WiP - Lixing Miao / Alienation as contradictory capitalist corporate agency
WiP - Lixing Miao / Alienation as contradictory capitalist corporate agency
April 29 our Works in Progress series comes to a close for the semester, with a presentation by Lixing Miao, in which he analyzes "Alienation as contradictory capitalist corporate agency." The abstract follows.
The concept of alienated labor has rekindled the ethical critique of capitalism. However, two unclarities need to be addressed to realize the concept’s critical potential. First, it is not clear whether the site of alienation is an individual agent or a collective agent (Honneth 2024, 20). Second, it is equally unclear whether Marx gives any “diagnostic unity” to the four kinds of alienation that he characterizes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM) (Brixel 2024, 41). In this paper, I aim to meet these two challenges at once. I argue that alienated labor is not primarily a problem with individual agency--the agency of an individual worker. Rather, the principle of diagnostic unity requires us to take a top-down approach, according to which alienation is primarily a problem with contradictory collective agency, or more specifically, contradictory capitalist corporate agency. Drawing on the value-form critique readings of Marx’s Capital, I will cast new light on Marx’s characterization of alienated labor as “the contradiction of estranged labor with itself” (EPM 34).