Alienation and Human Nature

For Marx, alienation, estrangement and objectification, consequences of workers selling their labor power to produce commodities exchanged for wages. But, alienation from what? Rousseau, that for premodern societies, social stratification by class or gender was unknown, people emphasized caring, sharing, mutual support, living in harmony with each other and with Nature. When someone built a fence around his land and said keep out, things went astray- humans were “ born free, but everywhere in chains” how do we understand this? Marx did have a view of human nature, implicit in his 1844 Manuscripts. He died too soon- at least to be informed by psychoanalysis that illuminated the psychological/emotional nature of capitalist modernity. Tthat task would befall the Frankfurt school- especially the work of Fromm and Marcuse, among the very first to read the heretofore unknown 1844 manuscripts. that early exposure shaped the subsequent views of each theorist. Yes, they had were major differences, , rejected the biologically based drive theories of Freud and moved toward a relational psychoanalysis based on emotional needs to belong, creative self-fulfillment, transcendence, a meaningful value orientation . Marcuse retained an orthodox Freudian view. But what is essential is that both theorists, understood a social revolution would require more than collective means of production and democratic, popular governance, but changing underlying emotionally based social character, restoring ah benevolent society. For Fromm that meant realizing a “ productive social character” while or Marcuse, it meant a “new aesthetic/libidinal sensibility.” In both cases the basic point is that 1) with elements of such characters spearheading progressive social mobilizations, “great refusals”, 2) realizing humanistic socialism, 3) the more traditional elements of human nature, “biophilia” lost under the conditions of the dominating social structures of modern capital, authoritarian “necrophilia”, might again become the normative values of the humanistic social order.