Marxist Criticisms Of Capitalism

In Marxist thought, the material conditions produce individual as objects that are subject to domination. Capitalist societies create alienation and commodity fetishism, and societal structures become reified in the consciousness of individuals within a society and seem to be natural and unchangeable. In this way, the self is oppressed and isolated from the species-being of humanity. Likewise, nature is turned into something that is to be exploited and commodified. The mechanisms of capitalism are fundamentally those of domination, both of humanity and the rest of nature. Marxist thought, in essence, stresses the malleability of humanity based on the material conditions in which one finds oneself. It is due to this that “man's species being,

Nature is viewed as something to be conquered and controlled. It is to be turned against itself so that humanity may utilize nature in order to “use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.”4 Just as humans are to be reduced to nothing more than their work, nature is to be nothing more than the raw material for that work. The mentality of domination contains the subjugation of both humanity and the rest of nature, and they must be assailed

This is not to say that there are no differences between humans and other animals, or even that none of these are purely qualitative. There clearly are important distinctions between them, and it may even be valuable at times to rely on the old terminology, although not in a way that assigns reason or complex emotional capacities exclusively to humans. Part of this is because critical theory is right to stand against modes of thought that erase differences. Yet for Adorno and Horkheimer, the traditional break between humans and animals is reified. This goes beyond simply noting that humans are different from other animals (though it is curious that the distinctions between different kinds of non-human animal life are obscured), and posits animals as fundamentally alien from