The worker’s alienated self-objectification grants truer knowledge of commodities than bourgeois objectivity.

Evidence

This privileged nature of the worker’s situation lies, paradoxically, in its narrow, inhuman limits: the worker is unable to know the outside world in a static, contemplative manner in one sense because he cannot know it all, because his situation does not give the leisure to intuit it in the middle-class sense; because, even before he posits elements of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an object, and this initial alienation within himself takes precedence over everything else. Yet precisely in this terrible alienation lies the strength of the worker’s position: his first movement is not toward knowledge of the work but toward knowledge of himself as an object, toward self-consciousness. Yet this self-consciousness, because it is initially knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor as a commodity, his life force which he is under the obligation to sell), permits him more genuine knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to middle-class “objectivity.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial move in Lukács’s epistemology: how the proletarian’s initial self-objectification, not leisure, is what grants access to totality.
• XREF: Directly traces Jameson’s reconstruction of Lukács’s ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ back to its Hegelian (subject-object identity) and Marxian (commodity fetishism) roots — exactly the Frankfurt-School lineage the reader wants. — connects to: Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 267; The worker’s alienation from his labor becomes the source of his cognitive strength — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4319; Self-objectification is the founding condition that makes human alienation possible — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 476 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The worker’s alienation from his labor becomes the source of his cognitive strength #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4319
• Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. #qualifies (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 267
• Woman’s disadvantaged position yields a more authentic self-knowledge than man’s. #corroborates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1015
• Self-objectification is the founding condition that makes human alienation possible #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 476