/lit/ - Literature

>>23001653
>Alienation, from the German Entfremdung (meaning more literally estrangement), is the closely related idea that the conceptions we have of the world become "estranged" from us when we become forgetful that they are in principle always OUR conceptions.
Tyler Durden basically. Let's say I'm a psychopath who creates an imaginary friend. That friend and me (or at least my psycho self) are the same person but the imaginary person has become split off / alienated from me.

>>23001677
>>23001685
>We are simply past the point as a civilization where competition over scarce resources is a necessary driver of conflict and self-sorting into mutually exclusive tribes and power blocs. The bourgeoisie is still running on the old firmware - all of its self-evident notions like the nation state and a political class organized around the need for constant war - are alienated, reified abstractions ... (one of the paradox's of Marx's formulation of the cunning of reason as "this is objectively but latently, true therefore we need to make it EVIDENTLY true to everyone")
The way it reads to me, it's not necessarily the case that advanced social productivity leads to advanced relations of production because it's alienated from the more advanced firmware, however, workers in capitalism can do the socialism if they realize the contradictions of capitalism and take action against it. Whereas the mechanical version goes: your physical body (brain, nerve cells) determines your mind literally, and social productivity determines the relations of production, so therefore, economic substructure determines political superstructure absolutely. When you have feudal productivity, you have feudalism, and when you have slave-ist productivity, you have slavery. Everything is absolute. I think some self-described communists think like that (Stalin version), and Marx is also charged with determinism, but that doesn't seem to get to the dialectic in his reasoning.

>World wars, apparently contradictory and paradoxical developments can all make sense in such a system because they can simply be "reflux" mechanisms or "gross" movements in one direction that don't affect the net change in the other, and Marx was actually ingenious at showing how apparently gross changes in the direction of reaction were manifestations and spurs of net change in the direction of proletarian revolution. That is why his worldview is so intoxicating to many people.
It's like the intensity of reaction is seen as a reciprocal force. So, what's interesting about that, is that the Marxist might be disturbed to see fascists marching around or something like that, but it doesn't necessarily shake him in his Weltanschauung, while a liberal-minded rationalist can be lost or confused at this sudden outburst of these bizarre manifestations of irrationality in human affairs. The Marxist who has really absorbed it would perhaps be enlivened by the "struggle" that's now playing out.
https://youtu.be/zZqVOFSYRWI