Marx's theory of alienation
By: István Mészáros
Edition: 5th ed
Publisher: Merlin
Published: 2005
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 356
Subjects: Marx, Karl, -- 1818-1883; Alienation (Social psychology)
Description: "The alienation of humankind, in the fundamental sense of the term, means the loss of control: its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power. When Marx analysed alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he indicated four principal aspects of it - the alienation of human beings from: (1) nature ; (2) their own productive activity ; (3) their 'species being', as members of the human species; and (4) each other. He forcefully underlined that all this is not some 'fatality of nature' - as indeed as the structural antagonisms of capital are characteristically misrepresented, so as to leave them in their place - but a form of self-alienation. In other words, not the deed of an all-powerful outside agency, natural or metaphysical, but the outcome of a determinate type of historical development which can be positively altered by a conscious intervention in the historical process, in order to 'transcend labour's self-alienation'." -- From preface.
Notes: Previous ed.: 1975

Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-342) and index