Communism: Coming to a Screen Near You! Benjamin, Adorno, and the Politics of Mediatization

Abstract

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx offers one of the first formulations of his critique of capitalist economic systems. Employing the now familiar concept of alienation, Marx maintains that proletarian subjects under capitalism experience alienation in three distinct yet related forms. First, Marx notes that subjects are alienated from the objects that they manufacture. Marx claims that “the worker puts his life into the object, but now his life no longer belongs to him, but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater the worker’s lack of objects.”¹ Next, Marx maintains that subjects are alienated from their own natures. For Marx, the specific nature of the human beings is revealed in their labor to refashion the whole of nature, the capacity for which renders the human being what Marx calls a species or universal being. In their alienation from the object, then, subjects are also alienated from their nature; this alienation “tears from man his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”² Finally, Marx notes that subjects are alienated from one another. Marx claims that a shared essence of human nature should logically bond subjects into social units; unfortunately, “the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.”³