Alienation in American Society

Abstract

This lecture was presented to a student conference on Socialism in America held at Yale University in 1964. It was later issued as a pamphlet by Monthly Review Press, but has been out of print for many years. It may seem odd to reissue it here, since the intervening decades have seen the publication of numerous important works on this same subject, including in the early 1970s such landmark studies as Istvan Meszaros' Marx's Theory of Alienation and Bertell Oilman's Alienation. But Pappenheim's approach was distinctive, not only because of its accessibility, but because it concentrated from beginning to end on the link between Marx's concepts of alienation and exploitation. Rather than using Marx's notion of alienation as the basis for an abstract humanism divorced from concrete struggle, and as a means of avoiding Marx's more developed political-economic critique of capitalism—as too many have done—Pappenheim stresses the close, indeed inextricable, relationship between a world of alienation and a world of exploitation. Notes for this piece are available from the MR office. - The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.