Late Capitalism and Alienation

by Victor Yarov

September 11th, 2025

It is obvious that humanity has reached a critical fork in its history. And it is not about "challenges",  threats of global catastrophes, etc., which are discussed in the mass media and the respectable  intellectual community. In fact, all this superficial alarmism is focused on the consequences, and is  completely blind to the underlying causes. Posed problems, as well as proposed solutions, is a kind  of collective cognitive distortion. It is necessary to discern the true, fundamental problems of  modern society and, based on the results of research, to conceive of its possible future. So, let's start with a brief examination of several very important philosophical concepts. 

1. Deobjectification and Objectification. 

What makes a human stand out from the natural world? The simple and trivial answer is reason. But reason (consciousness, spirit) is not a substance that came out of nowhere, it is the product of a long evolutionary development, the product of constant human interaction with the objective world of  nature. How exactly does this interaction take place, what are the real anthropological powers through which the process goes on? These powers, human qualities, are deobjectification and  objectification. 

Let's take one of the countless concrete examples of the manifestation of these powers — the wheel. You can find objects in nature that are similar in form to a wheel. However, as an object of  production and culture, the wheel can exist only in the human world. The process of applying  human abilities to create and produce a specific material object, the wheel, is objectification.  Objectification also includes the simple, habitual use of the wheel in practice. Using in thinking the  generally accepted idea or concept of the wheel is also objectification. But the wheel was once  invented. Here we turn to the deobjectification. Observing objects of nature similar to a wheel, a  human came up with the idea of using the movement of a round and relatively flat object for the  purpose of transporting heavy loads. In other words, a human seemed to "snatch" in his mind a  certain object from the flow of surrounding objectness, captured a certain side of the object and  mentally transformed, deobjectified it. Objectification and deobjectification are intertwined and go  continuously over into one another. For example, over the past five thousand years, a wheel has  undergone many transformations both in its form and in its practical application. These wheel  changes are the transition from deobjectification to objectification, and vice versa. If we take the  finished wheel of a modern car, then it is the concrete result of a gigantic chain of objectifications  and deobjectifications. Another example is that an artist deobjectifies a wheel by placing it, as part  of a composition, in a painting he creates, giving the image of the wheel a certain artistic meaning  within the framework of his work. The very process of painting a picture is objectification. The  object, that is the finished picture, is the result of both objectification and deobjectification. 

So, let's give a scientific definition of these concepts. Objectification is a process, an activity in  which human's abilities pass into the object he creates, are embodied in the object, so that the object becomes a socio-cultural, or "human object" (1). Deobjectification is a process in which a human  grasps the properties, essence, "logic of the object", "appropriates" the object in his mind, changes it in his consciousness and, thus, expands his abilities, increases the measure of his practical powers.  Thus, in fact, the entire human world, any human activity, physical and intellectual, external and  internal, is a dialectical process of deobjectification and objectification. Everything that is given to a new person and a new generation of people, as a preceding given — language, material and spiritual culture, social organization — is the result of previous activity of deobjectification and  objectification. 

It is easy to notice that, ultimately, deobjectification is primary in relation to objectification. For  example, by learning to speak first, and then to read and write, a child deobjectifies for himself the 

symbolic objectivity of the language. While learning a profession, a worker deobjectifies the ready made subject matter of a certain set of professional knowledge and working skills. A student, a  future researcher, deobjectifies the ready-made subject matter of specific scientific knowledge  accumulated at the moment, etc. Ultimately, deobjectification is the main, leading side of the  dialectical contradiction of deobjectification and objectification. Deobjectification produces a  mental transformation of a certain given (it can be any object, phenomenon, process of the material  and spiritual world). At the very least, the result of deobjectification is a change in the perception of  the given, a reformatting of the given. As a maximum, deobjectification creates a new. 

Adherents of modern respectable philosophy could say that it's about the "symbolic" but that's  wrong. The concept of "symbolic" is poor in content. The "symbolic" only captures the results of  deobjectification and objectification, it does not reflect the actual movement, the dialectic of human  activity. The "symbolic" divides human activity and reality into different, metaphysically opposing  sides. In this optics, a person is an object whose destiny is to passively accept the "symbolic"  alienated from him. It is also wrong to equate deobjectification with "deconstruction". As a  professional philosopher, Derrida could not have been unaware of the concepts of deobjectification  and objectification, which were developed by Hegel and then understood materialistically by Marx.  The intellectual pygmy Derrida stole deobjectification from the legacy of the Titans, he threw out  the content of this concept, deprived it of dialectical connections, reduced it to the analysis of  "texts" and made it a pretext for squalid reasonings about this and that. As is usual with  postmodernists, it is enough to come up with some new word to pull one over on "educated"  audience. And Derrida came up with "deconstruction". 

Deobjectification and objectification are a powerful forces possessed by human (collective human,  humanity), the essence of any human activity. It is these abilities that have allowed a human to go  from complete dependence on nature to the fact that today he has the ability to make changes on a  

planetary, geological and biological scale (the negative side of these opportunities has its own  reason, see below). Potentially (let's emphasize, potentially), the power of deobjectification and  objectification has almost no limits. Let's illustrate this with one daring cosmo-anthropological  hypothesis, which pedants with a lack of the ability to deobjectify might consider a meaningless  fantasy. Obviously, the fundamental constants of matter, as we currently understand them, set limits  for humans (for example, to move through space at superluminal speed), but cognition is infinite,  matter is infinitely diverse and inexhaustible as an object of knowledge. Our understanding of the  limits depends on our limited knowledge of nature at the moment. Let's take one of the physical  theories about the future of the Universe, which, based on the Big Bang and accelerating expansion, models the decay and disappearance of not only galaxies, stars, planets, but even elementary  particles. It is not a fact that this theory is correct, there is no consensus among scientists. However,  back in the middle of the last century, the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov wrote: "The thinking  spirit, at the cost of its own existence, returns to Mother Nature, which is dying of a "heat death," a  new fiery youth - a state in which it is able to begin the grandiose cycles of its development again,  which will one day, at another point in time and space, lead again to the birth of a new thinking  brain from its cooling depths, a new thinking spirit" (2). What prevents us from hypothetically  assuming that future humanity, having discovered new types and properties of matter, new types of  particles, and still unknown forms of physical interactions, will be able to produce some kind of  physical reaction (of the knowledge we have, thermonuclear reaction and nuclear fission chain  reaction can serve as very distant analogies), which will lead to a "leap", a reversal in the movement of the whole Universe (3)? 

