Page 8 - Critical Theory of Communication as Critical Sociology of Critique

FUCHS: CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION AS CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF CRITIQUE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CAPITALISM

But they are nonetheless interesting developments.
Boltanski and Chiapello also misinterpret Marx’s concept of alienation by reducing it to a purely subjective
dimension. They argue:
• “The concepts of alienation and exploitation refer to two different sensibilities. What is denounced
in alienation is, in the f rst instance, oppression, but also the way in which capitalist society prevents
human beings from living an ‘authentic’ existence, a truly human existence, and renders them alien to
themselves in a sense – that is to say, to their deepest humanity. The critique of alienation is therefore
also a critique of the new world’s lack of authenticity” (Botlanski & Chiapello 2005, p. 52, note 77).
• The students of the 1968 generation “had simultaneously seen their conditions deteriorate and their ex-
pectations of obtaining autonomous, creative jobs diminish, instead developed a critique of alienation.
It adopted the main themes of the artistic critique (already pervasive in the United States in the hippie
movement): on the one hand, the disenchantment, the inauthenticity, the ‘poverty of everyday life’, the
dehumanization of the world under the sway of technicization and technocratization; on the other hand,
the loss of autonomy, the absence of creativity, and the different forms of oppression in the modern
world” (Botlanski & Chiapello, 2005, p. 170).

Boltanski and Chiapello fall into the Althusser trap: Althusser saw alienation as an esoteric, purely subjectivist
concept of the young Marx. And like most of the time, Althusser also got it wrong here: alienation is a concept
that Marx used and developed throughout his life. Based on Althusser’s interpretation, Boltanski and Chiapello
limit the notions of alienation and de-alienation to the artistic critique. I cannot provide a detailed analysis here
of Marx’s use of the term and have to refer the reader therefore to chapter 7 in the book Reading Marx in the
Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on “Capital Volume I” (Fuchs, 2016c). Marx
uses the term alienation to signify the worker’s compulsion to sell her labour-power and the lack of ownership of
the objects and products of labour. In Capital, he writes: “Since, before he [the worker] enters the process, his
own labour has already been alienated [entfremdet] from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated
with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectif es itself so that it becomes a product alien to
him [fremdes Produkt]” (Marx, 1867, p. 716).
Bertell Ollman (1976, p. 193) argues that Capital “is a treatise on the law of value, and as such could only
be a work about alienation”: “When, in Capital, Marx speaks of ‘alienating’ any commodity, he does not simply
mean the act of selling it; he means giving up all control over its use-value. And, as we have shown, this transac-
tion could only take place because the workers, who create all value, engage in alienated activity on a product
from which they are all alienated and on behalf of a capitalist from whom they are alienated” (p. 193).
The implication of Marx’s concept of alienation is that even if you experience your labour as pleasure and
fun, it is still alienated if it takes place in capitalist relations of production or results in precarity. Even if labour
feels like fun (for example digital labour on corporate social media or the digital labour of freelance designers
or software engineers), it can still be exploitation. It may just become more diff cult to question it and struggle
against exploitation, because capital’s fetish and forms of reif cation take on an inverted form so that the social
appearance of de-alienation hides the deepening of exploitation as a form of economic alienation.
Marx’s concept of alienation is, however, broader than exploitation: exploitation is the economic form of
alienation. But there are also political and cultural forms of alienation. Alienation is a category that signif es dom-
ination in general and all its sub-types, whereas economic alienation is a category that signif es the economic
form of domination in class societies, namely exploitation.
But alienation is not a purely objective social form of domination and exploitation. Alienation is also expe-
rienced in specif c forms that are not causally determined. Some slaves may love their master, whereas others
may deeply hate him. There is a complex, non-linear relation between the conditions and the experience of
alienation. In contemporary critical theory, authors such as Rahel Jaeggi, Hartmut Rosa and Axel Honneth have

CONJUNCTIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, 2016, ISSN 2246-3755 | PAGE 8