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UCSD PHIL 166 - MARX ON ALIENATED LABOR

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1MARX ON ALIENATED LABOR NOTE FOR PHILOSOPHY 166 SPRING, 2006 In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Karl Marx describes an undesirable condition he calls "alienated [estranged] labor" and associates the elimination of this condition with the abolition of market exchange and the development of communist society. In general, to be alienated from something is to lack wholehearted identification with it and instead to regard it as strange or alien and perhaps as an obstacle in one's way or as menacing to oneself. One speaks of alienation only where there is a prior expectation that one will identify with the thing in question as one's own or as closely connected to or continuous with one's self. (I might be alienated from my father, from my national community, or from the plans for my high school reunion, but not from the planet Jupiter, even if I regard this planet as strange, alien, and vaguely menacing.) Alienated labor as Marx conceives it. Marx in the section on "Estranged Labour" distinguished four aspects of alienated labor: alienation from the product of one's labor, from the labor process or one's activity of laboring, from one's "species being" or essential human nature, and from other human beings as a result of the character of one's work life. I won't here try to characterize the four aspects that we discussed in class (alienation from the process of work, the product of work, other people, and the species being); the most difficult aspect to understand is the "species being" idea. The picture of unalienated labor that emerges from Marx's account is roughly the ideal of work as it might be experienced by a creative artist or dedicated scientist: One chooses freely to work in ways that involve the development and exercise of one's talents and powers, express one's individual nature, and are inherently satisfying, in order to create a product whose disposition one controls, the work being done in order to serve the human community as well as oneself, and done in ways that promote friendly and harmonious relations to others. Being aware that one's work has all of these qualities, one identifies with it wholeheartedly as an important part of one's good. (This formulation isn't intended to be a definitive, canonical statement of what Marx is saying, but as a stimulant to your own efforts at interpretation.) That unalienated labor so understood would be nice to have is not very controversial. It's evidently a demanding ideal, which few individuals fully achieve in society as we know it. The unalienated labor ideal admits of degrees; one can be more or less alienated. The ideal of unalienated labor is internally complex, and contains several components, each of which might vary in degree: one could be very alienated along some dimensions but not others. Suppose that a starving artist is hired by a rich art patron who stipulates that the artist can create as she likes, for a subsistence wage, under the constraint that the end product will become the sole property of the patron. Here the imagined artist would have very little alienation from her laboring activity and a high level of alienation from the product of her labor. But Marx evidently regards alienated labor as a unified syndrome that tends to appear with all its various components. He is encouraged in this belief by concentration on the plight of the unskilled factory worker under early industrial capitalism.2Some of the features of alienated labor in Marx's characterization of it are subjective or attitudinal: The alienated laborer finds no joy in her work and aims to benefit herself and not the human community by her work. Some of the features of the alienated labor syndrome are objective: e.g., the alienated laborer lacks freedom to choose whether or not to work and in what ways to work, and she would lack this freedom whatever her attitudes toward this lack might be. To be alienated is not just to suffer various negative features in one's work life. In addition, one must respond to these features by experiencing one's labor as alien rather than as a part of one's life with which one wholeheartedly identifies. Alienated labor in precapitalist and capitalist economies; unalienated labor in communist society. Since Marx focuses on the situation of the industrial worker under capitalism, the question arises to what extent alienation is to be found in work activity at various stages of historical development. Marx is not forthcoming on this topic in the 1844 Manuscripts, but it seems obvious that labor can be alienated under noncapitalist economic arrangements. For example, recall the Biblical account of the condition of the Israelites in Egypt before Moses intervenes: the Israelites are state slaves made to perform arduous labor in the construction of monuments to Pharaoh. The Israelites suffer the condition of alienated labor. In a work written jointly with his collaborator Frederick Engels a year after the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx suggests that labor might fail to be alienated without achieving the ideal of unalienated labor: Call this labor prealienated. Marx writes (p. 178 of the Marx-Engels Reader) of craft labor in medieval times: "Thus there is found with medieval craftsmen an interest in their special work and proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason, however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him." The medieval craftsman has more control of his laboring activity, exhibits more of his individual talent, and has a greater opportunity for self-expression at work than the unskilled worker in a capitalist factory. Moreover, according to Marx the industrial worker is detached from his work, cares nothing for it, whereas the medieval craftsman identifies wholeheartedly with his work life. Yet Marx finds in the capitalist worker a significant freedom which the medieval craftsman evidently lacks. This freedom is so closely bound up with the phenomenon of alienation that we might call it the "freedom of alienation." In some important respect, then, Marx holds that the condition of the highly alienated worker in a market exchange economy represents an achievement, a kind of cultural progress, by comparison with his medieval


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UCSD PHIL 166 - MARX ON ALIENATED LABOR

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