2. Alienation and reification. 

However, the history of mankind is not only a history of achievements and steady mastery of  natural forces. To this day, it is also a story of violence and stupidity, a story of cruel exploitation of 

man by man (4). It is absolutely impossible to understand the contradiction between the potentially  limitless power of human (collective human, human community in a number of generations) and the absurdity of his social existence without studying the phenomenon of alienation. 

In Marxism, alienation is defined as a break in the original unity of a human and his activities,  a state of society in which the world created by people through deobjectification and  objectification opposes people themselves as an alien and hostile, to their free development,  world. The phenomena that alienate a person are diverse. For example, it is enough to give three  main defining things here: 1) the economic order based on the class structure of society, 2) the state, 3) ideology (that is, false consciousness, distorted and (or) erroneous ideas, beliefs, feelings and  values shared by groups of people and individuals). 

It is obvious that when human had just emerged from the realm of nature, in primitive society,  alienation did not yet exist. But precisely because of his natural origin, human was initially very  weak and dependent on natural forces. With the extremely low level of tools and the abyss of  ignorance about the surrounding world, the division of labor and, as a result, the division of society into classes, were thus necessary at that moment for the development of mankind. The division of  labor, private property, and class division have established alienation both as a continuum of each  person's life activity, regardless of their class affiliation, and as sets of institutional forms (the state,  religious, cultural, and other social institutions). Speaking philosophically, in order to assert a  certain degree of independence from the natural world, to rise above it, man entered the era of  alienation.  

Capitalism occupies a special place among class social formations, because it brings about a  qualitative leap in the development of technology. For the first time a human begins to interact with nature equally, the human world is increasingly separated from nature, begins to transform it in the  most active way. "The bourgeoisie has played an eminently revolutionary role in history… It  showed for the first time what human activity can achieve" (5). But the breakthrough in the field of  science and technology under capitalist conditions is not accompanied by a softening of alienation,  much less its elimination, but on the contrary, its absolute strengthening. In capitalist society,  alienation takes the form of reification. The Marxist Gajo Petrović gives a good definition of  reification: "The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions  into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of  human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a 'special' case of alienation, its most radical and widespread  form characteristic of modern capitalist society” (6). In other words, reification is a total  characteristic of the social space of capitalism, where relations between people assume the image of relations between things, are enveloped in thinginess and merge with it (by "things", of course, one  should understand not only material things, such as property, but also immaterial ones, such as roles in society and their corresponding patterns of behavior and perception of oneself and other people,  institutions of the so-called "civil society", alienated false morality, philistine prejudices, etc.) 

It is fundamentally important to keep in mind that objectification and reification are not the same  thing (7). Objectification is a necessary aspect of any human activity in any social formation. But  under capitalist conditions, objectification takes on a perverse form of reification. At the same time,  the man who reifies the objective world is desubjetivated, he himself becomes a thing, an object of  influence and manipulation by an impersonal socio-economic, cultural and ideological machinery.  In bourgeois society, "this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete  emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited,  one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end" (8). Reification,  therefore, is a continuous and comprehensive dehumanization. With the exception of death, an 

unavoidable factor of life, alienation acts as the basis of human misery, tragedy and universal  disfigurement. An alienated living environment shapes a person, supports him to a certain extent  and under certain conditions, and, at the same time, denies his self-worth, withdraws his free self realization (the necessary condition for which is the free self-realization of each "other"). 

3. On the Criticism of Alienation. 

Lenin wrote: "in Marxism itself, from beginning to end, there is not a grain of ethics: in terms of  theory, it subordinates the "ethical point of view" to the "principle of causality"; in terms of  practice, it reduces it to the class struggle" (9). This statement is absolutely true in the sense that  Marxism does not recognize the intrinsic value of such of ethics, which is related, one way or  another, to alienation in general. But in a deeper sense, unfalsified Marxism from beginning to end  is the only justified "ethics" of affirming truly human existence, an "ethics" beyond the world of  alienation, with its "good" and its "evil." 

Althusser, a popular philosopher on the left, was mistaken when he believed that Marx's early works on alienation were ideological due to influence of Hegel and Feuerbach. According to Althusser, it  was only later that Marx switched to a purely "scientific" approach, focusing on the study of  economic "reality" in "Capital". Indeed, "Capital" is a study of the production relations of  capitalism. But it does not follow at all that it is divorced from Marx's theory of alienation.  Moreover, it is impossible to adequately, holistically and concretely understand the analysis of  capital outside the theory of alienation and the various aspects of capitalist alienation: reification  and commodity, institutional, ideological fetishism (if only for the reason that without reification  and fetishism, the reproduction and functioning of capital is impossible). The theory of alienation  precedes and underlies the study of capital not as an ideological concept that came to light because  another philosopher realized the conflict of all existing things with what is due and built another  system. Alienation (reification)— no less a real fact than capital. Alienation is total, omnipresent,  and all-pervading; it is not an imaginary god in heaven, but a real "god" who govern human thought and action in the capitalist world. But at the same time, the power of this "god" is not absolute (at  least at the moment), it is constantly being blurred, challenged, interrupted. From time to time, one  or another specific historical model of an alienated society falls into the abyss. On the existential  plane, dramas unfold, from the level of habitual ordinariness to the level of Shakespeare's tragedies  (by the way, most and the best part of world art one way or another, in the vast majority of cases,  unconsciously reflects a person's conflict with alienating forces). Because objectively there is a  tension, contradiction between human activity (deobjectification, objectification), in a broad sense  — life, and its alienation. 

