring activity’ that belonged to the ‘very essence of human existence’. [17] The critique of alienation therefore became a critique of technology and labour in general, and its supersession was considered possible only in the moment of play, when people could attain a freedom denied them in productive activity: ‘In a single toss of a ball, the player achieves an infinitely greater triumph of human freedom over objectification than in the most powerful accomplishment of technical labor.’[18]
In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse took an equally clear distance from Marx’s conception, arguing that human emancipation could be achieved only through the abolition of labour and the affirmation of the libido and play in social relations. He discarded any possibility that a society based on common ownership of the means of production might overcome alienation, on the grounds that labour in general, not only wage labour, was
‘work for an apparatus which they [the vast majority of the population] do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes…. They work … in alienation [… in the] absence of gratification [and in] negation of the pleasure principle.’[19]
The cardinal norm against which people should rebel was the ‘performance principle’ imposed by society. For, in Marcuse’s eyes,
‘the conflict between sexuality and civilization unfolds with this development of domination. Under the rule of the performance principle, body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labor; they can function as such instruments only if they renounce the freedom of the libidinal subject-object which the human organism primarily is and desires…. Man exists … as an instrument of alienated performance.’ [20]
Hence, even if material production is organized equitably and rationally, ‘it can never be a realm of freedom and gratification…. It is the sphere outside labor which defines freedom and fulfilment.’[21] Marcuse’s alternative was to abandon the Promethean myth so dear to Marx and to draw closer to a Dionysian perspective: the ‘liberation of eros’. [22] In contrast to Freud, who had maintained in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) that a non-repressive organization of society would entail a dangerous regression from the level of civilization attained in human relations, Marcuse was convinced that, if the liberation of the instincts took place in a technologically advanced ‘free society’ [23] in the service of humanity, it would not only favour the march of progress but create ‘new and durable work relations’.[24] But his indications about how the new society might come about were rather vague and utopian. He ended up opposing technological domination in general, so that his critique of alienation was no longer directed against capitalist relations of production, and his reflections on social change were so pessimistic as to include the working class among the subjects that operated in defence of the system.
The two leading figures in the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, also developed a theory of generalized estrangement resulting from invasive social control and the manipulation of needs by the mass media. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) they argued that ‘a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.’ [25] This meant that, in contemporary capitalism, even the sphere of leisure time - free and outside of work - was absorbed into the mechanisms reproducing consensus.
After World War II, the concept of alienation also found its way into psychoanalysis. Those who took it up started from Freud’s theory that man is forced to choose between nature and culture, and that, to enjoy the securities of civilization, he must necessarily renounce his impulses. [26] Some psychologists linked alienation with the psychoses that appeared in certain individuals as a result of this conflict-ridden choice, thereby reducing the whole vast problematic of alienation to a merely subjective phenomenon.
The author who dealt most with alienation from within psychoanalysis was Erich Fromm. Unlike most of his colleagues, he never separated its manifestations from the capitalist historical context; indeed, his books The Sane Society (1955) and Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) used the concept to try to build a bridge between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Yet Fromm likewise always put the main emphasis on subjectivity, and his concept of alienation, which he summarized as ‘a mode of experience in which the individual experiences himself as alien’, [27] remained too narrowly focused on the individual. Moreover, his account of Marx’s concept based itself only on the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and showed a deep lack of understanding of the specificity and centrality of alienated labour in Marx’s thought. This lacuna prevented Fromm from giving due weight to objective alienation (that of the worker in the labour process and in relation to the labour product) and led him to advance positions that appear disingenuous in their neglect of the underlying structural relations.
‘Marx believed that the working class was the most alienated class…. [He] did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people…. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter’s functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his “personality”, his smile, his opinions in the bargain.’[28]
One of the principal non-Marxist theories of alienation is that associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French existentialists. Indeed, in the 1940s, marked by the horrors of war and the ensuing crise de conscience, the phenomenon of alienation - partly under the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s neo-Hegelianism[29] - became a recurrent reference both in philosophy and in narrative literature. Once again, however, the concept is much more generic than in Marx’s thought, becoming identified with a diffuse discontent of man in society, a split between human individuality and the world of experience, and an insurmountable condition humaine. The existentialist philosophers did not propose a social origin for alienation, but saw it as inevitably bound up with all ‘facticity’ (no doubt the failure of the Soviet experience favoured such a view) and human otherness. In 1955, Jean Hippolyte set out this position in one of the most significant works in this tendency:
‘[alienation] does not seem to be reducible solely to the concept of the alienation of man under capitalism, as Marx understands it. The latter is only a particular case of a more universal problem of human self-consciousness which, being unable to conceive itself as an isolated cogito, can only recognize itself in a word which it constructs, in the other selves which it recognizes and by whom it is occasionally disowned. But this manner of self-discovery through the Other, this objectification, is always more or less an alienation, a loss of self and a simultaneous self-discovery. Thus objectification and alienation are inseparable, and their union is simply the expression of a dialectical tension observed in the very movement of history.’[30]
Marx helped to develop a critique of human subjugation, basing himself on opposition to capitalist relations of production. The existentialists followed an opposite trajectory, trying to absorb those parts of Marx’s work that they thought useful for their own approach, in a merely philosophical discussion devoid of a specific historical critique.[31]
https://marcellomusto.org/revisiting-marx-s-concept-of-alienation/