Alienation and Time. Simone Weil’s Contribution to Karl Marx’sTheory of Alienation, Based on her 1936 work, The Laborer Condition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51378/realidad.vi167.10641Keywords:
Alienation, Time, Rhythm, Industrial plants, CapitalismAbstract
This article analyzes how Karl Marx’s concept of “alienation”, developed in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to explain the worker’s alienation under capitalism, is enriched by Simone Weil’s phenomenological reflection in her 1936 work, «The Laborer Condition. While Marx approaches alienation from a structural critique of the production system, Weil delves into the concrete life experience of the worker, introducing «time» as a key factor in understanding their dehumanization.
Marx explains alienation as a phenomenon derived from private property and the división of labor, focusing his conclusions on material effects. However, Weil points out that his analysis overlooks experiential dimensions such as the monotony of industrial time, the fragmentation of attention, and the loss of psychological agency in repetitive gestures, which give the worker the feeling of having no control over what they do or think, making alienation not only economic but also existential, where mechanized time drains the worker’s life of meaning.
Weil’s contribution lies in demonstrating that Marx, in prioritizing an abstract critique of the capitalist production system, overlooked how factory temporality corrodes human subjectivity. Her phenomenological reading reveals that capitalist alienation cannot be overcomed solely through structural changes, but by transforming the qualitative relationship between human beings and their labor and time.
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