In fact, Althusser's interpretation leads to fragmentation and destruction of a holistic worldview, to a wretched pseudo-scientific pragmatism masquerading as "realism." In this sense, regardless of the  author's good intentions (subjectively, he apparently believed that in this way he was purging  Marxism of dogmatism and idealistic layers), his work organically fit into the general ideological  trend of late capitalism towards fragmentation and devaluation of meanings, the destruction of "big  narratives", in short, the neutralization and elimination of any theoretical nonconformism (10). Of  course, it is wrong to seek approaches to emancipation practice based solely on criticism of  alienation. In this case, the practice becomes as one-sided and short-sighted as in the case of  "realistic" criticism alone. Research on economics and politics, analysis of specific facts of public  life are needed. But by ignoring the problems of alienation, practice risks losing adequate deep  reflection, losing the meaning of its ultimate goal, and succumbing to internal corrosion. Thanks to  the popularizers (the Kautsky school), the concepts of productive forces, industrial relations, basis  and superstructure, and social formations became the focus of Marxism. Deobjectification and  objectification, alienation, reification, and fetishism were not adequately and timely understood; due to historical circumstances, their place in Marx's theory remained secondary, which is absolutely 

wrong and unacceptable. Suffice it to say that many of Marx's works in which this problem was  developed ("Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", "German Ideology", etc.) were first published only in the late 20s - early 30s of the XX century. The preparatory materials for “Capital” -"Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1859" («Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie»), which are extremely important in terms of understanding the holistic theory, were first published only in  1939-1941 in German in Moscow (in Russian they were published there only in 1968-1969 as part  of the 2nd edition of the «Works of K. Marx and F. Engels»). 

It can be said that anyone who has not understood the relationship between the theory of alienation  and the theory of productive forces, industrial relations, and social formations has not understood  Marxism well enough, and anyone who ignores or denies the problem of alienation does not  understand Marxism at all. It is precisely in the problem of alienation that the ultimate realism of  genuine communist theory is clearly reflected. Behind fetishes and ideological constructs, true  communist theory recognizes fundamental reality — the activity of human who produces his world  and himself, human as a species-being. It is precisely the deobjectification of alienation that asserts  communist theory as a consistent realistic humanism that opposes both the open cannibalism of  authoritarian hierarchical ideologies and the hypocritical, disguised cannibalism of liberal abstract  "humanism."  

Any non-communist critique of alienation cannot be complete and consistent, because it criticizes  alienating phenomena and effects (for example, media "hyperreality", destructive consumption of  individuals and society, purposeful primitivization of the masses, degradation of science and art,  isolation, emptiness and frustration of the "atomic" individual, the man of the crowd, etc.) being  based on a somewhat underlying ideological position, which itself is located in the realm of  alienation and does not go beyond it. Examples include right-wing conservative criticism or  "critical theory," which is popular among the so-called "leftists." 

The ultimate goal of the Communists (not in name, but in essence) is a human community free from alienation (a commonwealth, fellowship, as opposed to "society" divided along alienating lines and  united by formallist alienated bonds of individuals-atoms). A community where a person is returned to himself, where the free development of everyone is a condition for the free development of all.  

This definition already implies and includes all other definitions as means (the absence of classes  and the state, production not for the purpose of making a profit, but directly to provide people with  the goods necessary and useful for their comprehensive free development). The progress of science  and technology, the growth of material well-being - any conscious and unconscious adept of  capitalism will subscribe to such a truncated understanding of progress. These things are good in  themselves, but in an alienated society they ultimately act against a person.  "Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker" (11). For Communists, the measure of progress consists in moving towards the  complete and irrevocable disappearance of alienation. 

4. The Impossibility of Communism? 

Nevertheless, there is no fatality, no historical inevitability of the transition from capitalism to  communism. Capitalist society creates only certain material prerequisites (level of technology,  concentration of production, etc.) for the transition to socialism and communism, but the transition  itself and the new community are the product of conscious volitional activity (that is,  deobjectification of capitalism in both class and broad public consciousness and objectification of  fundamentally new social practices) of collective, class subject. Despite the fact that modern, late  capitalism everywhere and constantly confirms the characteristic given to it by Lenin ("decaying  capitalism", "reaction along the entire line"), at present socialism and communism are as far as ever 

from being a real prospect for humanity. Facts are stubborn things. The working class is dispersed  and morally degraded in the consumer society. We see that, periodically, everywhere in the world,  from rich America and prosperous France to poor Egypt and pauper Georgia, crowds of atomic  individuals take to the streets demanding only one thing - "bread and circuses", which must be  provided to them by new persons in power. There is no need to talk about any class consciousness  in these cases. 

The World Communist Party was defeated both from the outside and from the inside. Its degraded  remnants in any country of the world are either reformist parties of politicians, or practically  helpless marginal sects uniting pedantic dogmatists and poseurs at worst, at best — young  "beautiful souls" doomed to disappointment, acceptance of "capitalist realism" and drowning in the  cynicism of consumer existence. As for the wide range of modern "leftists", activists of all kinds of  "progressive movements", "fighters" for all kinds of rights, then, as a rule, here we are dealing with  people wandering in the fog of ideological concepts beneficial to capital, and, worse, with the avant —garde part of malignant processes aimed at the hopeless perpetuation of alienation. 

