"Everything is an endless sum of activities, one after the other, yet all are inextricably interconnected and determined. All these activities are divorced from the agent who is not part of them, but only deals with them, minds his own business, or - the ultimate absurdity - must undertake activities in order to live. It is 'the metamorphosis of personal into material powers,' which has left behind 'abstract individuals, deprived of all true vitality,' so that man's own activity confronts him as an alien power. This penetrates to the very foundation of capitalist society. It goes beneath the economic and ideological forms of the 'reality of an inhuman existence.' On the other hand, it confronts this with the reality of human existence demanding radical action."
Herbert Marcuse, "Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism," Telos 4 (Fall 1969): 6.
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