[Marxism] Question on alienation and anxiety

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am not aware that there is any specifically Marxist theory of anxiety, but
I suppose you could create one. Anxiety is to my knowledge a secondary
(derived) emotion (i.e. an effect of the interplay or conflict of more basic
emotions, e.g. anger, fear, love) and it is usually about something that
should happen or could happen, but hasn't, or something that might or might
not happen, a possible situation or possibility that might, or might not,
occur, or could occur. Then you get uncertainty and indecisiveness, and that
causes worry and fretting, maybe in a vicious circle. That might undermine
confidence or the ability to take action.

Psychologically there could be many different causes for it, and it seems
that for some people, the activity of worrying or fretting is a comfortable
state to be in, or even a way they express their concern or love for other
people. For example, somebody might say "I'm worried about you" and they are
expressing their concern about your wellbeing. But you could also look at it
from the point of view that if the conditions of life create a lot of
uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability, then the anxiety index will
go up too. Some sources of anxiety are pre-rational, i.e. they originate
from impulses or experiences in childhood which existed before you could
think rationally about what you feel. In that case, thinking about the
anxiety doesn't help a lot, you have to do something if you want to get rid
of anxiety.

Anxiety becomes sociologically or politically significant, if large masses
of people or whole social classes feel that way. Also, you could say that
different social classes and ethnic groups may typically have, as a
generalisation, somewhat different ways in which they actually respond to
anxiety, a different pattern of response.

Why is that ? Because they are raised and grow up differently, maybe live in
different sorts of worlds, have different social roles and functions. The
moral and emotional worlds of social classes has been studied in detail, for
example, by Melvin Kohn  (see http://www.soc.jhu.edu/people/Kohn/ ) and by
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (see e.g. the books The Hidden Injuries of
Class, The Corrosion of Character etc.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/whoswho/sennett.htm etc.).

What you feel is to an extent simply a product of your physical makeup, but
also shaped by the way you were socialised and what you experienced. But the
way in which you respond to what you feel, how you manage your emotions, is
very much learnt, and this learning is obviously also influenced by your
interactions with other people.

If you try to reduce e.g. feelings of anxiety to some basic factors or basic
structure of "the human mind" or "the soul" in general etc. then I think you
are making a mistake, I think that's a malabstraction. Of course, you can
know how you yourself function emotionally, or people you know, but it is
unwise to extrapolate a general theory about the emotional worlds of all
people, based on some kind of idea about human nature.Here are some reasons
for that:

(1)  While such a theory is in principle impossible, what you can actually
validly say about it in a scientific sense, is limited and specific. We can
say that all people have the capacity to experience a wide range of
emotions, but that doesn't tell us much about how they actually respond to
them, or what they do with them.

(2) Moreover, one ought to consider what people feel in the context within
which they live, and in the context of their relationships with each other
as social beings, and not in abstraction from all that. That is to say,
there are false ways and valid ways to generalise about human emotions. In
the dialectical theory of cognition, we distinguish between six different
forms of human awareness:

(1) subconscious awareness
(2) consciously subjective awareness
(3) intersubjective awareness
(4) objective awareness
(5) reality-transforming awareness
(6) transcendent awareness

Each of these forms of awareness has its own limits, in the sense of what
you can know or observe about them or through them, they imply definite
relationships between the individual and the external world of which s/he is
a part, and they presuppose definite conditions. And each of them provide a
different way of knowing about something. It's easy to mix them up.

(3) "how people are", how they feel, how they respond to that and how they
see themselves is subject to change, and it might be very difficult to
disentangle the enduring (durable, more or less permanent) emotional
patterns from emotional patterns that emerge in a specific period of
history.

