Did any of the leftist minds from history ever talk about topics such as social alienation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, social awkwardness, underachieving, lack of motivation, emotional turmoil caused by capitalist society, stress, repressed anger etc or just economy stuff?
Not an incel thread, mods. I mean the kind of negative shit that affects everybody, from chantards to normies
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marxists.org
monthlyreview.org
cardiff.ac.uk
isreview.org
thoughtco.com
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Yes.
Best part btw (fuck formatting):
By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British
students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French
students can still be found on the streets protesting against
neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably
worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a
matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence.
They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they
can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity,
is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview
amongst the British young, and it has its correlate in widespread
pathologies. Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental
health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic.
It is the condition most dealt with by the National Health
Service, and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages.
The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is
astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager
in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a
sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility
of politicization. By privatizing these problems - treating them
as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the
individual's neurology and/or by their family background - any
question of social systemic causation is ruled out.
Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a
state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is
Usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition
I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure
so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue
pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no
appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be
accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a
consequence of students' ambiguous structural position,
stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions
and their new status as consumers of services. In his crucial
essay 'Postscript on Societies of Control', Deleuze distinguishes
between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which
were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the
school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all
institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.
Deleuze is right to argue that Kafka is the prophet of
distributed, cybernetic power that is typical of Control societies.
In The Trial, Kafka importantly distinguishes between two types
of acquittal available to the accused. Definite acquittal is no
longer possible, if it ever was ('we have only legendary accounts
of ancient cases [which] provide instances of acquittal'). The two
remaining options, then, are (1) 'Ostensible acquittal', in which
the accused is to all and intents and purposes acquitted, but may
later, at some unspecified time, face the charges in full, or (2)
'Indefinite postponement', in which the accused engages in (what
they hope is an infinitely) protracted process of legal wrangling,
so that the dreaded ultimate judgment is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Deleuze observes that the Control societies delineated by
Kafka himself, but also by Foucault and Burroughs, operate using
indefinite postponement: Education as a lifelong process…
Training that persists for as long as your working life continues…
Work you take home with you… Working from home, homing
from work. A consequence of this 'indefinite' mode of power is
that external surveillance is succeeded by internal policing.
Control only works if you are complicit with it. Hence the
Burroughs figure of the 'Control Addict': the one who is addicted
to control, but also, inevitably, the one who has been taken over,
possessed by Control.
Walk into almost any class at the college where I taught and
you will immediately appreciate that you are in a post-disciplinary
framework. Foucault painstakingly enumerated the way
in which discipline was installed through the imposition of rigid
body postures. During lessons at our college, however, students
will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly,
snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating full meals).
The old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down. The
carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies
of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and
continuous development.
The system by which the college is funded means that it
literally cannot afford to exclude students, even if it wanted to.
Resources are allocated to colleges on the basis of how successfully
they meet targets on achievement (exam results), attendance
and retention of students. This combination of market
imperatives with bureaucratically-defined 'targets' is typical of
the 'market Stalinist' initiatives which now regulate public
services. The lack of an effective disciplinary system has not, to
say the least, been compensated for by an increase in student
self-motivation. Students are aware that if they don't attend for
weeks on end, and/or if they don't produce any work, they will
not face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this
freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or
anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion
of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and
many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest
that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is
that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written
Material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is
deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-
honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate
'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining,
concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be
bored simply means to be removed from the communicative
sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to
be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification
on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that
they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the
consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the
indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
An illustration: I challenged one student about why he always
wore headphones in class. He replied that it didn't matter,
because he wasn't actually playing any music. In another lesson,
he was playing music at very low volume through the
headphones, without wearing them. When I asked him to switch
it off, he replied that even he couldn't hear it. Why wear the
headphones without playing music or play music without
wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on
the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he
couldn't hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there,
within reach. Besides, in a classic example of interpassivity, if the
music was still playing, even if he couldn't hear it, then the player
could still enjoy it on his behalf. The use of headphones is significant
here - pop is experienced not as something which could
have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private
'Oedlpod' consumer bliss, a walling up against the social.
The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment
matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate
or focus. Students' incapacity to connect current lack of
focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into
any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere
demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent of Jameson's
analysis in 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society'. Jameson
observed there that Lacan's theory of schizophrenia offered a
'suggestive aesthetic model' for understanding the fragmenting
of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial
complex. 'With the breakdown of the signifying chain',
Jameson summarized, 'the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to
an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a
series of pure and unrelated presents in time'. Jameson was
writing in the late 1980s - i.e. the period in which most of my
students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is
a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip
culture - a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always
come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.
Thanks user
Marx and Engels spoke at length about alienation, but being staunch materialists, they attributed its sole cause to having the fruits of your labor stolen by the capitalist. I don't think it's a radical position to say they had a point, but perhaps because psychology was so primitive back, you simply can't study alienation without considering emotional and romantic relations, anomie, psychology, religiosity etc. and what I personally consider the most important factor, the death of community.
Anyway, I think the first Marxists to ponder alienation outside of a purely material context were the much maligned Frankfurt School. They seem to have opened the floodgates for other Marxist studies of the superstructure, most notably Sartre, Debord and Lacan, tho I'm guessing that most writing on social alienation aren't Marxists. I'm afraid I can't name someone more current, I'm still drowning in the political economy part of leftism.
Marxists.org supplies a reading list for alienation, but geared towards the original, purely materialistic origin: marxists.org
A couple of seemingly interesting links and PDFs that I googled but didn't read yet:
monthlyreview.org
cardiff.ac.uk
isreview.org
thoughtco.com
Other socialist periodicals like wuzwuz should have good articles too.
Read Bifo
Yes, some good books: