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Marx Karl Marx represents one of the most controversial philosophical approaches in his researches and works. In his early writing on Alienated Labor, there is a clear and prevailing focus on the predicament of the laborer. In my eyes it is an attempt to draw a stark distinction between property owners and workers. The purpose of this paper is to view Marx's concept of alienation and how it affects a particular individual. To do so we will look at what Marx means by alienation, the different sorts of alienation that he uncovered, and the relationship between the capitalistic, class society and alienation itself. According to Oxford's English Dictionary, alienation is defined as estranged or to make hostile (19).
This is only the beginning of what alienation means to Karl Marx. Marx's philosophy, like much of existential thinking, represents a protest against mans alienation, his loss of himself and his transformation into a thing; it is a movement against the dehumanization and automatization of man inherent in the development of Western industrialism (Fromm, V). Marx was a believer in an inevitable revolution between capitalists, and the workers employed in their industries. He believed that the actual cost of any product is simply the price of material and most importantly, the labor employed to create it. However, the owner of the industry does no labor in creating the product, but rather buys a laborer and sells the results of that mans work. Marx therefore considered any profit made in the sale of the product to be stolen from the worker.
With this in mind, we turn to Marx's actual concept of alienation according to author Erich Fromm. Alienation (or estrangement) means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him. They stand above and against him as objects, even though they may be objects of his own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object (44). We see that this statement holds true when we read Marx's first manuscript of Alienated Labour. [W]e have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity, that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production (Bailey Gayle, 31). More specifically, alienation is a state of consciousness resulting from a specific method of relationship between men and objects.
In Karl Marx's eyes, there are a total of four different sorts of alienation. The first pertains to the alienation of the worker from the object of production. In general, Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. This fact simply implies that the object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposite to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer (32). By this, Marx means that the laborer is alienated from his creation in that once it is created it no longer belongs to him. It becomes property of the employer or capitalist.
The objectification of labor is in a sense the finished product that the worker creates. More specifically, the worker performs an act of labor creating an object. His expelled labor is the act that creates the product and is therefore materialized, or brought into existence, becoming objectified and now physically in existence! . This object of production now exists externally and independently of the worker. It is this independence of the object that outlines the alienation from the laborer. The alienation created by the objectification of the workers labor plays a major part in Marx's analysis, However, alienation appears not only in the result, but also in the process, of production, within productive activity itself (34).
We see that the product is an alien entity to the worker, but in order to achieve this alienation the production process itself must also be alien. The finished product ultimately summarizes the alienation in the work activity itself (34). In this production process the worker is de-humanized. The laborer feels a loss within himself rather than being fulfilled in his work. He feels at home only when he is at work and at work when he is at home. Simply put, he loses control of his waking life and becomes less than human.
The laborer is alienated because the work is no longer a part of his true nature and consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather then well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased (34). In general, the worker is alienated from the labor that he performs because in a sense, the labor is generated for the means of another person, namely his employer. The work that he does belongs not to him, but to someone else, therefore alienating him from it. As Marx puts it, this is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering[labor] as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him (35).
The worker is also alienated from the production process because he generally follows a given curriculum. The employer making the employee a mindless labourer defines this process. He performs work that does not benefit him but only the employer, therefore provoking a sense of alienation. This sort of alienation can also be considered as the division of labor. This division separates labor into two parts: manual or material labor, and mental labor; the manual labor, which is to be performed by the worker while the capitalist tackles the mental labor. This division of labor is best described by Marx when he writes, the division of laboring of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts (50).
Not only is a worker alienated from objectified labor and the production process, but also from his own species-being. Mans alienation from other men holds many of the same truths as the other sorts of alienation. This form of alienation can be seen as a basis for the other forms. This category of alienation can be further broken down into three sub-categories: alienation from fellow workers, alienation between worker and capitalist, and alienation of capitalist from capitalist. As Marx puts it, Workers competed against each other for jobs, and there were too many workers. For every worker who faltered or expressed dissatisfaction with working conditions, there were a dozen waiting at the employers door.
As a result, workers were also alienated from each other and, of course, from the capitalist, who was making money from exploiting them (Melchert, 520). Also flowing from the previous forms of alienation we can derive a view as to why the worker is alienated from the capitalist. In general, the two are separated because their goals are different. Each capitalist searches for employees that he can degrade to the cheapest commodity. It is the goal of the capitalist to profit from the objectified labour of the worker.
Paying the laborer the least amount of money possible accomplishes this. However, this view is alien to that of the laborers. The workers view compels him to strive for the highest paying job available. To turn back to Marx's early writing on alienated labor, he states, Thus we have now to grasp the real connection between this whole system of alienation - private property, acquisitiveness, the separation of labor, capital, and land, exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of man, monopoly and competition and the system of money (Baily Gayle, 32). As we see here, Marx is defining all the characteristics of a capitalistic society in relation to alienation.
With this in mind, it can only be true that the cause of alienation originates in a capitalistic, class society. Through the eyes of a person living in todays society, namely me, an assessment of Marx's analysis becomes apparent. Considering that Marx's writing on Alienated Labour was composed in the 19 th century, it would be absurd to claim that his arguments hold no ground. The aspects of each argument are still evident in society to this day. Today, men are alienated from their object of production, from the production process, from their species being, and finally from other men. It is this truth (that Marx's views are still applied today) that gives Marx's analysis its strength.
Alienation is present in all industries whether we believe it or not. Insofar as theyre being any weaknesses, I have found that there are no worthy points weak enough to touch on. After reviewing Karl Marx's thoughts on the meaning of alienation, the different sorts of alienation that he discussed, and the relationship of alienation to a capitalistic, class society, his concept of estrangement and how it affects a particular individual should be clearly evident. I feel that in the end, the attempt to draw a stark distinction between workers and property owners has been accomplished. Bibliography: T. Z.
Line, From Socrates To Sartre, New York: Viking Press 2 nd Edition, 1998 Bailey, Gordon, Not Gayle. Sociology: An Introduction. From the Classics to Contemporary Feminists. Toronto: Oxford, 1993. Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man.
New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966. Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. 3 rd Edition. Toronto: Mayfield, 1999. McLellan, David.
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
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