Abstract
The literature on alienation in Marx’s works suffers from the defect that it largely focuses on estrangement, the workers’ loss of their objects in capitalism, the damage this does, and the merits of a genuine appropriation of lost objects. This focus has a twofold problem: (1) we are now attached to capitalism not because objects are withheld but rather because they are delivered on an unimaginable scale, and (2) Marx had no interest in this “problem” after 1844, when his focus turned to the supremacy of these objects in that they govern our lives. This is alienation, a concept that exists alongside the distinct concept of estrangement in 1844. However, ending estrangement is regressive for Marx after 1844: it is a necessary element of our becoming free and fully human. What we must end is alienation. It is not a problem for the world to be composed of displaced human attributes and qualities; this is now just the composition of reality, a fact. But it is a problem that this world reduces us to a mere means of surplus-value creation.
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