Alienation accurately describes working-class privation but not general spiritual malaise

Evidence

The concept of alienation had rigor when specifically used to articulate the various concrete privations of workingclass life (as in Marx’s Paris manuscripts); and it also had a specific function at a specific historical moment (the Khrushchev opening), which radicals in the East (Poland, Yugoslavia) and the West (Sartre) believed could inaugurate a new tradition in Marxist thinking and practice. It surely does not amount to much, however, as a general designation for (bourgeois) spiritual malaise. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 241

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines alienation’s proper scope (Marx’s political-economic context) versus its degeneration into a loose label for bourgeois malaise.
• XREF: Connects to Marx’s Paris manuscripts and the Sartrean/Khrushchev-era Marxist revival the reader knows. — connects to: Artistic alienation means conscious transcendence, distinct from Marx’s alienation concept. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 290; Hegelian, Marxist, and existentialist thought diverge on whether alienation is eliminable — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 479; Alienated labor is a class phenomenon, not a technical one. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 736 (+2 more)