As a broad generalisation, you might say that "the function gives you the
organ", i.e. typical "emotional worlds" and response patterns are shaped up
by (an adaptation to) the lifestyles and self-interests that people have,
and the basic structure of those lifestyles and self-interests is given by
the relations of production/reproduction and communication that predominate
in society at the time. That structure also creates ideologies of emotion,
i.e. ideologies about the appropriate expression and management of emotions,
what is "human" and what is "inhuman", and so forth, a topic for endless
social commentary and critique (for some critiques see e.g. Frank Furedi's
books, or Christopher Lasch, "The culture of narcissism").

In each epoch of history, there are usually some psychologists, guru's or
spiritual leaders who are popular or fashionable because they articulate how
people (or the elites, or the most successful people) like to see themselves
or think how people ought to be seen (e.g. Freud, Eysenck etc.). But within
a decade or several decades, the picture usually changes again
significantly, and that has been especially true in the 20th century, which
witnessed more social change than at any time before.

The main progressive change there has been, scientifically speaking, is that
nowadays much more careful neurological, psychological and anthropological
research is done on the basis of controlled empirical experimentation. But
such research is not immune to ideological-moral influences, and can lead to
all sorts of unwarranted extrapolations (for example reducing social
behaviour simplistically to biological behaviour, or sociologisms or
psychologisms, i.e. research findings are extended beyond the limits to
which they really apply).

Marx had little to say about human nature "in general" (as a general,
transhistorical abstraction) beyond the idea that human beings are creatures
of need who suffer and must produce for their survival, in co-operation with
each other, and that therefore human beings "make themselves" (humanise
themselves) to a great extent (cf. Gordon V. Childe, Man Makes Himself).
Rather Marx emphasises the historicity of human nature, a nature which
cannot be understood in a decontextualised way, but must be understood in
its historical context, and in terms of the real social relations between
people. But various Marxist authors have explored the possibility of
general, enduring facets of human nature (e.g. Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Lukacs,
Agnes Heller etc.).

As regards alienation, there are some standard books on it by Bertell Ollman
and Istvan Meszaros etc. based on Marx's 1844 Paris Manuscripts, and the
subsequent evolution of Marx's thinking about it. But Marx thought about
alienation not primarily as a psychological state ("anomie"), but rather in
terms of real social relations and real practices among people, and the type
of interactions they generate. The main concept in Marx's thought relevant
to psychological states is that of reification ("thingification"), which
describes processes of inversion, such that a power is attributed to things
and ideas which they do not really have, and so that people are oppressed by
their own creations (mental, physical, social). Usually reification involves
some kind of dualism or antinomy. Marx suggests that the formation of a
universal market spontaneously generates reifying tendencies, most famously
"commodity fetishism".

But something that is largely ignored in the literature on the topic is,
that capitalist civilisation creates both alienation and the revolt (the
overcoming) of alienation, i.e. it creates both alienating conditions, and
the potential to overcome those conditions, i.e. possibilities for human
self-liberation, and that some historical epochs are experienced as more
alienating or less alienating (good times and bad times). So, it is partly
through a struggle against alienation, that people humanise themselves, and
at least partially also they can overcome alienating conditions. It might be
argued that it is impossible to fully overcome alienation in capitalist
society, but, a mere re-allocation of economic resources which is more
socially just would not overcome it either just by itself - it requires also
qualitative changes in the way people in society interact and relate to each
other, and how they relate to nature.

As regards overeating, this is usually associated with a lack of self-care,
or if you like self-love, or at the very least the inability to regulate
your own food-intake, though lack of selfcontrol or social pressures which
create a certain attitude towards eating food. But to attribute that simply
to "alienation" is a speculative generality. You would need to investigate
specifically what the real motives behind overeating are. But, at the most
basic level, overeating presupposes that you can actually do it, i..e. that
there is sufficient food, and that you have the money or access rights to
food, so that you can stuff yourself on it. That may seem like a platitude
but for millions of people it isn't self-evident. Extrapolating from FAO
data, the number of chronically hungry human beings around the world must
now be around 860 million (including 800 million+ in "developing
countries"); around 25 million human beings die annually from hunger. These
people do not have much chance of overeating, because the food is simply not
there.

Jurriaan






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