File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 162


Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 21:55:24 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Reification and alienation


In message <199709221911.UAA09323-AT-hermes.clara.net>, Russell Pearson
<r.pearson-AT-clara.net> writes
>Now what I'd like to raise is this- surely such a dream of overcoming
>alienation is just that, a dream? Notwithstanding James' comments on the
>negative apologetics, isn't the notion of such a total overcoming of
>alienation purely utopian, or am I becoming contaminated with some sort of
>quasi Heideggerian-Existentialist dispair?
>
>
>Yours in a stripey T-Shirt and beret...,

And don't you look fetching in it too...

I think yes you are getting a bit existential on us. I guess it depends
on what you mean by alienation. I mean commodity fetishism and all that
arises out of it - the alienation of humanity that is capital. I'm
arguing that those things that appear to us to be the perennial problems
of the human condition are, nine times out of ten, just aspects of this
form of social organisation. Why does everybody appear to be 'other',
why do we want to see even ourselves as 'other'. Not because of man's
thrownness, but because capitalist social relations are antagonistic.
-- 
James Heartfield


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