There has been a recent turn in alienation scholarship towards texts that Marx wrote post 1850, following the logic that Marx's developed form of the concept treats the objective or material conditions relating to ‘alienation’ rather than focusing on feelings or subjective states. However, when it comes to creating conditions of non-alienation, the mature Marx is ignored, and alienation scholarship routinely returns to the young Marx and his idea of a ‘genuine appropriation’ of lost essence – a solution utterly incompatible with solving alienation as it was ‘scientifically’ redefined. The objective theory of alienation is one of hyper-functional social integration, of human beings conflating exploitation and life. His early solution (to the opposite problem of exploitation registering to workers as the negation of life) is not only unfit for purpose but can be argued to exacerbate objective alienation. Though Adorno did not fully comprehend that Marx's mature anti-integration polemics were theories of de-alienation, he did understand that the young Marx was obsolete, in that fostering integration is no cure for excessive integration. This paper mobilises Adorno to call for a further development in alienation scholarship: if one looks to the mature Marx to define the problem of alienation, one ought as well listen to his solutions.
Lachlan Ross (2026) studied this question.