Marx saw workers’ alienation as rooted in imagination’s ideological capture

Evidence

By contrast, capital’s destructive imagination is discussed at much greater length in Marx’s analysis of workers’ alienation—­a condition emerging out of the great uncertainties of nineteenth-­century life: ephemerality, insecu­ rity, and the disintegration of community caused by unbound capitalist expansion. Such imagination emboldens the power of ideology, which in turn signals the passage to capitalist modernity, fosters exploitation, and stifles human creativity. As Sayer (1990) notes: “It is this alienation rather than the mere rapidity of change (for which it is the prior condition) which underpins the transitory, fleeting and contingent experience” of workers (56). At the same time, a different type of hushed yet radical imagination underpins the collective struggles of those anxious and precarious laborers: their never fully suppressed power to imagine themselves as the architects of their own history. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 219

Categorization

• XREF: Dual nature of imagination (destructive/ideological vs. generative/emancipatory) resonates with Gramsci’s hegemony/resistance and the collected notes on social capital’s dual possibilities. — connects to: Marx’s choice of Vorstellung distinguished his social imagination from Kant’s individualist one — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 626; Marx and Weber framed speculation’s contradictions but ignored imagination’s role in capitalism — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 228
• SEED: Angle: ‘the two imaginations of finance’ — capitalist destructive imagination vs. workers’ generative imagination — as a framing device for how financialized subjects both submit to and reimagine speculative life.

Broader Connections

• Marx and Weber framed speculation’s contradictions but ignored imagination’s role in capitalism #responds-to (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 228