Alienation

The failure to address adequately the struggles and concerns of First Nations peoples, as well as the undertheorizing of the significance of the ecological context of economic activity, has been detrimental to the progress of the socialist project as a vibrant alternative to capitalism. This absence, or lack, is especially ironic as capitalism has brought little but death and desolation to First Nations peoples and to the environment. While the Left may rightly argue that its portrait, as painted by First Nations scholars and by advocates of the environmental movement, has elements of caricature, socialist supporters must nonetheless address these critiques in an open and positive fashion.

If it is true, as Marx says, that it is through their material intercourse with nature that humans make themselves, then the qualities and social relations of food ought to be of great interest to Marxist theory. I argue that an analysis and comparison of industrial and non-industrial food, as well as the effects of its consumption, offers a powerful case study on alienation in capitalist society. More practically, I contend that a robust analysis of the role of food in human production and reproduction has direct consequences for contemporary socialist struggles. In short, not only can learning about and consuming real food be an important non-alienating and consciousness-raising activity, but the deleterious effects of abstract, industrial food are chief among the obstacles that prevent members of oppressed classes from resisting capitalism.

While investigations of capitalist estrangement have historically focussed on productive labour, this analysis describes the consumption of industrially-produced food as a form of alienation. Just as Marx portrays capitalist labour as degrading the worker, this paper argues that so too does industrial food. Drawing on Marx and the Frankfurt School, particularly the concepts of division of labour, abstraction, and one-dimensionality, it is argued that food is an important way to understand the human-nature dialectic. As such, it is a tool in the continued oppression of the subordinate classes, but also a possible site of resistance to capitalism.

""We define ‘electroacoustic’ a sound or set of sounds resulting from processes of electronic synthesis and/or manipulation. At the turn of 20th century such technological processes matched with certain ‘tropes’ of western culture such as vibration, inscription and transmission that were subsequently developed in sonic
arts. These tropes find a privileged field of application in the domain of audiovisual media, to the extent that some scholars place them at the origin of the theoretical and technical debate concerning the birth of American talkies. It is indeed the fictional
cinema that since its beginnings contributed, through the means of electroacoustic sound, to the development of those tropes towards narrative configurations such as automation and perceptual alteration and eventually to the profound characterization of genres like science fiction and horror-thriller. In an ideal itinerary leading from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), the topical connotation of
electroacoustic sound become well established in the American cinema. I argue that Italian auteur cinema of the 1960s rearticulated such topoi under new perspectives and through an approach to electroacoustic sound strongly mediated by the reception of contemporary avant-garde music. Drawing on two case studies––The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969)––this paper analyzes how Italian auteur films used electroacoustic sound and music (in
these cases pre-existent compositions) to give expression to the alienated condition of a generation facing dramatic disillusion after the post-war ‘economic miracle’. In such contexts, electronics are used not merely to produce uncanny effects but as
processes of musical construction that challenge artistic creativity and expression, eventually representing tools of hermeneutical interpretations of the films themselves.""

The present paper deals with the theme of coping with uncertainty in the context of the Japanese youth, particularly concerned with their escape strategies and the political consequences of the adoption of such strategy. Through the observation of a multitude of narratives from Japanese students with diverse backgrounds, it can be observed how such students, when faced with some perceived limitations produced by Japanese institutions, instead of attempting to promote changes in such institutions, naturalized such thinking as being simply the Japanese way, choosing instead to escape such institutions to more international ones that they perceive as freer. Although the rigidity of the discourse on Japaneseness can appear to be a way to cope with the uncertainty brought by the contemporary age providing stable and fix identities, what is observed along this paper is how the symbolic misery promoted by such rigid idea of national-identity actually act as another source of pressure in the youth, that gets trapped within a schizophrenic reality in which the national discourse asks them to enact a single model of Japaneseness that they can’t fit in, and the market discourse asks them to be global and in a constant improvement that never ends but is in constant becoming, both being prêt-a-porter subjectivities that exists only in their hyper-real sense. Additionally, the paper concludes, by adopting such strategies, not only the escape is not realized, but the institutions are further strengthened by the lack of demands for change.

