I think a neat way to put it is: Alienated acting/being is what’s left after you pretend you would not cooperate with other people.
Liberal ideology imagines every person as a autonomous agent “taking their own decisions”. Except you live in a cave and gather berries on your own, this is a radical misconception. In fact almost everything you do depends on other peoples doing and vice versa.
Alienation is the ideological and practical renouncement of this fact of beeing part of a social species.
If you deny this fundamental property of your beeing and doing, you end up with confusion and moral atrocities. And principally this goes “for both sides”.
Of course the war-stock-financed yacht is worse, but even in the case of a US-minimum-wage-financed banana the buyer profits from the exploitation of some dude in south america. If heshe has not developped a critical consciousness of the individualist illusion of liberalism, heshe won’t see it, cause “im not greedy I just want a fuckin 'nana”.
Alienation does not explain the vertical (quantitative) unfairness, the exploitation, but the general disconnectedness (qualitative) of humans from their social system, their history, each other, their work and themselves.
I think a neat way to put it is: Alienated acting/being is what’s left after you pretend you would not cooperate with other people.
Liberal ideology imagines every person as a autonomous agent “taking their own decisions”. Except you live in a cave and gather berries on your own, this is a radical misconception. In fact almost everything you do depends on other peoples doing and vice versa.
Alienation is the ideological and practical renouncement of this fact of beeing part of a social species.
If you deny this fundamental property of your beeing and doing, you end up with confusion and moral atrocities. And principally this goes “for both sides”.
Of course the war-stock-financed yacht is worse, but even in the case of a US-minimum-wage-financed banana the buyer profits from the exploitation of some dude in south america. If heshe has not developped a critical consciousness of the individualist illusion of liberalism, heshe won’t see it, cause “im not greedy I just want a fuckin 'nana”.
Alienation does not explain the vertical (quantitative) unfairness, the exploitation, but the general disconnectedness (qualitative) of humans from their social system, their history, each other, their work and themselves.