When Marx talks about alienation, he talks about being alienated from the purposefulness of one's own job due to the capitalist mode of production and the role of one's social class.
People who call themselves Marxists today use alienation to talk about how they have no friends, which has nothing to do with the way their jobs are. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't /leftypol/ types misinterpreting Marx to complain about being virgins?
AOC needs to redistribute dat pussy, comrade
>Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ethnically Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland, Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.
>At a 2018 Hanukkah party held by activist group Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, Ocasio-Cortez said that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, although she does not practice the faith. Of her Sephardic Jewish ancestry, she has said that DNA isn't culture, but that "to be Puerto Rican is to be the descendant of: African Moors + slaves, Taino Indians, Spanish colonizers, Jewish refugees, and likely others. We are all of these things and something else all at once — we are Boricua."
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
But this does?
>People who call themselves Marxists today
These people have no connection to intellectual tradition. They have never and will never read Hegel. Their political beliefs are not beliefs but catchphrases, memes, group identification that makes them feel powerful or fulfills their psychological needs.
For the early Marx, alienation refers to the estrangement of the laborer from the product of his labor, since that product is effectively stolen from him (if you believe in the labor theory of value) by those who own the means of production. Since his labor serves to enrich those who are stealing from him, he is therefore laboring to maintain the very system that oppresses him. He is cut off from that which he makes, and then ultimately set in opposition to it. Marx suggests that under capitalist relations of production, something similar to this alienation of man from object occurs between man and man. Since men end up competing with one another, they come to see each other only as competitors suppressing wages, rather than as human beings. If the commodification of objects gives objects a sort of reified life of their own, the commodification of labor itself reduces men to mere objects.
So on the one hand, the Marxist idea of alienation is a fairly strict formal concept, but on the other hand it clearly has broad applicability, perhaps even to lonely virgins. Of course, there's some debate as to whether the late Marx still cared about alienation (which is really a concept derived from Hegel) at all. In the form of commodity fetishism, alienation still forms an important part of Marx's argument in Capital, but the more humanistic dimensions of his account of alienation are less evident.
Care to post some passages from early Marx where he goes into this? Nowhere in Capital does he refer to the alienation in anything other than the technical sense, let alone implicating it in various modern mental disorders.
He lists 4 kinds of Alienation in the 1844 manuscripts:
>1. Alienation from the Product of ones labour - that is, there is no ownership or control over what one produces, the worker can only sell their labour, not the prodct of their labour
>2. Alienation from the process of one's labour - Due to the division of labour, the production line, and the advancement of the means of production, the worker have practically no creative input to the production process, and instead of using tools, he becomes a tool to the machines to which he must constantly attend.
>3. Alienation from their fellow Man - The capitalist system reduces human relationships to "callous cash payments" and pits the capitalist against the worker, the worker against the worker, and the capitalist against the capitalist, all in the service of the valorisation of capital. This removes the autheticity of human relationships and creates an overly antagonistic society.
>4. Alienation for themselves as a Species-Being - Marx considered that which seperates Humans from other animals was their activites and work--that is, production. "As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both what they produce and with how they produce" in this sense, as labour defines ones character, and defines ones very humanity, the use of it by Capitalists. Basically, Marx thought work was what granted fulfillment to life, but the work that the proletariat undertakes "as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, […] is shunned like the plague." it is very unfulfilling and retards the creative capacity of humans; "their material production and material intercourse, alter, along with their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness."
I'm not sure what they talk about on /leftypol/ but from your description it could conceivably fall into the 3rd category or even the 4th. Though, as you've noted, these ideas don't appear in Capital (but they do in the Grundrisse, which kind of connects the two periods).
Bear in mind it has been a while since i've read Marx and i may have misunderstood him. Check out "Alienation: Marx's conception of man in capitalist society" by Bertell Ollman for a better account.
