On the Critique of Recent Theories of Alienation and Reification

The categories "alienation" and "reification", which were often used in an inflationary manner in the late 1960s to early 1980s, have re-entered the socio-philosophical discussion in the German-speaking world since the early 2000s. In this paper, these reactualisations are critically presented based on three examples and evaluated with reference to Karl Marx's theory. Although these reactualisations are based only on an unsatisfactory critique of capitalism, they reveal phenomena of alienation and reification in everyday life and in the intersubjective proximity of the present that remained excluded in Marx's theory with its primary focus on social structures.