Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 3
How Marx Traces the Roots of
Alienation to Capitalist Society
(page 5)
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Marx on the Roots of Alienation and the Role of Labor
For Marx, labor’s alienation is the basis for all other forms of alienation; human labor is as thing to be used as a mere unit of the machinery is the source of many social tensions. This is the source for many social relations whose essence is foreign and estranged. Even family relationships — in which many people release all the inhuman tension at work by treating the others as objects to be abused — can be traced to the role of alienated labor. Thus, human existence which is alienated from our essence starts where most of us spend most of our life — at work:
“The laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer.”[8]
Many view Marx as someone who wrote brilliant things for the 19th century, but whose writings are “outdated” for today’s modern capitalism. It is no longer the capitalism where the majority of workers use the monotonous motion of the wrench in the assembly line all day long, Marx’s critics contend. But Marx’s critique of work in capitalist society was not restricted to the brutal and dismal life of the workers in the 19th century which still exists today in third world countries and to a lesser degree in the advanced capitalist countries. Marx’s main criticism in regard to the treatment of the laborer is not focused on the cruelty of the psychical work. Marx was a profound humanist. He also focused his critique on what happened to the humanity of the workers. The laborer is disconnected from nature and his/her human essence. At work the laborer is transformed into a mere thing, a mere part of the machinery; or more accurately in today’s strong financial capitalism — which is based to a larger degree then the past on non-productive investment, bubble capital — the laborer is part of the investment; he/she is treated as money to generate more money. When the laborer generates profit the capitalist continues to invest; but when he/she stops producing profit, the capitalist withdraws the laborer like any other money on the market; the capitalist throws the workers to the street as a “downsizable” thing. For the capitalist the laborer is not a human being but a thing, to be discarded later. The recent example of Asia illustrates the case. European and American capitalists and financial institutions invested trillions of dollars — which included investing in buying many workers as laborers — as long as the investment generated huge profit. When the investment stopped generating profit, the capitalists withdrew the money and threw tens of millions of Asian workers back into subhuman conditions.
Marx demonstrated how capitalism treats the workers like possessions — things to be used like other machinery in the factory in the process of making a profit. In the process, the workers are sucked from their humanity and the potential to do productive work which is not hostile to their aliveness and human capacity. Work occupies the majority of the day. Thus, it is inevitable, that the alienation of the workers from their work estranges them from themselves and other people in general. It destroys the ability of the workers to live a productive life with love. Their internal life is becoming poorer, in proportion to the rise of alienation. They live the life of a commodity, or an animal, to be exploited, used, and discarded. Marx writes:
“We shall begin from a contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and content. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not creates only goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity. . .
“This fact simply implies that the object produces by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodies in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labor. The performance of work is at the same time its objectification. The performance of work is appears in the sphere of political economy as a vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation. . .
“All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself. The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodies in the product of his labor is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that is stands opposed him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as alien and hostile force.”[9]
Thus the alienation of labor in capitalism is the source of all alienation:
“Human alienation, and above all the relation of man to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship between each man and other men. Thus in the relationship of alienated labor every man regards other men according to the standards and relationships in which he finds himself placed as a worker.”[10]
The objectification of the laborer, that is, his/her transformation into a commodity and a thing, is the root of other forms of alienation. Does this fundamental reality no longer exist today? At the beginning of a new millennium capitalism provides outstanding advanced technologies. Yet, most people spend most of the waking hours in activities related to work and survival. Today as much as in the 19th century, a worker who spend most of the day at work is estranged from his/her potential humanity. The work is not his/her own. He/she are still an investment and part of the machinery. This remains as long as the worker cannot explore his/her humanity at work. This means relating to work and people at work in human way by expressing his/her real thoughts and feelings. But the workers cannot have solidarity with other workers without risking the job. Work for most people is a hated necessity. Their real thoughts and feelings during working hours must be censored: for most workers can be fired at any time for the expression of what they really think or feel about their situation.
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[8] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, I.c., page 536.
[9] From Karl Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted in Marx’s Concept of Man by Erich Fromm, pages 95-96, emphasis in original.
[10] Ibid. page 103.