Alienation is for Lukács based on Marx’s chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital Volume 1, a form of objectification that takes on dominative and class character:
Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man’s nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective marks of an internal alienation (Lukács 1971, xxiv).
The commodity structure conceals ‘every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people’ so that ‘a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom objectivity”’ (Lukács 1971, 83). In the modern rationalisation of the labour process, there is a ‘mathematical analysis of work-processes’ so that qualities are reduced to quantities that ‘can be calculated’ (88). The measurement of labour time is decisive in this context. ‘The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of “ghostly objectivity” cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all object for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man’ (100). ‘Reification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange’ (91), which includes ‘the separation of the producer from his means of production’ (91), etc. Reification tries to eliminate qualities, dialectical logic, and non-instrumental action from the economy and society as a whole.
Authors in the newer generation of German critical theory, such as Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi and Hartmut Rosa, have revived Marx’s concept of alienation. Jaeggi and Rosa argue that there is no essence to which one needs to returns to and that is predetermined, but that in appropriation one creates the self and the world. They have problems with Lukács’ objectivist understanding of Marx and a notion of alienation that is grounded in Hegel’s dialectic of essence and existence. Honneth, in contrast, takes an approach more inspired by Hegel and Lukács that assumes that there is an essence of the human and social world that is important for a moral philosophy.
5.2.2. Hartmut Rosa and Rahel Jaeggi on Alienation
For Hartmut Rosa (2012, 300–323), acceleration results in contemporary modernity in a five-fold alienation from space, things, our own actions, time (e.g. lack of time), and social relations. The social theorist would not have to identify ‘true needs’, but to analyse disappointments of human expectations. ‘According to my analysis, we are not alienated from our true inner essence, but from our ability to appropriate the world in its spatial, temporal, social, practical and objective dimensions’2 (Rosa 2012, 322, translation from German).
The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory
155