Alienation

Abstract: From the Publisher: The number of travelers along the information superhighway is increasing at a rate of ten percent a month. How will this communications revolution affect our culture and society? Though awed by their potential, we've feared computers as agents of the further alienation of modern man: they take away our jobs, minimize direct human contact, even shake our faith in the unique power of the human brain. Pierre Levy believes, however, that rather than creating a society where machines rule man, the technology of cyberspace will have a humanizing influence on us, and foster the emergence of a "collective intelligence" - a meeting of minds on the Internet - that will validate the contributions of the individual.

Abstract: THE FORMAL LITURGY OF THE OBJECT Preface - George Ritzer The Miraculous Status of Consumption The Vicious Circle of Growth THE THEORY OF CONSUMPTION The Social Logic of Consumption Towards a Theory of Consumption Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference (SMD) MASS MEDIA, SEX AND LEISURE Mass-Media Culture The Finest Consumer Object The Body The Drama of Leisure or the Impossibility of Wasting One's Time The Mystique of Solicitude Anomie in the Affluent Society CONCLUSION On Contemporary Alienation or the End of the Pact with the Devil

Abstract: The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27 The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

Abstract: Presenting case studies of schizophrenic patients, Laing aims to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. He also offers an existential analysis of personal alienation.