Political Memes

That "abstraction" is the alienation. I don't want to have like, a symmantical argument or anything. Like you say, surplus value appears to them in stocks, which is just a form of capital; but it also appears on profit and loss reports. They don't actually starve the poor, but the existence of the starving and destitute is a great motivation for working people to consent to their own exploitation. they don't actually build or drop the bombs -- but they invest in the companies that do, and profit when they drop, like you said about venture capital for example. Big corporate landlords look at their income and try and figure out how to increase profits year on year, but they never have to see how it affects peoples lives when they raise rents. Consumers don't see where or how the things they buy are made, it just appears in a retail space. Workers don't make an entire commodity like a craftsman might, they interact with a machine (owned by the capitalist) that mass produces some little spring or whatever that is integrated into the final commodity, and the capitalist has purchased the workers time to operate it, thus the workers are alienated from the product of their own labor.

So maybe you don't want to use the word alienation and you'd rather call it abstraction. Alienation is the word Marx used to describe it, abstraction is something different, so that's what I call it. But I think its the same concept.

I think a neat way to put it is: Alienated acting/being is what's left after you pretend you would not cooperate with other people.

Liberal ideology imagines every person as a autonomous agent "taking their own decisions". Except you live in a cave and gather berries on your own, this is a radical misconception. In fact almost everything you do depends on other peoples doing and vice versa.

Alienation is the ideological and practical renouncement of this fact of beeing part of a social species.

If you deny this fundamental property of your beeing and doing, you end up with confusion and moral atrocities. And principally this goes "for both sides".

Of course the war-stock-financed yacht is worse, but even in the case of a US-minimum-wage-financed banana the buyer profits from the exploitation of some dude in south america. If heshe has not developped a critical consciousness of the individualist illusion of liberalism, heshe won't see it, cause "im not greedy I just want a fuckin 'nana".

Alienation does not explain the vertical (quantitative) unfairness, the exploitation, but the general disconnectedness (qualitative) of humans from their social system, their history, each other, their work and themselves.