Philosophy Colloquium

A lecture by Professor Sabina Bremner, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, titled "Capital $ as End-In-Itself: Marx's Account of Alienation as Abstraction."

Marx’s concept of alienation has been construed in many different ways: meaninglessness, estrangement from human nature, lack of autonomy, or a dearth of satisfaction in one's work. In this paper, I argue that there is another account that has not yet been considered, but which was actually Marx’s, running throughout his early to late writings. On my reading, Marx defines alienation as abstraction. In particular, 'alienation' refers to the thoroughgoing conceptual abstraction necessarily presupposed by capital-generation, which Marx takes to structure the market under capitalism. Capital is therefore a mere abstraction that takes the place of all determinate human ends, needs, and projects, since it constitutes what Marx refers to as the ‘end-in-itself’, or structuring end, of capitalism as an economic system. I claim that this interpretation is not only more faithful to Marx, but also captures aspects of alienated experience under capitalism that are not easily captured by other views: it shows that a full account of Marx’s normative critique of alienation must contend with his analysis of the coercive structure of the economic system as a whole, rather than of individual relationships within that system.

Philosophy