Thus, the human race found itself in a situation of maximum decline in its social structure and, at  the same time, inability (even unwillingness) to change anything. Why? 

5. The society of late capitalism. 

Lenin identified the main features of imperialism (monopolies, the export of capital to colonies, the  leadership of financial capital and its fusion with the bureaucratic apparatus). While all these  features remain today with some changes (for example, neocolonialism is being practiced instead of colonialism), however, over a hundred years capital has gone through two major transformations.  The Keynesian phase, involved social programs, has been aimed at expanding the domestic sales  market. The neoliberal stage consisted of expansion of the domestic market due to the exponential  growth of consumer credit, as well as: almost complete separation of finance from production,  "economy of debt and financial bubbles", maintaining of the most profitable high-tech industries  and the tops of production chains in developed countries and, simultaneously, deployment of low profit traditional industries in countries with cheap labor (that, in fact, is the real content of  "globalization", the ideological tinsel of which is so beloved by all modern "progressive" forces).  By the time of the pandemic, the neoliberal model had exhausted itself and now the world of capital is trying to find a new "modus vivendi", to move into a new phase (more on this below). At the  heart of all these transformations lies the contradiction between the self-expanding value (the  essence of capital) and the downward trend in surplus value. Since value is created by living labor,  the reduction of living labor as a result of the use of technology leads to a decrease in surplus value  (12). 

Marx recorded the acuteness of the class antagonism of an early capitalism at a time when, due to  its absolute impoverishment (13), the proletariat represented a living negation of capitalist society:  “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of  intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a  class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages,  which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class  which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of  the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course,  arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class” (14). But Marx himself introduced a distinction between the stage of "formal subordination of labor to  capital", in which exploitation is based on absolute surplus value, implied lengthening of the  working day, and the stage of "absolute subordination" based on relative surplus value, such a level 

of technical equipment of production that allows to shorten the working day and reduce the cost of  goods consumed by workers. The position of an employee in the world of capital is dialectically  contradictory. In this world, he is not only the object of exploitation, but also the owner of the  product, i.e. his ability to work. And like any commodity owner, he strives to sell his goods for the  best price. Marx sees this dialectical duality: "What precisely distinguishes capital from the master servant relation is that the worker confronts [capital] as consumer and possessor of exchange  values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money he becomes a simple  center of circulation -- one of its infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is  extinguished" (15). During periods of economic growth or even just stagnation, wage labor is  unable to go beyond pure reformism. Only in moments of acute and large-scale crisis does it have  the opportunity (only the opportunity) to escape from the fate of being a raw material for  exploitation. 

The Keynesian phase brought under the trend towards the integration of wage labor into the system  a fairly solid material base (partially dismantled, but generally working during the period of  neoliberalism). A modern employee, unlike a worker of the 19th and early 20th centuries, has a  social reserve (at least social benefits, and skilled workers have savings and sometimes even some  property). He is by no means "ousted from society", but occupies a position in it that capital takes  into account and, to a certain extent, guarantees. Of course, the employee's reserve can be reset to  zero in the next crisis (that, again, automatically, by itself, does not lead them outside the system).  But in a "normal" state, the mechanisms of systemic integration of wage labor are working, and  they are working well. Capital killed two fowls with one stone: through social programs  (Keynesianism) and consumer credit (neoliberalism), it broke the deadlock of internal  contradictions, revived sales and accumulation, and at the same time, if not completely eliminated,  then reduced social antagonism to a historical minimum.  

Pedants and dogmatists can bring their standard counter argument that the proletariat in conditions  of absolute impoverishment can be found in backward countries. Yes, that is possible. But the  capitalist system is unified and the socio-economic model, which has been built in its consistent  form in rich countries, acts as the center of gravity towards which all others are moving. For  example, the mass media and entertainment industry in the poorest countries of Asia and Africa  operates according to the patterns of rich countries. In all countries of the so-called "third world"  has more or less large stratum of the relatively well-to-do population, westernized, sharing the  values of the "consumer society", greedily absorbing the "culture" of individualism and hedonistic  careerism. Since cutting-edge consumer fetishes serve as a marker of social "success" on the  general background of poverty, people from this stratum are much more committed to the European  model of consumer society than the Europeans themselves. Being a role model for the unconscious  and divided proletarian and semi-proletarian masses, who are making every effort to get into their  ranks, these segments of the local so-called "middle class" radiate degradation into broad grassroots layers. 

No less important is the side of ideology, the "superstructure". The concepts of the "society of the  spectacle" by Guy Debord, the "society of consumption" by Jean Baudrillard and the "one dimensional man" by Herbert Marcuse do not contain anything fundamentally new, because Marx  had already revealed the essence of fetishism and reification, and these authors wrote in fact about  these sides of alienation. A certain value of their works lies in the fact that they describe the  specifics of alienation peculiar to late capitalism — the collective hypnosis imposed by the media,  hyperconformism and passivity of the atomized mass, the mass that consume spectacles and signs  in its isolated from wholeness, hemmed-in world (16). Baudrillard and Marcuse point to the  phenomenon of the expulsion of the "transcendent", that is, translating into the language of  Marxism - the non-reificated, non-alienated dimension of man. The meaningless space of the  system strives to remove well-established contradictions. In such a world, a human himself disappears, he is no longer an individual and consists only of signs of social status. "It is the  prophylactic whiteness of a saturated society, a society with no history and no dizzying heights, a  society with no myth other than itself" (17). 

