We know workers dislike domination. And contra Lyotard, they also dislike exploitation. But might a significant number of workers actually enjoy being estranged from the objects of their labor? Or at least, might they be indifferent enough to not see alienation as a problem?
Consider that as an alienated worker, I am encouraged to be utterly unconcerned with labor conditions outside of my own workplace. Or the quantity and quality of production of commodities that I do not consume. Those are the concerns of management and the bourgeoisie. My alienation provides a perverse degree of "freedom" from society, to focus only on my individual consumption and not the conditions of my fellow workers.
Whereas in a communist society of free and equal producers, I am supposed to have an interest the labor conditions in all workplaces in a society, as each directly affects the amount of social product available for consumption. The degree of political control needed to make that happen equitably seems extremely time-consuming and limiting, and I imagine a lot of workers would be turned off by it.
Perhaps that is why most 'socialist' experiments have never really addressed alienation, and why most workers seem completely resigned to the hyper-alienated existence mediated by apps and nation-states despite everyone allegedly agreeing on how horrible it is.
>>2810889They don't know any other way to be.
>My alienation provides a perverse degree of "freedom" from society, to focus only on my individual consumption and not the conditions of my fellow workers
this is a central theme in xenofeminism
>>2810955>xenofeminismlmao what
don't a lot of the self-described "Marxian" academics argue that the young (1840s) Marx moved away from a framework that centered on alienation and species-beings, towards a framework that centered on exploitation and class-struggle? Isn't alienation mostly a residue of his Young Hegelianism?
Why should I care about where the steel I produce goes and how it’s used? Serious question
>My alienation provides a perverse degree of "freedom" from society, to focus only on my individual consumption and not the conditions of my fellow workers.
Well, this is the utopian vision of capitalism; we all have our role and we all look after ourselves. Unfortunately, crisis is a feature, not a bug, and so we are forced into politics.
>>2810968Peter Thiel feminism
>>2810971Marx's theory of alienation is indistinct from the theory of exploitation and class struggle, since capital as objectified labour subjectifies itself against the labourer, who becomes an object. And communism is simply the disalienation of man by a positive (e.g. self-determined) humanism.
>>2811081I am quoting Marx directly.
>>2811084Are you malfunctioning? You never posted a quote. If you want to as a reply then do so, but don't forget to also include his critique of Feuerbach while you're at it.
>>2811097No sageposter is worth talking to, as experience has proven.
>>2811032Because the magnitude and efficiency of steel production affects the availability and cost of goods and services that you consume.
>>2811106You had nothing to stand on. Don't get it twisted.
>>2811202Marx directly:
>Communism is practical humanismyou:
<noYou are illiterate, arrogant and cowardly. Fix yourself.
>>2811079thanks for the reply, the anon arguing with you about humanism is not the anon who originally asked.
Are you saying that alienation is charivatures or videogames or food? Because that's not alienation
>>2811350>Uses a search engineOh no. How about reading Marx, instead?
>communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism<communism […] the advent of practical humanismhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htmIts interesting though, that someone would be so wrong yet so shameless, while pretending to represent the person theyre purposefully ignorant of.
>>2811363Congrats, finally, the actual quote. See the year?
1844. The year after, Marx already released his
critique of Feuerbachian materialism, laying the
building blocks for their development of historical materialism (still not completed until the late 1860s and riddled with bourgeois political-economic blindspots!).
>Marx: Theses on Feuerbach, 1945:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/>5>Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants sensuous contemplation [Anschauung]; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.>6>Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:>1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated - human individual.>2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.>7>Feuerbach consequently does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form.>8>All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.More significantly: Engels:
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,
1886:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch03.htm>Part 4: Marx>Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach — these were the offshoots of Hegelian philosophy, in so far as they did not abandon the field of philosophy. Strauss, after his Life of Jesus and Dogmatics, produced only literary studies in philosophy and ecclesiastical history after the fashion of Renan. Bauer only achieved something in the field of the history of the origin of Christianity, though what he did here was important. Stirner remained a curiosity, even after Bakunin blended him with Proudhon and labelled the blend “anarchism”. Feuerbach alone was of significance as a philosopher. But not only did philosophy — claimed to soar above all special sciences and to be the science of sciences connecting them — remain to him an impassable barrier, an inviolable holy thing, but as a philosopher, too, he stopped half-incapable of disposing of Hegel through criticism; he simply threw him aside as useless, while he himself, compared with the encyclopaedic wealth of the Hegelian system, achieved nothing positive beyond a turgid religion of love and a meagre, impotent morality.>Out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, however, there developed still another tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. And this tendency is essentially connected with the name of Marx (1).>The separation from Hegelian philosophy was here also the result of a return to the materialist standpoint. That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this. But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently — at least in its basic features — in all domains of knowledge concerned.If any of this still reads as 'humanist' to you then you don't know what humanism is.
>>2811188I put in 8 hours of labor, I’m entitled to 8 hours of consumption, what’s there to calculate? If I need to be reassigned temporarily that’s not my concern nor should I have any input on the matter
>>2811416None of this contradicts what was written earlier.
>The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm >>2811421Deductions have to be made from everyone's comsumption credit to fund expansion of the MoP, plus public services. The size of that deduction needs to be determined politically by the working class.
>>2811519So I’m gonna have to be on a zoom meeting with every other survivor of the civil war and we decide which sectors of workers get to bear the most tax burden to fund our public services.
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