In
his first manuscript, Karl Marx discusses the estrangement of labor. He
explores the idea that the worker’s objects of production, which should
theoretically be a part of him or herself, becomes something alien. Even though
the significance of the object relates to the worker who creates it, society
places more importance on the product than the worker who produces it. This
leads to a disconnection between the fates of the worker and his or her
product. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the
more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever
cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Marx 71). This basic idea
begins Marx’s critique on estranged labor. He explores how the worker’s
alienation from his or her product is tied to alienation that occurs within the
scheme of production and alienation from his species (important parts of his
argument, but not ones I’m discussing in detail here). Towards the end of this
essay, Marx gets to the point in which he establishes that the alien product
the worker produces belongs to the one “in whose serve labor is done” (78) who
necessarily is another human. This seems to imply that the worker’s work
belongs to his or her bosses or the wealthy elites of society. Marx builds on
this to critique the idea of private property, as private property is a concept
that stems from alienated labor.
This
argument, especially the parts about how the object of labor becomes alienated from
the laboring person, that labor belongs to someone else, and that the whole
process creates and serves as an indictment of private property, was especially
interesting to me given the work I’ve been doing in another class. Although in
this other class, we haven’t discusses Marx in depth, he has come up a bit.
Furthermore, some of the material I’ve explored in the other class in a sense
supports Marx’s argument, which at least seems to me to imply that private
property comes from and goes against the interest of the worker’s relationship
to his or her product. In an iconic economic essay called “I, Pencil,” Lenard
Reid explores the pencil’s “family tree.” What he finds is that no one person
creates a pencil, just in the sense that no one person creates another person
but is instead a product of families and unions. The argument is that no one
person can create a pencil. Multiple workers doing different kind of job create
the pencil. If only one of those workers was placed in a room and told to make
a pencil, he or she would be unable to. This idea is accepted today in modern
economic theory, and it provides an interesting insight into alienated labor:
Can one really be alienated from something that never really was entirely his
or her own? On another note, in the book Free
Market Fairness, John Tomasi briefly makes the point that Americans today,
even Americans in the working class, respect the riches and private property of
the rich and do not wish to do away with private property. Mt question is this:
is it possible that the conception of work that does away with estranged labor
is related to the modern view of the working class towards private property?
Rephrasing your question a bit, I ask this in response: Is labor that significant? I know, it's a big, loaded question. But seriously, what if we don't place our lives' values upon the labor that we do? For instance, I love to sing, but I do not want to sing professionally. Singing is my hobby and I enjoy it very much. If I were placed into a job (like a bird in a cage) and required to sing, I would probably come to resent my labor - even if I had placed myself into that job, to earn money and support myself - because what had previously been a hobby would now be a laborious task, no longer a release and expression of my true self. With this example in mind, I cannot help but wonder: is Marx, and indeed Engels as well, placing too much emphasis upon labor? Am I reading this work in the wrong context? Laborers in America today do not work in sweatshops for inhumane numbers of hours. But, on the other hand, is it inhumane to call for some Americans to work in office cubicles or at McDonald's drive-thrus for what they may see as inhumane amounts of time? This whole rambling argument really has me thinking about what it means - in a contemporary context or even an abstract one - for labor to be "inhumane."
ReplyDeleteThe example of the pencil is an excellent way of applying Marx's theory to something concrete. You asked if one could be alienated from something that never was really entirely one's own, and I think for Marx this is precisely what alienation implies. Think about multiple workers building a pencil. Maybe one puts the wood in a machine that makes it pencil shaped, another drills a hole in the pencil, yet another inserts the graphite, someone paints it, someone puts on the eraser. In this situation the pencil is not the creation of any one worker, and looking at the pencil no worker can say, "that is me." For each worker the pencil is alien, it is other, and this constitutes Marx’s estrangement from the object. On Friday afternoon when that worker receives her pay she looks at the pay check.
ReplyDeleteWhen she looks at this piece of paper which is her very means of existence, the thing with which she will procure food and shelter, she cannot see herself in it. She can see no creativity, no beauty, not even an object, merely an in incomplete action, the putting on of a tiny pink piece of rubber, an eraser owned by another which she will place on a pencil owned by another, which will be sold to another, for the profit of another, all so that she can receive a piece of paper signed by another, so that she may purchase the right to live.
The more erasers she puts on pencils the less value the pencils have (as they become less scarce) and ultimately the less money she will receive. The more of herself that she puts into her work, the less means to survive (wages) she receives. She is alienated from the origin and the end result of the pencil (nature) and from the origin of her subsistence (nature via wages). Later we will learn that she is also alienated from her fellow workers with whom she is in competition, and from the capitalist who sees her as mere commodity.
As for your second question, Marx would probably say that the reason workers often do not desire to do away with private property is that they have internalized the capitalist consciousness. They essentially do not realize that the private property which they seek and the material aggrandizement they vainly strive for are the direct result of their own estrangement. Ultimately for Marx, things must get much, much worse before the preliterate will become conscious of its alienation and unite against the capitalist, but this unity and collective consciousness is hindered by capitalism’s superstructure which conditions all social institutions and which ultimately comes to condition even our subjective identities.
The question you pose is an interesting one, though it is step prior to where Marx begins in “Estranged Labour.” The peculiar nature of labor itself is not the focus of this manuscript, but how that labor, as something important to the individual, becomes alien to him. After having just looked through the first manuscript, I do not see that Marx ever explicitly claims that an individual’s labor belongs to the individual, but I would think that this association is Marx’s assumption. Marx does say that alien product appears as a loss of reality to the worker, and it is implicit that this reality is the worker’s. Marx’s view on labor as one’s own is mostly taken for granted… at least in this text, but let us see if we can go more in depth on this question.
ReplyDeleteWhat if labor was not our own at all to begin with? You suggest that the labor we take to be our own is really the result of a system of labor found in a historical sequence (I am generalizing from your proposition of the family and the pencil; no one person can create something idea). In this respect, a historical one, I think Marx’s ideas on species being could be helpful in understanding what view he might take. By acknowledging the estrangement from a species being, it appears that Marx may have taken into account your objection that labor is not simply one’s own, but a result of many other previous productions. The species being could be conceived of larger scope estrangement of the myopic estrangement of the object from the individual. I do not think Marx argues that these alienations can happen separately. If this is the case, they are really one and same phenomenon, which would entail that in the estrangement of the object from the individual is also the estrangement of the individual from the species—and vice versa—so that the estrangement is truly an affront on the level you suggest. The reality Marx speaks of, then, is taken from the very history of production that came prior to the enactment of alienation.
This would mean that you actually have not stepped outside of Marx’s theory as I supposed in the beginning of this comment.
One of your questions really struck me, when you asked if someone could be alienated from something that was never entirely his/her own. I think this is a solid question for Marx but I believe that if we only could work with things that were entirely our own we could never really work with anything. I don't think Marx is against communal labor at all, or working together to create something like a pencil. I think that he takes issue with how alienated each individual person is in each part of the process. I think Jonathan summarized Marx's view very well. In another point, just because the majority of Americans agree with the concept of private property does not mean it is the best most beneficial way to distribute resources. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible to reconcile estranged labor and private property.
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