The alienated consciousness, dehumanized human nature and capitalism September 11, 2015
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.Tags: economics, free market critics, Methodological Individualism and Its Critiques, Political Economy
trackback
“The alienated consciousness is correlative with a money economy. Its root is the compulsion to work. This compulsion to work subordinates man to things, producing at the same time confusion in the valuation of things and devaluation of the human body. It reduces the drives of the human being to greed and competition… The desire for money takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires – asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo Economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature. In this dehumanized human nature man loses contact with his own body, more specifically with his senses, with sensuality and with the pleasure-principle. And this dehumanized human nature produces an inhuman consciousness, whose only currency…
View original post 125 more words
OromianEconomist 
Perhaps there are positives resulting from the compulsion to work as, after all, although there are plenty who work only because they have to, there are also those who love their work. If we didn’t have capitalism driving a huge number to work, then society would not function; it would not reproduce materially. Work offers the potential for humanity to make a contribution towards society. That society may be dysfunctional in some ways but it has some positives too.