Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
That’s a complete distortion of Marx’s theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there’s a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.
Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I’m sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn’t rectify the alienation if they tried.
The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it’s quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.
That’s the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you’re in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.
Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
That’s a complete distortion of Marx’s theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there’s a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.
Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I’m sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn’t rectify the alienation if they tried.
The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it’s quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.
That’s the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you’re in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.