ALIENATION

“The sum total of these relations of production con itutes the economic ructure of society, the real foundation, on which r es a legal and political super ructure and to which corre ond de nite forms of social consciousness.”

“The whole development of the human race needed order to humanize the senses and to educate them so that they become human senses.”

“The point is to change” the world

Karl Marx

- Marx’s contemporaries expected atheism would liberate man. Marx was more nuanced: Yes, “ Man makes religion , religion does not make man ... But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man –state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world , because they are an inverted world Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people [must be] the demand for their real happiness.”

- The inverted world is a set of objective conditions that separate me from the conditions of meaningful agency. I am at once alienated from: a. The product of my labour (what I want to buy vs what I earn selling my labour-power never match) b. The activity of my labour (I am constantly overworked, desperately seeking time for passive consumption) c. ‘Species Being’ (from my humanity because of hierarchization in production-consumption, and from “hierarchies that normally organize sensory experience, such as ... between intelligence, which determines, and the hands, which obey”) d. Social bonds (from my capacity for sincere fraternal association beyond “enlightened ‘self-interest’”)

The verted world a world of alienation: “... a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, like the sorcerer who no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by h ells.