Marxism and Alienation

I can't point you to any specific literature because I don't read, but I'll tell you what it seems like to me.

Social isolation is inextricably linked to capitalism and other aspects of ruling western ideology. Social value is derived from labor. What we do with our time, and what we accomplish determines our place in society, how others perceive our worth, and how we perceive our own worth. Under capitalism, the workers are alienated from their labor, in that they are deprived of any substantial influence in how the value they produce is used. As labor is the primary origin of social worth, alienation from labor is one of the fundamental causes of social alienation.

When people are deprived of the opportunity to define their identity in their labor in any meaningful way, they're forced to seek other ways to assert their social value. More often than not, this takes the form of relying on material goods to indicate their wealth, which in turn indicates the value of their labor, ultimately indicating their social value.

Furthermore, the type of consumerism that is central to economics and modern lifestyles in the first-world, is driven by the void in people life that social isolation creates. This gives capitalists an incentive to encourage their customers to define their social value through consumption. This is manifested in the marketing of products. As consumption can provide no lasting sense of meaning in people lives, this is a cycle.

There are of course other factors that contribute to social isolation, but most of them are also linked to the ruling ideology. Social hierarchies and systems of authority (apart from those based on merit) are inherently alienating, as they serve to prevent either party from forming any sort of meaningful connection with the other. The encouragement of competition within workplaces and classrooms, a natural result of the commodification of labor, also creates an environment entirely uncondusive to the formation of meaningful social bonds. Hell, even the concrete logistics of how we live cultivates social alienation. The ultimate goal of a worker who adheres to the ruling ideology is to purchase a house big enough so that they don't have to have any interactions with their neighbors.

You mentioned that the main movements who offer solutions to social isolation are the alt-right and postmodernists. The alt-right offers the potential to define social value on the membership in racial and national groups. This is an offer that can be understood at a very primal level therefore has very broad appeal. It is a rather empty offer though because with the unbridled embracing of national/racial identity, comes the abandonment of personal identity, which can only be stably founded in labor. The same could be said for neo-liberal identity politics as well. I'm not really sure what postmodernism specifically offers in terms of an end to social isolation, but academia itself offers one of the few areas left in society where individuals can define their identity in their labor in a meaningful way. However, this comes at the cost of alienation from the broader society and very few opportunities to form a meaningful group identity.

The only real solution to social isolation is communist revolution. Worker control of the means of production would allow workers the autonomy and influence to anchor their personal identities in the true source of social value, labor. It would also allow workers to create meaningful group identities and communities with those who they work with, because they wouldn't have to be constantly competing with their co-workers.

Living on a farm has taught me about alienation first hand. It used to be small scale, where there was a multitude of things to take care off. Now it is like factory work. Animals are killed off when not good enough. Huge swaths of land have to be maintained with large machines. Production is king. Banks decide what you do, because of your loans. I would much rather produce for consumption instead of what we have now.

These threads always turn into r9k for some reason. Sage

Exactly. You are alienated BECAUSE you don't work. Labor is the fundamental source of an individuals value within society. Alienation stems from a real or perceived lack of social value.

If you did work however, you would still be socially alienated because the commodification of your labor and lack of influence and autonomy in your workplace.

Basically, your fucked either way until we hang the bourgeoisie.

Said a very young and immature Marx. Said older Marx: the bourgies are people too, struggling against Capitalists just as much as the proles. They must be brought to a lower level to see themselves for the temporarily embarrassed millionaires they are, and be induced to give up their petty pursuits of money by seeing the blight that Capitalism produces.

I'm sorry for being hyperbolic. What I meant to say is: until we raise class consciousness among the proletariat and bourgeoisie alike. Please don't gulag me.

The profit-motive of capitalism is one of the greatest cancers of society: jacobinmag.com/2017/03/food-production-hunger-waste-agriculture-commodity-capitalism/

Source for jpgs:
twitter.com/dubsteppenwolf/status/856633768005836800

PAH!

THE EU WAS DOING IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL!

When my mom died.

...

Look up the culture industry

How do postmodernists have that market cornered? Based on what I've heard of these creatures I'd guess they would be for more alienation not less. To me postmodernists are a bit like cultural marxists: they seem to exist only as a ridiculous phantom menace.

As it's commonly understood on this board (I could probably argue for days on the details, as I believe understanding their failures and why they happened is critical to moving forward) hey're all the thinkers who led up to the incoherent idpol-liberal "Left". Think Butler, Hooks, Foucault, et al.

They don't even care about alienation because everything's identity because they want it to be that way and reality is a maze of mirrors where you should just give up and complain about stuff like language. They're so overwhelmed by the totality of the world in their efforts to get into the nitty-gritty details of social hierarchies and the like (of questionable importance, in any case) that they all give up and destroy the Left in the process. You can only have a theory of alienation if you acknowledge the possibility of material and social freedom of the individual like Marxists and anarchists, a concept which postmodernists myopically reject.

Just go read some Marx. He talks a lot about the 4 kinds of alienation: alienation of the worker from their product, alienation of the worker from the act of production, alienation of the worker from themselves and their essence as a "species-being" (a being who recognizes itself as an instance of its species, and thus has a desire to act in a communistic way), and alienation of the worker from other workers (which is intimately tied to alienation from the self as species-being).

No offence OP, but you're really living up to the stereotype of Anarchists just being Marxists who can't be bothered to do the reading.

No. State-assigned girlfriends are revisionism.

After the Revolution, yes. Marxism itself deals with economy: why Revolution is necessary, how it should happen, and what changes it should bring. What you are going to do after has nothing to do with Marxism.