But the essence of these actual processes is revealed through the concepts of Marxist theory, first of  all, deobjectification. The horizon of deobjectification became limited by pure utilitarian  functionality and bound by an iron chain of reification. The downside (and a necessary means to  keep it within the framework of a utilitarian function) is the preventive sterilization and dumbing  down of deobjectification. After all, deobjectification (along with objectification) is a deep human  need. And capital satisfies this need. How? Through the virtuality of computer worlds, social  networks and games, through Hollywood movies and tabloid fiction, through the cadaverous fumes  of "modern art", through the opinions of a bunch of so-called "experts" and "analysts", through  "philosophy", degenerated to mouse fuss with language, etc. etc., "their name is legion". 

6. The anthropological limit and posthuman Dystopia. 

If we take a retrospective look at the development of capitalism since the beginning of the 20th  century, it is not difficult to notice a tendency — capital tries to mitigate the severity of internal  contradictions through elements and forms turned inside out on alien soil and therefore perverted.  The truth of these forms lies outside capitalism and belongs to a possible communist society. For  example, monopolization, the ubiquitous participation of the state, and social programs are an  attempt to overcome the anarchy, chaos, and meaninglessness (from a non-alienated human point of view) of capitalist production. Erasing cultural and national narrow-mindedness, ideology of “one  world” - a parody of the unity of non-alienated human commonwealth on a planetary scale. Even  such unimportant details as the erasure of the striking differences in clothing and consumption of  goods between the bourgeoisie and employees, which Herbert Marcuse noticed, or the false  atmosphere of "caring", helpfulness, formal participation and benevolence, which Baudrillard  noted, are a parody of communist relations, where "human is a friend, comrade and brother to  human". 

Capital has constantly run into the limits of its development, but so far it has managed to find a way out. By expanding to the periphery. Through wars and cyclical economic crises that relieved  structural stress and restarted the system. By tying wage labor with golden chains to the galley of  accumulation. So, there is a logical question, is there a finite limit, such a limit that, when faced  with, capitalism will either die, giving way to a communist commonwealth, or collapse into some  kind of original form of society, whereby no one in their right mind would call it the movement of  civilization forward? 

Theoretically, two factors can serve as a limit. The first one is the impossibility of self-growth of  value, the impossibility of continuing capitalist accumulation. The second limit is a human himself,  in the form in which he has existed so far. While the first factor received some coverage in the  scientific literature (R. Luxemburg et al.), then the second was actually not properly understood. 

Capital performed a complex operation on a human. First, it "killed God," that is, devalued  mythology, which for thousands of years had been not only "the sigh of the oppressed creature" but  also "the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions", "at one and the same time, the expression of real squalor and a protest against real squalor" (18), and after that capital gave  rise to a tendency of transformation of a human into its function, a mere derivative of its movement  (19). 

Under the conditions of slavery, the slave had been directly alienated from the process and result of  his labor, the alienation of the slave was based on brute force, and, strictly speaking, no ideological 

justification was required for it. Under feudalism, a peasant gives a corvee or a quitrent to the feudal lord, devoting himself to his personal farm apart from that. A range of religious and political  ideologies (for example, the idea of a monarch "by God's grace") had been used to justify feudal  dependence (20). Due to the conditions of his life, the slave had been absolutely alien to the master  and the world of masters. The peasant had a certain degree of autonomy and was able either  approve or reject the feudal order. Thus, slavery and feudalism do not create conditions for blurring  the boundaries of subjectivity and objectness, external and internal, for introjection of the external.  Unlike capitalism, pre-capitalist societies do not have the goal of "production for the sake of  production", they lack the unrestrained accumulation of wealth as an end in itself, and technological innovations are slow to materialize. Capitalism, on the contrary, is based on expanded reproduction, and it cannot "calm down" until it grinds, destroys, or integrates everything that is incompatible or  simply hinders the process of capital accumulation. In all dimensions of the social space and,  moreover, in the very inner world of a human, capital creates or tries to create a homogeneous and  favorable environment for itself. The position of an employee under capitalism is such that he is  both an object of exploitation and, at the same time, the direct creator of capital, under certain  conditions he is collaborate with capital. As for capitalists and bureaucrats, they are no less  reificated and are, in fact, the maintenance staff, the technocrat managers of a giant machine. The  appearance of such figures as the socialist-manufacturer Robert Owen or the co-owner of the textile business Friedrich Engels is practically excluded in our time. 

Capital becomes a subject when it moves people, dictates their behavior and way of thinking  (which, naturally, dialectically does not negate the opposite statement — it is also true that people  move capital). When capital becomes a subject, then people become a function of capital.  Capitalist values, norms, rules, habits and behavioral patterns, and a capitalist worldview become  part of a person's inner world. For a huge number of people from very different classes and strata of  society, this part becomes an organic and defining part of their being. In this sense, a "pro-capitalist" can be equally homeless marginal, worker, multi-billionaire, "leftist" or "right-wing" activist. In  other words, capital is trying to create a human generation "in its own image" and, at the same time, seeks to block all paths to escape from its totality. A person of the late capitalist era differs in  that he loses sensitivity to alienation. 

And yet, human is a product of biological and social evolution dating back tens of thousands of  years. A human was created by his activity, deobjectification and objectification. Placing it in a  closed spherical space, the only meaning of which is a completely abstract and lifeless thing —  value (21), creates a conflict, contradiction between capital and human nature. Thus, capital is  

forced to eliminate human and fabricate a new biosocial being instead. The "Homo sapiens" will  become just a substrate for a certain "Golem" creature, between which and capital there will be no  gap and the interaction of capital and this creature will go smoothly, without a hitch. 