"Preface 7 / Abbreviations 12 / Introduction: Lukács and the Problems of Law 16
Part One: PRELIMINARY SKIRMISHES WITH THE QUESTIONS OF LAW  Chapter 1 ENCOUNTERS OF THE YOUNG LUKÁCS WITH LAW 23  1.1 Legal Studies 24 / 1.2 Friendship with Felix Somló 30 / 1.3 Relationship with Gustav Radbruch 33  Chapter 2 GLORIFICATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS  2.1 The Search for a Way Opposed to Institutions: Law as Force and as Consciousness 40 / 2.2 Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and its Dramatized Legal Conception 46 / 2.3 Messianism as the Core of Lukács’ Preconception 52  Chapter 3 PROVISIONAL SUMMARIES AND QUESTION MARKS  3.1 Ruthlessness and its Trap in The Destruction of Reason 59 / 3.2 Allusions to a Synthesis in The Specificity of the Aesthetic 66
Part Two: THE ONTOLOGY: A COPERNICAN REVOLUTION  Chapter 4 THE ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH AS A METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITY OF TRANSCENDING SOCIALIST NORMATIVISM  4.1 The Genesis and Methodological Significance of the Ontology 71 / 4.2 Socialist Legal Thinking 76 [4.2.1 The Revolutionary Period 77 / 4.2.2 The Roots and Manifestations of Socialist Normativism 81 / 4.2.3 The Need for Progress 93] 4.3 The Making of an Ontological Approach to Law 95  Chapter 5 THE ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF LAW  5.1 Law as a Complex of Mediation 101 [5.1.1 Complex of Complexes 102 / 5.1.2 Complexes or Social Relationships 105 / 5.1.3 The Interaction of Complexes: Mediation 107] 5.2 Law as Objectification and as Actual Functioning [5.2.1 The Genesis of Law and the Dialectics of the Use of Coercion 111 / 5.2.2 Positive Law and Natural Law 115 / 5.2.3 The Inner Contradiction of Law 118 / 5.2.4 Legal Superstructure 119] 5.3 Is Law a Reflection of Reality? [5.3.1 Teleology and Causality 123 / 5.3.2 Reflection of Reality and the Question of Incongruence 125 / 5.3.3 The Nature of Juridical Concepts 132 / 5.3.4 Validity as a Distinctive Quality of Law 134] 5.4 Law in Action: Formal Legality versus Social Optimum [5.4.1 Components of Law-Observance 138 / 5.4.2 Law and Logic: Subsumption and Manipulation 145 / 5.4.3 “Jurist’s World View” and the Ideology of the Legal Profession 152]  Chapter 6 THE ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH AS A HORIZON IN THE GENERAL RENEWAL OF MARXISM 157
Appendix: “THING” AND REIFICATION IN LAW [1985] 160–184: A.1 “Thing” or Reification in Marxist Philosophy? 160 / A.2 Concepts of “Thing” as Fictions in the Law 163 / A.3 Objectification, Reification and Alienation as Qualities of the Existence of Law 169 [A.3.1 Objectification 171 / A.3.2 Reification 173 / A.3.3 Alienation 180] A.4 Conclusions 183
Postscript: THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF LUKÁCS’ IDEAS WITH MODERN SOCIAL THEORETICAL THOUGHT (The Ontology of Social Being in Social Science Reconstructions – with Regards to Constructs like Law) [2013] 197–215: P.1 Ontologies and The Ontology of Social Being 197 / P.2 Some Key Terms of Lukács’ Ontology 199 / P.3 The Ontology of Social Being as Applied to Law 206 / P.4 Gattungswesen and Alienation 213
Index 216 / Index of Names 217"