One of Marx’s most famous concepts, “alienation” initially meant “the systemic separation of a worker from the product of his labor”. The result of a craftsman’s labor is directly visible beneath his hands, growing by the day; when he’s done, the shirt (or whatever) sits there before him, fully finished. The factory worker, by contrast, is little more than a machine-tender; he pulls the lever, and the finished article is squirted out somewhere far down the line, automatically, by machine. His “labor” consists of lever-pulling and jam-clearing.
It was a real enough insight into the psychology of factory work, and Marx deserves all the credit he got for it, but “alienation” was even more useful in a broad social context — the separation of man from the cultural products of his society. After all, if capitalism is the mode of production around which society organizes itself, and the products of capitalism are by definition alienated from their producers, then by extension capitalist society must be alienated from itself. Indeed, what could “society” even mean, in a world of lever-pullers and bearing-lubers and jam-clearers?
Again, a profound and important insight into the social conditions of the Industrial Age. Ours is a mechanical, transactional world, one not well-suited to the kind of organism we are. That’s why Marxism and its spacey little brother Nazism are both what Jeffrey Herf calls “reactionary modernism.” The Communists thought they were the endpoint of the Enlightenment; the Nazis rejected it entirely; but both of them were curdled Romantics, in love with Enlightenment science while terrified of that science’s society. Lenin said that Communism was “Soviet power plus electrification”. Goebbels wasn’t that pithy, but “the feudal system plus autobahns” is pretty much what he meant by Nazism, and both boil down to “medieval peasant villages with air conditioning”.
That the one excludes the other — necessarily, comrade, necessarily, in the full Hegelian sense of the word — never occurred to either of them shouldn’t really be held against them, since both of them were determined to freeze the world exactly as it was. Both were so terrified of individuality that they were determined to stamp it out, not realizing that individuality was the only thing that made their fantasy worlds possible. Medieval peasants who were happy being medieval peasants never would’ve invented air conditioning in the first place, nicht wahr?
Severian, “Alienation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-29.
May 20, 2023
QotD: Alienation
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