Morton 127: "we might argue that alienation means that there is some original essence that is deprived of its full expression in capitalism. There is some constantly present substance that gets parceled out, frozen, segmented, diverted, reformatted."
"This is commonly held to be the view of the early Marx. One argument for it is that if there is nothing underneath, how come we feel such suffering in capitalism?"
"Such an argument raises an immediate objection: it's superimposing something we can feel on top of something structural. It doesn't matter whether we can feel alienated or not: we just are alienated, and feeling alienated isn't what alienation means."
what it means is that "humans are prevented from the full exercise of their productive powers; within capitalism only a limited range of pleasure modes are available, no matter how wide-ranging they seem"
this is the position of "later Marx"--"The Marx of Capital and on isn't concerned with some original essence: there is none. [...] The very idea that there is some original essense that has been betrayed is precisely the ideological form that alienation takes within capitalism" (128)
if we believe that "appearances are superficial, that there is an underlying essence that is unaffected by capital, and therefore alienated to the extent that it can't find expression," then liberation would relieve us of "false appearances"
if we believe that the illusion, by contrast, is that there is a "difference between real us and commodified us," then liberation means "that this illusion collapses"--liberation relieves us of a "false reality"
Morton seems to believe that there is no "consistent self-present essence" (132) but that we are alienated from "spectral inconsistency"