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2021 | Buch

Karl Marx's Writings on Alienation

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The theory of alienation occupies a significant place in the work of Marx and has long been considered one of his main contributions to the critique of bourgeois society. Many authors who have written on this concept over the 20th century have erroneously based their interpretations on Marx’s early writings. In this anthology, by contrast, Marcello Musto has concentrated his selection on the most relevant pages of Marx’s later economic works, in which his thoughts on alienation were far more extensive and detailed than those of the early philosophical manuscripts. Additionally, the writings collated in this volume are unique in their presentation of not only Marx’s critique of capitalism, but also his description of communist society. This comprehensive rediscovery of Marx’s ideas on alienation provides an indispensable critical tool for both understanding the past and the critique of contemporary society.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Part I MARCELLO MUSTO, INTRODUCTION

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Alienation Redux: Marxian Perspectives
Abstract
Alienation was one of the most important and widely debated themes of the twentieth century and Marx’s reflections on this concept defined significant moments in its dissemination. Most of the authors who initially wrote on alienation considered it a universal aspect of human existence. Additionally, after World War II the popularity of the concept created a profound terminological ambiguity. The diffusion of Marx’s oeuvre paved the way for a conception of alienation geared to the overcoming of this phenomenon in practice—to the political action of social movements, parties and trade unions to change the working and living conditions of the working class. Marx’s writings on alienation provided not only a coherent theoretical basis for new studies of this concept, but above all an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the labour movement. Alienation left the books of philosophers took to the streets and became a critique of bourgeois society.
Marcello Musto

Part II KARL MARX, WRITINGS ON ALIENATION

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Early Philosophical and Political Writings
Abstract
In these texts Marx argued that workers in bourgeois society is alienated in four senses: (1) by the product of their labour, which becomes an alien object holding sway over them; (2) in their work activity, which is seen as turned against them and not belonging to them; (3) by the human race, since human’s species being is transformed into a being alien to them; and (4) by other people, with regard to the labour and the object of the labour of others like themself. In the same group of writings, Marx also pointed to the limits of the co-operation among workers in the capitalist factory. Their association was not a voluntary action on their part but is imposed as an alien power outside their control. Wage labour does not enter into the workers’ life-activity but constitutes a sacrifice of their lives.
Marcello Musto
Chapter 3. From the Grundrisse to the Theories of Surplus Value
Abstract
In these manuscripts, written between the late 1850s and the early 1860s, Marx’s considerations on alienation were much deeper and more detailed than those in his early writings. He meticulously described how the workers in bourgeois society is under the command of capital and how the product of their activity becomes an alien power. These writings—in particular the Grundrisse—also contained many passages in which Marx outlined the non-alienated postcapitalist society that he had in view. He highlighted that alienation was not a natural but a social phenomenon, which expresses a specifically social relation.
Marcello Musto
Chapter 4. Capital and Its Preparatory Manuscripts
Abstract
In Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, Marx went deeper into the problematic of alienation, linking his economic and political analysis more closely to each other. In the capitalist mode of production, the separation between the workers and the means of production—a prerequisite for the buying and selling of labour-power—reaches the point where the conditions of labour appear before the worker as autonomous persons. Moreover, in Capital, Volume One, a new formulation for alienation took shape: that is, commodity fetishism, the phenomenon through which human beings are ruled over by the objects they have created and live in a world where the definite social relation between men themselves assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things.
Marcello Musto
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Karl Marx's Writings on Alienation
verfasst von
Marcello Musto
Copyright-Jahr
2021
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-60781-4
Print ISBN
978-3-030-60780-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60781-4