Alienation

Alienation: a romantic image of great influence, claiming that we are not and cannot be at home in the modern world, but must be powerfully alienated from it. The idea is connected especially to the work of the young Karl Marx, where it is central to the so-called Paris Manuscripts of 1844. It came to represent a key concern into the 1960s, when these writings of the young Marx were first translated into English, coinciding with the emergence of the counterculture across America and Europe. The idea of alienation has significant precedents in the work of Rousseau and Schiller. There, it was the human spirit in struggle against modern civilization. For the early Rousseau, the self was at home in nature; civilization was an artefact, a blot on the landscape. For Schiller, the industrial division of labour resulted in the division or dissection of the human individual. This became a key theme or sensibility in Marx's work, through to Capital: “To subdivide a person is to execute them.” Thus the connection with counterculture radicalism, anticonservatism, and opposition to war and bureaucracy: “I am an individual, do not bend, fold, or spindle.”

The idea of alienation in its broadest use therefore reflects this romantic intellectual theme and its popular rendition into the 1960s. It responds to what Cornelius Castoriadis would call the “demand of autonomy.” By the 60s, it came to represent a more generalized sense of being “out of it.” For Marx, in contrast, alienation had a more precise and detailed meaning; and though the Paris Manuscripts are often incomplete, and suggestive more than substantive, Marx's views on alienation are clear and strong, and typologized. Alienation, for Marx, refers centrally to the alienation of labour. The early Marx holds creative labour to be the essence of humanity. To live is to act, to transform the world and the self. Labour is the medium of this process. Marx thus works out of a tradition of philosophical anthropology, for which humanity is defined as creative or generative and social institutions are subjected to criticism on the grounds that they work against such qualities. What is wrong with capitalism, for the young Marx, is not that it is unfair or inefficient in its distribution, but that it denies the human essence. It denies the right creatively to labour. In the German language, some tension exists regarding what in English we call alienation. Literally, alienation is Entfremdung, where fremd is strange or alien, which of course presumes this prior original condition. Marx also refers, however, to Entausserung, which is usually translated as objectification. Human animals objectify themselves; we make our worlds; the bee makes its too, but we design ours first in our heads. Objectification is not stigmatic or negative in the way that alienation is; it refers to the expressionist sense of Ausdruck, that culture results from expressing something that is held to be innate in us (or in some of us).

Marx's typology of alienation shifts through four stages or movements, all connected to this ontology of labour. As Marx explains it, alienated labour involves, first, alienation [Page 10]from the object of labour, the thing produced. Alienation is a hard material fact; I produce for the other, for the master; I relinquish control over the results of production. I give over of my self and my labour to the other. I objectify myself, here, but not in circumstances of my choosing; the necessary act of Entausserung, or objectification, is turned under the relations of private property into Entfremdung. Alienated labour involves, second, alienation from the process of production. Marx's ultimate value concern is with human activity and not the distribution of things. Humans are defined by their creative capacities. To be denied of the process creatively to labour is to be denied our humanity. This is the ontologically most significant aspect of alienation: alienation from the capacity to create, or to transform the world, nature, and culture through labour. Third, Marx insists, there is an additional dynamic. As we are alienated from the results of the process and the process of labour itself, so are we alienated from each other, from our fellows, with whom we ought really cooperate rather than compete or remain indifferent toward. We are therefore alienated from each other in the process of alienated labour. Fourth, Marx argues at a more abstract level (and this category disappears from his later work) that when we alienate our labour, we are alienated from the human essence as species-being (Gattungswesen). This seems to be an abstract extension of the previous claim: We alienate ourselves not only from the particularity of our immediate coworkers but also from the generality of humanity as such.

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