Ideological alienation: The culmination of alienation in post-revolutionary society

Abstract

In the condition of global social tension between mutually opposed economic-political systems, total alienation as the culmination of alieanation, appears on the scene in its two shapes which are to be taken as the extreme consequences of the same alienating process. The paper propounds the statement that reification, as the consequence of the overpowering of human consciousness by the market mechanism, turns out to be the culmination of the alienation of bourgeois society. In order to show how and why ideological alienation becomes the dominant form of the self-alienation of man in postrevolutionary society, the author first problematizes and then analyses the concept of ideology and along with it the concepts of alienation and reification.