Sacrifice for ornament. On alienated labour from a phenomenological perspective

Abstract

The following work means to relate the concept of alienated labour in Marxist theory with the notion of practical sacrifice from Edmund Husserl’s ethics, paving the way for a possible dialogue between two philosophies which have praxis as their princi-ple. The aforementioned, taking as a paradigmatic example what will be qualified as sacrificial labor in the floriculture sector in Mexico. A conceptual comparision will be made from a paradigmatic case as an example. Taking this form of labour as representative of the phenomenon of sacrifice described by Marx as an ingredient of alienated labour and by Husserl as a product of the decision between two absolut values. The investigation manages to locate, from this shared concept between the authors, a possible line of dialogue from the description of the structures of expe-rience, pointing to the enrichment of the phenomenological description on the loss of oneself thanks to the development of the concept of alienation whithin the defini-tion of labour.