She can't even pander using the race card correctly. btw she grew up in a gated community.
inb4 obsessed
you are a hack and a pseud and nobody likes you in real life i would bet my house
Bruh, you’re a meany bourgeois, running dog lackey for your plutocratic masters. ;_;
AOC is a neoliberal not a Marxist.
Serious question. Would an example of alienation be a pizza place worker? Let's say you make 7.25$ USD AN HOUR working there. A pizza costs 10.00$. In one hour of work you cannot afford one pizza yet you make dozens of them (for someone else's profit). This is alienation, no?
>alienation to talk about how they have no friends, which has nothing to do with the way their jobs are.
Stop hanging around with uni students and unironically go to /leftypol/ yourself
Also you are confusing atomization (ie I am forever alone and have no friends :() with Marxist alienation
>People who call themselves Marxists today use alienation to talk about how they have no friends
No they dont't. Stop hanging around retards.
Cringe
NK you commie boong
bumpu
So if the actually existing internet Marxists aren't the vanguard, organic class party then who is?
There isn't one in the west
Thanks McCarthyism
>muh McCarthy
that was a long time ago user
Absolutely. The pizza place worker does not receive his share of what is being produced.
okay here's a real breakdown of alienation as written in the Paris Manuscripts.
>step one
alienated from the product of your labour, the thing you make are not your own, instead you are given a wage in compensation
>step two
alienated from labour, without access to the products of your labour, the labour itself becomes alienated, sold to another rather than remain under your own control
>step three
alienated from species-being, for Marx man is at his most human when he labours. Leisure is something animals do, it is only man who labours. thus when man feels more at home in leisure than at work he's alienated from his very nature
>step four
alienated from other men, having to sell your labour in a market means you must compete against your fellow man for the limited amount of wages available, putting you in a place of antagonism against your fellow worker
That's faked, riiiight?
That's not alienation, that's exploitation. Alienation is about producing commodities for exchange under the direction of a capitalist as opposed to artisanal production.
There is no way you aren't a woman.
This place is the worst it has ever been.
Alienation is a technical term in Hegelianese. People attribute agency to "the system" in the same sense as God.
Good answers
She's from New York, what does she know about being Puerto Rican.
She cute
en.wikipedia.org
Seriously, people don't even read Wikipedia these days.
A modern era analysis is in Hanna Arendt's “The Human Condition”.
There is also a possibility of critique that declines to consider labor a central property of humans. As an example, Kazimir Malevich, who actually wrote a lot in addition to painting, has an essay on laziness.
They are alienated from the product of their labor in that no single person creates the finished product. To oversimplify: in the old days an artisan carpenter would make a table. Now you have ten guys on an assembly line one of whom finishes the tabletop, one of whom screws the legs in, et cetera all working for a wage and not creating anything with their individual labor except what Marx refers to as surplus value for the bossman.
I’m more conservative, but he may have been right about this one. I worked in construction for a while and one of the most fulfilling parts of the job was seeing your finished product at the end of the day and taking pride in it. It is sad that jobs that were traditionally done by small town artisans who ran their own businesses (e.g., butcher) have been taken over by Wal-Mart which just pays a bunch of guys a shit-tier wage to do it more efficiently. I think Marx was right about the centrality of labor to the economic order, and our policymakers in the US have spent the past several decades pursuing increased GDP growth and consumption over meaningful and good paying work for people.
It doesn’t mean tfw no gf though. You will be surprised to find that a not insignificant portion of self-identifying Marxists at American universities are in fact dumb as rocks and haven’t actually read Marx.
I’m but reading back through the thread I didn’t know this I’ve only read capital.
I'd recommend reading some of his earlier works, especially the 1844 manuscripts, Theses on Feuerbach, and the first part of The German Ideology. I think some of his most potent criticisms are found here, and they add some extra gravity to the critiques in Capital as well as explaining Marx's metaphysics. I'm not a marxist myself, but he is worth reading if you're interested in politics, economics, or social theory in general.
bump
