Abstract :
[en] From Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer, to Althusser or Bourdieu everything seems to occur as if criticism in its main variation – the Marxist approach – had worked to feed a principal way of thinking: individuals (workers, proletarians, social actors, etc.) unconsciously reproduce the social structures of capitalism which alienate them. They accept the conditions enforced on them and no longer seek to rebel against a world which substantially impoverish their labor, their soul and their creativity. Even worse: they ensure the reproduction of the system by seeking to engage in mass consumption at any price.
There is little doubt that Marx was not wrong to point out, with the concept of alienation, the inhuman working conditions in which the nineteenth century proletariat was, and which a huge part of the workers still have to face all around the world nowadays. Should the worker-consumer only be seen as a scatterbrain being who unconsciously reproduces, to use Bourdieu’s language, the conditions of his domination? My intention here is not to put Marx in the dock, since he is, I am sure, an author whose work has remained of unequalled power for over a century. However, I would like to try and show that by dint of favouring almost exclusively the concept of alienation in his work, there is a considerable risk that only a negative path for criticism can emerge from it. It is that initial heart of criticism which was Marx’s thinking and which has irrigated the whole twentieth century from the Frankfurt School to French critical sociology that I would like to put into perspective by suggesting a new agenda for critical research that I would characterize as, for now and for lack of a better term, positive. This agenda of research is in its early days. Nonetheless, in my opinion, a theoretical base should be given to it straight away. The following pages will try to establish it by notably drawing on the main theoretician of libertarian anarchism, Marx’s rival on socialist theory, Proudhon. However, I would like to insist on the fact that the purpose is not to truly turn the latter against Marx .
Because I think that Marx must remain a topical issue, I rather wish to demonstrate that, at the cradle of criticism, right next to him, there is an equally – or even more? – Materialist position which could be pertinently combined to the criticism of alienation . This position might be helpful to highlight, here and now, possibilities of emancipation through labor which are not exclusively conditioned by the “Grand Soir”. Proudhon’s work is certainly philosophically and economically weaker than Marx’s. However, Proudhon is very interesting in the way he manages to see in a “laboring” man something else than a slave-laboring animal deprived of subjectivity by capitalism and who only exists as a production tool. In that way, criticism, if any, may be considered as positive
