Alienation and Abstract Labor-Time: Marx and the Romantic Critique

Capitalist commodity production subordinates concrete and distinct forms of creative activity to the quantifiable and homogeneous category of abstract labor. In order for commodities to be exchanged on the market, products of specific types of human labor must be equalized as measurable units of abstract labor-time. Capital’s logic of value separates us from the essential human capacity to labor, turning human activity into a means of obtaining a wage for workers and producing surplus-value for capitalists. Marx’s theory of alienation shows that, under capitalism, workers have been alienated from their species-being, or their ability to fulfill biological and social needs through conscious activity in and on the world. This process reduces qualitatively distinct forms of human activity to quantifiable units of abstract labor-time. The subordination of concrete labor to abstract labor-time alienates workers from their essential human capacity to consciously and creatively act in and on the world—their ability, that is, to engage in unalienated labor—while also subsuming non-capitalist forms of time to the logic of value production. Anti-colonial resistance to the subordination of all forms of life to the logic of value represents a concrete example of the struggle against alienation in practice. By viewing elements of the past as an ongoing site of contestation, Romantic Marxism seeks to combine a living tradition of life and resistance with working-class organizing in the present, as part of a movement toward a qualitatively different communist society in the future. Integrating the Romantic view of the past with Marx’s critique of alienation expands the utopian vision of communist freedom, while remaining grounded in, and emerging from, the material conditions of the present.