MARX, MATERIALIST DIALECTICS, AND PRAXIS: Volume 3: The Critique of Alien Control

By Peter Critchley

The Critique of Alien Control is the third volume of Marx, Materialist Dialectics, and Praxis is a four volume study of Marx's critical-emancipatory praxis, locating Marx in the contradictory dynamics of modernity and postmodernity. The work develops Marx's social-natural ontology as a critique of an 'alien' rationalisation that proceeds at ever further remove from reality. The work draws a distinction between a scientistic-deterministic Marxism and a critical-emancipatory Marxism in order to establish freedom as the end of Marx's practical critique. The emphasises Marx's concern to facilitate the recovery of human subjectivity from behind the alienated forms through which sociability has come to be expressed, thus affirming conscious, creative human agency in a self-made social world bounded by a given and inherited natural world. The book therefore places the society-nature interchange at the centre of Marx's materialist dialectics. The Critique of Alien Control develops Marx's materialist ontology, centred on labour, to show what is required to uproot the alienating separations and dualisms characterising liberal modernity and the capital system. The book compares and contrasts Marx's critique of alienation with the rationalisation thesis of Max Weber. The problems we face are located not in the processes of some ahistorical reason but in the specific social relations of an alienated system of production, with the substantive irrationality and unnatural spirit of capital's fetish relations - implicated in a social and ecological unravelling - expressing a class rationality. This ensures the continuation of a cycle of self-destruction without societal transformation. To this end, I show how Marx affirmed the everyday social world of reciprocity and solidary exchange against the violence and tyranny of abstraction, arguing for the restitution of social power. In the process, I develop a concept of social self-determination as against capital's objective determinism, overcoming the monopolisation of power/alienation of control under the capital system through an emphasis on a practical-sensuous experience that is embodied in the conscious, collective control of social relations.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CQVNKNFS
• ISBN13: 9798872713685
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 300 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"