The Faculty Colloquia aim to cover the broad scope of Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil), in analytic and continental philosophy as well as the history of philosophy. In this fourth session of the 2022-2023 academic year, Tim Christiaens (Tilburg University) will speak about the development of the notion of 'alienation' in Karl Marx' thought.
When philosophers today turn to Karl Marx' alienation critique of capitalism, they most often focus on Marx' early writings. These texts, like the 1844 Pariser Manuskripte, provide an explicitly Hegelian and clear indictment of capitalism as fostering alienating labour conditions for the working class. Throughout his philosophical development, however, Marx gradually moved away from his philosophical background and Hegelian terminology. The Grundrisse occupies an awkward position in this process: though it still uses some Hegelian terms, like 'alienation', Marx distances himself from philosophical reflection in favour of scientific and political-economic research. I argue that Marx briefly rethinks the notion of alienation in the Grundrisse along the lines of Aristotle's description of natural slaves as ruled by an alien power, their master. Marx studies the relation between worker and capital along the lines of the slave/master-dichotomy from Aristotle to argue that workers have been reduced to the status of slaves in the Aristotelian sense of the term.
Dr. Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of philosophy at Tilburg University. He mainly studies contemporary French and Italian political philosophy and economic topics like the digitalization of work, socio-economic exclusion, and the power of financial markets. Tim Christiaens recently published a book on Digital Working Lives: Worker Autonomy and the Gig Economy with Rowman & Littlefield.
