Swain 19 Swain, 2019, Dan, Professor of Life Studies at the University of Life Sciences Prague Alienation or Why Capitalism is Bad, Chapter 2, pg. 276 - IShone
However, it is worth stepping back from these various debates to ask to what extent alienation really depends on a substantive idea of human nature or of the fully realized human. In Marx, alienation appears first and foremost not as a failure to live a certain way but as a kind of pathological relationship to one’s own activity. Rahel Jaeggi (2014) has recently argued for a reading of alienation as a kind of “relation of relationlessness.” On this reading, what is at stake is not a failure to realize any specific essence or core self but a failure in the relationship of a subject to their own activity in which activities appear unchosen: either as externally imposed or simply as natural and inevitable. This need not depend either on identifying a specific kind of human activity, or on the idea of a perfect recognition of all activity as one’s own—but merely the idea there is some activity that we could see as our own that we do not. While Jaeggi does not read Marx himself in these terms, it is possible to do so. Even in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, species being is represented not as some specific core of human activities but free, self-directed activity itself, strongly suggesting that the relationship to the (p. 369) activity was far more significant than the kind of activity. Moreover, Marx’s positive account of human nature generally appears as future oriented, often identified with the goal of Communist society itself (see Ollman 1971:111–120). In this sense, to the extent that Marx has an idea of essence or nature it can be seen as anticipatory, committed to the possibility that a richer relationship to our activity is possible without committing him to a particular (substantive or overdemanding) model of what this involved. Here, alienation appears primarily as a negative concept, as a failure; but it does not therefore bring with it aspecific positive alternative. Alienation thus describes an inhuman condition but does not commit us to a narrow vision of the human condition. However, it does commit us to some claims about the human animal, namely that there exist certain pathological ways of relating to our own activity, that we are capable of recognizing them as such, and that these are connected to specific forms of organization of social life. These claims are controversial, but they are capable of scrutiny and analysis independent of the broader philosophical debates about essences and natures. Perhaps, then, it makes more sense to scrutinize these claims not purely as abstract philosophical ones but as empirical ones aimed at drawing links between specific social and psychological phenomena and capitalist relations of production. If these claims can be shown to contribute to an understanding of contemporary society and its condition, then it at least partially vindicates them.