yağmur
@yagmurdur
judy cox:
Marx developed his theory of alienation to reveal the human activity that lies behind the seemingly impersonal forces dominating society. He showed how, although aspects of the society we live in appear natural and independent of us, they are the results of past human actions. For Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács Marx’s theory ‘dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every respect including historical decline’. Marx showed not only that human action in the past created the modern world, but also that human action could shape a future world free from the contradictions of capitalism. Marx developed a materialist theory of how human beings were shaped by the society they lived in, but also how they could act to change that society, how people are both ‘world determined’ and ‘world producing’. For Marx, alienation was not rooted in the mind or in religion, as it was for his predecessors Hegel and Feuerbach. Instead Marx understood alienation as something rooted in the material world. Alienation meant loss of control, specifically the loss of control over labour.
-An Introduction to Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 1998
woman and labour, olive schreiner, 1911
entelektüel emek giderek artıyor ve yaşam emeğinde kaba kas uğraşlarının yerini mi alıyor? o zaman biz de kendimiz için, bize hayatın bilgisini ve entelektüel enerji ve gücü verecek tek şeyi, geçmişte doğduğumuz yaşamın fiziksel emekleriyle aynı miktarda zihinselliği üstlenmemizi sağlayacak kültürü ve eylem özgürlüğünü talep ederiz.
(original: Is intellectual labour to take ever and increasingly the place of crude muscular exertion in the labour of life?– then we demand for ourselves that culture and the freedom of action which alone can yield us the knowledge of life and the intellectual vigour and strength which will enable us to undertake the same share of mental which we have borne in the past in physical labours of life.)
Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?
To grasp the full significance of such stupefying of one's consciousness, let each one carefully recall the spiritual conditions he has passed through at each period of his life. Everyone will find that at each period of his life certain moral questions confronted him which he ought to solve, and on the solution of which the whole welfare of his life depended. For the solution of these questions great concentration of attention was needful. Such concentration of attention is a labor. In every labor, especially at the beginning, there is a time when the work seems difficult and painful, and when human weakness prompts a desire to abandon it.
(by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Aylmer Maude. Originally published in 1890 as a preface to a book by Dr. P. S. Alexeyef, whom Tolstoy had met three years earlier.)