From Alienation to Revolution: A Defense of Marx’s Theory of Alienation

The following discussion presents an overview of Marx’s theory of alienation. In contrast to the usual presentation of the subject, we will demonstrate that Marx’s theory of alienation is unintelligible without a prior assimilation of the philosophical method by which it was derived. This in turn leads to a major problem. The philosophical outlook and categories employed by Marx are quite foreign to those, particularly in the English-speaking world, who have been trained in the school of empiricism and its descendants, positivism and analytic philosophy. The process of misapprehension can be likened to an attempt to appropriate the great literature of a foreign language by reference to a phrase book. Compounding the problem is the hostility to socialist politics that is engendered by powerful class interests, generating the grossest caricatures of Marxism which find their way into the popular media. On top of this, a further layer of confusion has been sown by the distorted and vulgar interpretations of Marxism that were spread for decades by the heirs of Stalin. The prognosis for breaking through this logjam is nevertheless far from hopeless. Indeed, the demise of the Soviet Union has opened up the possibility for a genuine renewal of authentic Marxism. The stultifying pressure of an official brand of “Marxism” which functioned as the ideological legitimation of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union no longer commands any credibility. This is the other side of the coin of the so-called “new world order”, which appeared to many as heralding the ultimate triumph of capitalism. Marx’s theory of alienation has often been presented as something entirely separate, if not completely at odds with his scientific work. Marx the philosopher is counterposed to Marx the author of Capital and the relationship of each to Marx the revolutionary remains a mystery. Depending on the preferences of the author, either the “young Marx” is favored over the “mature Marx” or vice-versa. We will show that maintaining this dichotomy is only possible if the body of Marx’s work is either deliberately distorted or misunderstood. Our thesis is that the theory of alienation lays the foundation for a scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Neither is understandable without the other. The critique of political economy in turn results in the identification of the working class as the sole agency capable of transforming society and thereby overcoming the proximate cause of alienation. In the course of our investigation, we will engage a number of authors who have contributed to the debate on alienation. In doing so, we make no pretense at providing anything like an exhaustive review of the literature on the subject. That would probably