These conclusions do not proceed from the erroneous essentialist notion of a certain timeless,  abstract, ideal human nature. Justifiably rejecting essentialism in the question of man, some authors  argue that "man is simply his real existence" and that "as a human practice, alienation is as much a  part of ‘human nature’ as non-alienated, communistic practice might be" (22). Obviously, such an  understanding does not see the contradiction between living human practice (deobjectification,  objectification) and the reification of this practice, in fact, it refuses to study reality and leads to  subjective idealism. 

In a broader sense, it is about the contradiction between human and the alienation of human.  Dialectics assumes that a contradiction has an outcome. Either one of the sides of the contradiction  is destroyed and the remaining side transforms into a new phenomenon, or both sides completely  annihilate each other and the old phenomenon disappears without becoming a new one. The  contradiction between human and the alienation of human has its beginning, therefore, it has an end,

it must be resolved in one way or another. If a human is unable to eliminate alienation then  alienation will eliminate human. Concretely, this elimination of human means that the capitalist  form of alienation, reification, ends victoriously and dialectically transforms into the pure thingness  of posthuman beings. The definition of a posthuman does not proceed from any moral or aesthetic  values. This is not moral condemnation or aesthetic rejection. A posthuman, despite the fact that  his external qualities may not differ or not differ much from a human being, is essentially  different from him in that deobjectification and objectification are "discarded" in him and  replaced by a processual thingness. Another option for resolving the contradiction is mutual  annihilation of the opposing sides, which implies, in this case, a catastrophe and the death of human civilization. 

The philosophers of the school of "critical theory" (Foucault and others) have written a lot about  "biopolitics", that is, strategic government policy, which has been going on for several hundred  years, aimed at the regulation and management of that aspect of human life that is directly related to physicality (for example, the introduction of mandatory standards of sanitation and hygiene,  encouraging or prohibitive fertility policy, medical supervision, mandatory health tests, etc.). In  addition to the benefits that these measures can bring, they also have a downside in a society of  alienation. Critical theory poses the question of who benefits and for what purposes, and answers:  "Through biopolitics, the state asserts its sovereignty. Political power intersects with biological life, shaping the bodies, behavior, and well-being of the population through various strategies and  controls". But the state is essentially an apparatus in the hands of capital, a political shell of capital.  Consequently, the true subject of biopolitics is not the state, but capital. Consequently, the true goal  of biopolitics is not the expansion and consolidation of the sphere of political power, but the  adaptation of biological to the interests and needs of capital, the creation of homogeneity, and the  elimination of friction between human-biological aspect and capitalist sociality. In other words, the  ultimate goal of biopolitics is the domestication of human by capital. 

Since the beginning of the 21st century, technologies have been rapidly developing, providing a  qualitatively new stage of biopolitics. Genetic engineering has made it possible to edit the human  genome. Nanotechnology makes it possible to introduce microchips into organisms. Digital  technologies, AI, and big data analysis make an individual's daily existence transparent, controlled,  and manageable. Superimposed on the domestication and almost complete mental enslavement of  human, they open up unprecedented possibilities for the system. Liberal and leftist "progressives"  ridicule any warnings about the negative sides of technology as insane conspiracy theory and  marginal obscurantism. Indeed, if warnings ignore the underlying causes and connections of a  potentially dangerous trend, and confuse reality with the fantasies and reactionary prejudices of an  unsettled philistine, then they are inadequate and useless. In fact, it is unlikely that the massive use  of new technologies to finally transform humans into posthumans will be secret and forced, such as  the sterilization program for Indian women in the United States in the 60-70s of the 20th century or  the tragedy of the "Duplessis Orphans" in the 30s and 50s in Quebec, Canada, when children  orphanages were transferred to the category of psychiatric hospitals in order to save the local  budget, and tens of thousands of healthy children underwent lobotomies, "treatment" with electric  shocks, etc. The degree of erasure of humanness is already such that those invited by capital to its  "new brave world" will voluntarily agree to anything if they are promised greater "comfort",  "security", "health and longevity". Dr. Schwab and the futurists squad, who call for the coition of  the living and the inanimate, and the replacement of human with a "posthuman", are not marginal  eccentrics, but speakers of capital, purposefully introducing a forward-looking trend into the field of public discussion. 

Obviously, the transition from neoliberalism to a new model requires some kind of push. Such an  impetus could be a large-scale economic crisis. The leaders of the global financial elite have been  repeating for quite some time that a crisis on a scale equal to or even greater than the Great 

Depression of the 1930s is almost inevitable. In this crisis, tens of trillions of fictitious, unsecured  money in the form of debt obligations and speculative financial instruments should be reset. No one can predict what the social dimension of the crisis will be. However, based on the trends developing at the moment, the contours of new post-neoliberal model, if capital manages to slip away and this  time, can be predicted. The so-called "middle class" will suffer the most. Radical biopolitics and  even more extensive securitization will become the means of keeping the former "middle class" in  line. Ideology will require individuals to be more actively involved and engaged in the socio political sphere. The key message will be: "It is necessary for 'sustainable development", "security"  and "survival" in the face of various "challenges". Biopolitical programming should force its  victims to accept a new maxim of existence: "Have nothing and be happy!" In general, the new  socio-economic model will be hybrid in nature, combining elements that can be described as "neo feudalism" (social segregation into "elite", "plebs" and "excluded"), capitalism based on digital  money and quasi-planned regulation of the economy through AI, quasi "socialism" (providing for  the majority of society, which will not be engaged in any socially useful activity, a living wage in  the form of a "universal basic income"). This society will strive for a dead mechanical  equilibrium in everything. Contradictions, tensions and conflicts are calculated in advance  and preventatively stopped. 

