Camadas de alienação e estranhamento no século XX

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate whether, in the twentieth century, capitalism develops new manifestations of alienation or estrangement different from those described by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and by him and Engels in The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto. To this end, it was necessary to examine the historical process of the formation of these concepts in Hegel, as well as Marx’s and Engels’ debate with Feuerbach. With the concepts clearly defined, we studied the theory of value and the development of the productive forces in the twentieth century, especially the Taylorism and the process of the financialization of the economy, to determine whether new manifestations of alienation or estrangement emerge in the new labor relations that arose during that century. We analyze how the labor and exchange relations developed in the twentieth century add layers of alienation/estrangement in relation to the general forms of alienation/estrangement described by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century. We point out that these layers of alienation are specific forms of the general forms identified in the nineteenth century. Finally, we argue that there are no fundamentally different forms of alienation/estrangement, since the forms described by Marx indicate that the basis of alienation lies in private property; and as this foundation has not changed, the general forms of alienation/estrangement remain the same. What changes, rather, is the emergence of new ways of how we perceive alienation.