Amy E. Wendling: Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009)

“In Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, Amy Wendling draws on lesser known archival materials, including Marx’s notebooks on women and patriarchy and technology to offer a new interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as it develops throughout his works. For Marx, technology exemplifies the interaction between human beings and nature. Marx’s description of this interaction is in transition throughout his works. An older, humanist and vitalist paradigm sets the human being against nature as a qualitatively different type of force. A newer, thermodynamic paradigm sets the human being and nature in continuity. Marx’s work occurs at the juncture of these paradigms and contains elements of each. This affects his deployment of the concept ‘labor’. Labor is demoted from its status as a meaningful human activity that confers political status and mastery of the natural world, and it becomes a mere nodal point where energy is transferred. Against this backdrop, Marx increasingly appealed not to meaningful labor but to the abolition of labor as the culmination of human freedom. He also shows how the labours of members of the working class, including women, are interpreted in the old and new paradigms.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN 0230224407, 9780230224407
272 pages

Reviews: Chris Arthur (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2010), Richard Cotter (LSE Review of Books, 2013), Tom Bunyard (Historical Materialism, 2014), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher
Worldcat

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Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1967–) [FR, ES, EN]

“The book was, along with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant works written by members of the Situationist International (1957–1972).

The book takes the field of ‘everyday life’ as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between ‘qualitative subjects’ is the ‘end’ to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be “called forward” through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile ‘objects’ and without the ‘qualititive richness’ which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be ‘built’. So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a ‘thing’ for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, mis-communication – and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.” (Wikipedia)

French edition
Publisher Gallimard, 1967.
Vaneigem’s preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Gallimard in 1992.

English translation was first published in 1983 jointly by Left Bank Books and Rebel Press.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher Rebel Press, 2001
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of non-profit editions.
ISBN 0946061017, 9780946061013
279 pages

Review: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (French, 1967, unpaginated), HTML
Tratado del saber vivir para uso de las jovenes generaciones (Spanish, trans. Javier Urcanibia, 1977/2008)
The Revolution Of Everyday Life (English, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1983/2001)

Fredy Perlman: The Reproduction of Daily Life (1969-) [EN, CR, PT, FR]

What sustains Capitalism? Our acceptance of everyday activities. The text offers a clear introduction to basic Marxist concepts like commodity fetishism, and surplus value; it also traces the transformation of human activity into capital. It opens with the observation “that everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe.”

Publisher: Black & Red, Detroit, 1969, 24 pages. Reprinted in Anything Can Happen, October 1992, Phoenix Press, PO Box 824 London N1 9DL.

Croatian edition: Reprodukcija svakodnevnog života. Translated by Aleksa Golijanin, 2003. Anti-copyright.

Portuguese edition: A Reprodução do Quotidiano. Translated from Treason Press edition (2004), in February 2009, Edições Versus Capitalismus. Anti-copyright.

French edition: La Reproduction de la Vie Quotidienne. Published by Ravage Éditions, Paris, September 2011. Anti-copyright.

about the author (wikipedia)
publisher
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PDF (English, multiple formats)
PDF (Croatian, multiple formats)
PDF (Portuguese, PDF)
PDF (French, multiple formats)