Marx, Alienation and Dialectics Within Leisure

Although a foundational concept to leisure studies, alienation still holds significant promise for helping us understand leisure in contemporary society. Starting from Marx’s writing on alienation, this chapter illustrates the influence Marx’s writing and methods have had on leisure studies. Leisure studies draws much from Marx’s articulation of value as being produced from exchange. In the modern world, this exchange is found within the consumption model of leisure, making leisure not an escape from alienation, but rather as significant feature of modern alienation. Instead of seeing leisure as a salve to modern ills, Marx’s scholarship suggests that we look at how leisure is a historically constructed social and economic system that is rooted in the material conditions of production and the capitalist theory of value.