ABSTRACT
It is difficult to imagine Marxist theory without the concept of alienation. The concept of alienation, which Marx (1818-1883) took from Hegel and Feuerbach, is perhaps the key concept in his work. By following Marx’s series of reformulations of the concept during his career – from alienation to exploitation and from exploitation to commodity fetishism – Marx’s entire opus can be reconstructed in a unitary, coherent, and systematic manner. I am not claiming that Marx’s thought did not evolve significantly, but instead of contrasting the young Marx to the mature Marx, as was common in the 1970s, I wish to integrate the early humanist insistence on action with the later realist view of society. From this perspective, shared by Roy Bhaskar (1989), society is an invisible, but real, system of internal relations between institutions and social positions that conditions and structures the actions of individuals and groups, who act within given conditions, thereby reproducing or transforming society. When society is imposed on actors as an external, alien, and constraining force, action is reduced to its instrumentalstrategic dimension. Labor becomes toil and life becomes a matter of survival. Marx posits that workers are alienated from labor, from the product of labor, from other workers, and from themselves. Furthermore, because they are alienated from society, action, and themselves, they can no longer express their being through action, nor can they transform society with consciousness and will. When workers are subjected to society, transformatory praxis becomes the practice of reproducing society as a context of domination that imposes external constraints on actors. In this way, alienation halts the dialectic between agency and society. As a realist theory of the causes of reification, Marxism seeks to reactivate the dialectic, to move beyond alienation by revealing the structural constraints that weigh on action and that transform actors into mere agents of the structure, thus impeding a conscious transformation of alienated society into a just and free society, without exploitation.