Instead of the "technological singularity" that pro-capitalist scientists write about, technological stagnation will reign. Technology will be limited by the need to maintain status quo. In other  words, there will be a return to the pre-capitalist limitation of technological progress. As mentioned  above, alienation arose as a result of the division of labor, the opposition and struggle of various  human activities and, with a low level of development of the means of labor, was necessary for the  elevation of the human world above the natural world. The irony is that just when the means of  labor (in the form of, for example, robotics and artificial intelligence) make it possible to  fundamentally transform labor, eliminate the division of labor, and unite all people into a  commonwealth in which the collective is in harmony with the individual — that's when involution  of human into the posthuman occurs, and civilization turns into a stagnating degenerative  formation. Marx wrote that a society of alienation is the "prehistory" of the human race.  Communism was supposed to usher in the beginning of real history. But it may never begin.  Similarly, there will be no history of the posthuman, because, by its very nature, this being cannot  have a history. 

To summarize, humanity, unable to implement "utopia" (in fact, unable to get out of  wandering through the labyrinths of alienated existence), must come to a dystopia of simple  reproduction of thing-existence, non-life. "Collateral damage" is intended to be a multitude of  people who are either unable to fit into the "brave new world" or consciously reject it.  

One plot is often repeated in the works of many science fiction writers - earthlings discover an  alien civilization that is technically quite advanced, but life in which, from their point of view, is  terrible, one way or another monstrously perverted. However, it is quite possible that aliens in the  future will be the ones who are horrified by the posthuman Earth civilization. 

7. A Fragile Hope. 

As it is known, the main contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between the social  character of production and private form of appropriation. Let's look at this contradiction in the  optics of the theory of alienation. The social nature of production means that all human activities  are interconnected and interdependent. A private form of appropriation means that some human  activities appropriate the results of other human activities. At the same time, both activities are  specifically alienated. The theory of alienation does not contradict or negate the reality of the class  structure of society; it examines society from a deeper historical and anthropological perspective.

Taken as a whole, the conceptual apparatus of Marxism has not lost its truth, but its object, society,  has changed a lot. Genuine Marxism does not see any danger for itself in this, because one of its  cornerstones is the statement about the constant movement and change of reality, including social  reality. Despite the huge investments of the bourgeoisie in discrediting Marxism, the greatest  damage to Marx's theory came not from outside, but from within, from dogmatists and pedants on  the one hand and revisionists on the other. Therefore, the task is to update and concretize concepts  and practices in accordance with the changed reality, as well as to develop new concepts and  practices. 

Classical Marxism focused on the material interests of workers and peasants, as opposed to the  material interests of capitalists and remnants of the feudal class. But in the conditions of the  decomposition of the class, the integration of the masses into the capitalist system and the almost  complete reification of a human, particular material interests of the grassroots population (exactly  that, a purely quantitative multitude of atomic individuals) can not only lie in the paradigm of  capital, but also contribute to an even greater degradation of the social fabric. For example, some of  the "leftists" are already welcoming the idea of "universal basic income". They completely not  understanding why this measure is being hatched by the functionaries of capital and why it will be  implemented by them at some point. Or, for example, the uncritical participation of the "left" in the  environmental movement. Those on the "left" who are not devoid of reason at all know perfectly  well that the environmental movement is sponsored by corporations, that the "green economy" is  partly fake, partly the flow of capital into a new sphere for it. The media faces of the movement, the vilest postmodern fakes like Greta Thunberg, don't cause disgust for them. What they don't want to  know is that the current environmental movement is programmed in the near future to serve as an  additional justification for depriving the "middle class" of its habitual standards of consumption,  social segregation and the introduction of the most severe control measures. Hegel wrote about the  "cunning of world reason", which leads to real results, either very far away or the opposite of what  the bearers of certain views and actors of historical process aspired to and dreamed of. A recent  historical example is the supporters of the ideas of so—called "democratic socialism" in the USSR  and Eastern Europe. Once in power, instead of "socialism with a human face", they objectively  facilitated the arrival of the wildest forms of capitalism. Generally speaking, the discrepancy  between subjective goal and objective result of activity is an absolutely logical and inevitable  consequence of alienation. This, in fact, is the whole mythical "cunning" of the mythical "world  reason." 

Taken by themselves, the traditional practices of the "left" - trade unionist activity, Gramscian  "cultural hegemony" and attempts to participate in elections - do not make sense in the extremely  reificated world of capital, which has become a subject. In their current form, they are digested by  capital and topologically located in its field. This does not mean that they need to be denied  everywhere and always. Under certain circumstances, elements of these practices can bring positive results. The bottom line is that any practice should be organically linked to a holistic theory that  adequately understands not only the past, but also, more importantly, the present. 

What remains within the limits of what is possible at a time of the triumph of reaction and the  accelerating degradation of human and society? Paradoxically, the mechanically fabricated, out vital one-dimensionality of late capitalism, coupled with the devaluation of fetishes, products of  previous eras, holds a clearance, throughview, an opportunity to identify and deobjectify reification. Deobjectification of reification leads to an understanding of its dialectically dual nature — both as  reality and, at the same time, as an appearance, collective and individual self-suggestion. Naturally,  the system does everything to ensure that this clearance is not noticed, so that collective and  individual existence pass by it. Supporters of the communist commonwealth should show people  the clearance, they must try to open their eyes.

Therefore, the practical task in actual conditions is, first of all, to weave a mental environment and  clusters of vital activity that are as free from reification as possible. At a minimum, this space will  act as a barrier on the path of human civilization to an inhuman dystopia, and at most, it will  become the core around which, in a time of comprehensive crisis, crystallize forces capable of  transforming society of alienation into a commonwealth where "the free development of everyone is a condition for the free development of all". 

Footnotes

1. K. Marx, in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 42, p. 121. 

2. Ilyenkov E. V. "Cosmology of the spirit", in the collection "Philosophy and Culture".  Moscow: Politizdat, 1991. p. 431. 

