Marx on Alienation

philosophy bites: Jonathan Wolff on Marx on Alienation

"The worker is alienated in four different ways under capitalism... the most straightforward is alienation from the product. Imagine someone on a production line or someone in a factory makes things and those things are taken away from the worker. The worker doesn't come to own them... It's not just that the product is taken away from the worker. But rather the product sort of reappears in alien form. One thing to bear in mind in all the notions of alienation is not just that something is removed, two things come apart. But what is lost reappears in some sort of alien form. It will often be that something that is part of the human essence comes back to dominate or oppress human beings in some unexpected way... [On things like boom-bust cycles] Marx says that we become playthings of alien forces but the facts about them, the metaphysics of these forces is that they are our own product. Capitalism as a monster that controls us that we created so this really I think it is the notion of alienation from the product at its deepest for Marx...

Alienation from productive activity and here he has particularly production line technology in mind. Human beings in producing reduce themselves to a level of a machine so that human beings have this tremendous potential. Human beings can Marx says even create in accordance with the laws of beauty but for most workers under capitalism certainly as Marx saw it they didn't exercise their will or consciousness or design. They were just told what to do, act in a mechanical way and Marx says that though human beings are essentially productive we feel most human when we're away from work. When we are eating, drinking and procreating which is a sort of parody of what human life should be because we should be at our most human when we creative and working...

Alienation from species essence and alienation from other human beings. Now all of these categories are somewhat merged together but we've got the third one now which is alienation from species essence. What Marx means by this is a human beings as a species have a particular essence. There are things about human beings that are distinctive to those human beings and Marx claims that under capitalism the vast majority of human beings don't enjoy their essence in their daily activity. For Marx the essence splits into two: part of it is the notion of what is special about human beings? What distinguishes human beings from animals in terms of what can we do? And here a point we've already touched on. Marx says that human beings are essentially creative... many animals produce things. We do the same thing but we learn from each other. One generation is better at producing things than the previous generation... under capitalism the vast majority of us are not able to do that...

Marx and other economists have distinguished two different forms of division of labor. One is a social division of labor - some people make shoes, some people make hats and you exchange it and there's a division of labor within the workplace whereby you get great specialization of tasks. Very famous example of this: Adam Smith wrote about a pin factory... Imagine an alien looking down on human life and seeing people going to shop people going to work and not understanding money. And think of what human beings have achieved is this incredible global system of cooperation. The martian might think how wonderful. Human beings can cooperate in this fantastic way. They're all doing these things for each other...

For the ordinary person, unreflective person they go to work, they get some money and they go to shops and they buy things with that money and they're cut off from this incredible division of labor that we're all part of... Marx says were alienated from other human beings...

'Marx said it's not for him to write the recipes for the cook shops for the future'

'That does sound a bit of a cop out'...

Marx's working method quite often was to pace around the room dictating. It's said that Marx couldn't read his own hand writing"