Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 3
How Marx Traces the Roots of
Alienation to Capitalist Society
(page 6)
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The only exception exists when there is a union, and even then the workers only feel their humanity and solidarity when they are in direct confrontation with the capitalist in the defense of their working conditions. Most of the time the drive for profit with the method of alienated productivity dominates the social relations at work. This will remain to be the case as long as life at work is external and hostile to the human potential of the worker — to his/her ability to live a productive life that is human; the worker can transcend alienation only when he/she can express the growing positive self within a framework of productive work with others.
For in the capitalist system, the worker work for money, to survive and the accumulate things (if he/she has extra money). The worker does not experience work as part of his/her free life:
“For labor, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain his physical existence. Productive life is, however, species-life. It is life creating life. In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. Life itself [in the case of labor in capitalism] appears as a means of life. . .
“ . . . Thus alienated labor turns the species life of man[11], and also nature as his mental species-property, into an alien being and into a means for his individual existence. It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life.
“. . . In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life.”[12]
Since work occupies the biggest portion of the day, productive and satisfying life at work is central to our humanity. Thus the problem is not only the physical exhaustion from work. The alienation of the worker during working hours is quite intolerable psychologically. The deep stress from work effects all the social relations after work. The alienation of the worker during his/her working hours spreads to the rest of the worker’s life. It deeply effects the social relations of the worker to the husband/wife, lover, children, friends, and the worker’s well being; the psychological damages from the stress of work can last for a life time.
When the method of production — that is, the economic system that molds the basic structure of human life — stands in antagonism to the inner needs of our species and its potential evolution, the character of our species degenerates and becomes hostile to its potential. To put it graphically: our specie really evolved beyond the limitation of the cat. We do not need to behave toward each other as individualist cats who fight other cats to survive on their territories. With the advance of technology, we do not need to work all the time and compete with each other as we try to advance ourselves in this alienated world that is based on constant work. We are no longer animals trying to survive all the time. To develop our humanity and all its potential beyond the Darwin laws on the animal kingdom, we must overcome the limitation of the animal kingdom.
Class societies still uphold the antagonistic features of the animal kingdom, in which the survival at the expense of others is a key feature. Class societies hold back the development of the positive human potential that goes beyond that. They hold back what makes us human. As long as the social ego still adheres to the antagonistic social and economic system of class society, the human behind it cannot reach the deeper self; or as Marx puts it: the alienated labor turns the species life of a human being into an alien being. Our social and economic system stifled the real potential of our specie. This is in essence why the social ego of people is hostile to their deeper soul.
Eric Fromm summarized beautifully the problem of human alienation in capitalist society and Marx’s basic conception of it:
“For Marx as for Hegel, the concept of alienation is based on the distinction between existence and essence, on the fact that man’s existence is alienated from his essence, that in reality he is not what he potentially is, or to put it differently, that he is not what he ought to be, and that he ought to be that which he could be.”[13]
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[11] By the species life of man, Marx means what makes humans as a species different than other (animal) species, that is, our potential to develop our humanity through love, reasoning and compassion for others.
[12] From Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted in Marx’s Concept of Man by Erich Fromm, pages 101, 103, emphasis in original.
[13] Ibid., page 47, emphasis in original.