3. The ability to deobjectify linked with such essential human qualities as imagination and  intuition, but, of course, it is not limited to them. Sometimes even a figment of the  imagination that has not been realized in reality brings unexpected results. Russian thinker  Nikolai Fedorov expressed the idea of resurrection of the dead through a "parascientific"  method, which consisted in "collecting scattered ashes and combining them into bodies,  using for this purpose radiant images, or images left by waves from vibrations of every  molecule that has ever existed". The idea presupposed the settlement of living and  resurrected humanity on the planets of the Solar system and planets near distant stars. K. E.  Tsiolkovsky called Fedorov his ideological mentor and created the first practical  developments in the field of space rocket engineering. In turn, the chief designer of the first  artificial satellite and the first manned spacecraft, S. Korolev, considered Tsiolkovsky his  teacher. 

4. Lenin in conversation with Gorky: "I don't know anything better than Beethoven's  Apassionata, I'm ready to listen to it every day. Amazing, super-human music. I always  think, perhaps with a naive childish proud: what marvels men create! But I can't listen to  music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads  of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat  anyone on the head...". Сited in: Maxim Gorky. "V. I. Lenin". Collected works. Moscow;  1949. Vol. 17. Short stories, essays, memoirs 1924-1936. 

5. K. Marx and F. Engels. «The Manifesto of the Communist Party». 

6. Gayo Petrovich. "Reification". 1983. Dictionary of Marxist thought. Cambridge,  Massachusetts. pp. 411-413. 

7. The Marxist theorist Georg Lukacs mistakenly identified objectification and reification in  «History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics». 

8. Marx К., «Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie». В., 1953, S. 387.  9. Lenin V. I. "The economic content of narodism". Complete works. 5th Edition, vol. 1, p.  441. 

10. What kind of Althusser's "realism" is can be seen from his analysis of Carlo Bertolazzi's  play "El Nost Milan". The plot of the play that interested Althusser: the social bottom of  Milan at the end of the 19th century. Nina, the daughter of an old circus performer, is in love with a young clown from the same circus. But the clown dies. The scoundrel shopkeeper  Torgasso is trying to take Nina by force. But at that moment, the father appears. He kills  Torgasso with a knife, and then flees. After a while, Nina meets with her father in a women's flophouse. The father, personification of archaic prejudices, alienated morality and illusions  of the plebeian consciousness, tries to teach Nina. But there has been a change in her, now  she rejects everything that he had beeen teaching her. She came to the conclusion that  money decides everything, that Torgasso was right, not her father. Nina realized that she had a commodity - a young, beautiful body, and she needed to sell it more expensively, become  a kept woman for a rich lover or, at the very least, a highly paid prostitute. Althusser admires

Nina's act as a victory of "realism" over illusions. But from the point of view of the  communists, this is the victory of "capitalist realism", the replacement of some illusions by  others, subordination to a different kind of fetishism, the fetishism of money. Bertolazzi was  neither a social democrat nor an anarchist, so it would be difficult to expect him to  eventually lead the heroine of his work into the ranks of fighters for a new world, that is, to  genuine realism. The grievances are not against him, but against the "communist" Althusser. 

11. "Capital", Marx and Engels, Moscow: Complete works, vol. 23, p. 315, 1960. 12. It may seem that there is a discrepancy here. Why then high-tech manufacturing, such as IT  industry, brings more profit? In fact, it is quite logical. A new technology creates a new  market, and in this market one or more monopolies gain excess profits over a certain period  of time (for example: Microsoft or IT giants currently engaged in AI). 

13. Dostoevsky has an expressive description of proletarian and lumpen-proletarian London of  that time in his travel essay "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions". By the way,  Dostoevsky intuitively grasped the abyss of alienation. The story "The Dream of a  Ridiculous Man" is dedicated to the conflict of "knowledge about life" and "life itself". The  catch phrase from the novel "Idiot": "Beauty will save the world" was the wish of a former  socialist and genius that someday the alienation that disfigures people would disappear. 

14. K. Marx and F. Engels. "German ideology". Collected works, vol. 3, p. 69, Moscow, 1959. 15. K. Marx. "Economic manuscripts of 1857-59", Moscow: Complete works, vol. 46.1, 1969. 16. Postmodernism logically satisfies this demand with its ringing emptiness and cynical play. 17. J. Baudrillard. "The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures". AST Publishing House.  

2020. 

18. Marx K. "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right". K. Marx, F. Engels. Collected works,  vol. 1, p. 415, Moscow, 1955. 

19. There is even such a bizarre phrase: "human capital". It is defined as "a set of knowledge,  skills, and abilities of a person that he can use to generate income, taking into account the  current state of health". In this definition, we find the characteristic features of capitalism,  "two in one" at once - the "universal prostitution" of various human activities and the  reduction of human existence to "naked life", to biology, measured by quantitative  parameters — health, age, IQ level, etc. 

20. These ideologems turned against the feudal lords at a certain point. For example, English  peasants began to ask the question: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the  gentleman?" 

21. It is noteworthy that Karl Popper, one of the gurus of modern neoliberals, author of the  concept of an "Open Society", after thinking about the evolution of this society, came to the  conclusion that the next logical stage would be an "Abstract Society": "We could conceive of a society in which men practically never meet face to face – in which all business is  conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams,  and who go about in closed motor-cars. (Artificial insemination would allow even  propagation without a personal element)". (Karl Popper. "The Open Society and its  enemies." M. Cultural Initiative; Phoenix, 1992 ). 

22. P. K. Gandakin. «On Marx’s Materialism. (Marxism and the Position of Contemplation)».  https://www.geesemag.com/marxs-materialism