ALIENATED LABOUR

Alienated Labour

Alienated Labour

Introduction

The idea of alienation in its broadest use therefore reflects this romantic intellectual theme and its popular rendition into the 1960s. It responds to what Cornelius Castoriadis would call the “demand of autonomy.” By the 60s, it came to represent a more generalized sense of being “out of it.” For Marx, in contrast, alienation had a more precise and detailed meaning; and though the Paris Manuscripts are often incomplete, and suggestive more than substantive, Marx's views on alienation are clear and strong, and typologized (Ollman, 2006).

Alienation, for Marx, refers centrally to the alienation of labour. The early Marx holds creative labour to be the essence of humanity. To live is to act, to transform the world and the self. Labour is the medium of this process (Markus, 2006). Marx thus works out of a tradition of philosophical anthropology, for which humanity is defined as creative or generative and social institutions are subjected to criticism on the grounds that they work against such qualities (Gould, 2008).

Discussion

What is wrong with capitalism, for the young Marx, is not that it is unfair or inefficient in its distribution, but that it denies the human essence. It denies the right creatively to labour. In the German language, some tension exists regarding what in English we call alienation. Literally, alienation is Entfremdung, where fremd is strange or alien, which of course presumes this prior original condition. Marx also refers, however, to Entausserung, which is usually translated as objectification. Human animals objectify themselves; we make our worlds; the bee makes its too, but we design ours first in our heads (Marx, 2005). Objectification is not stigmatic or negative in the way that alienation is; it refers to the expressionist sense of Ausdruck, that culture results from expressing something that is held to be innate in us (or in some of us).

Marx's typology of alienation shifts through four stages or movements, all connected to this ontology of labour. As Marx explains it, alienated labour involves, first, alienation from the object of labour, the thing produced (Gould, 2008). Alienation is a hard material fact; I produce for the other, for the master; I relinquish control over the results of production. I give over of my self and my labour to the other.

I objectify myself, here, but not in circumstances of my choosing; the necessary act of Entausserung, or objectification, is turned under the relations of private property into Entfremdung. Alienated labour involves, second, alienation from the process of production. Marx's ultimate value concern is with human activity and not the distribution of things. Humans are defined by their creative capacities. To be denied of the process creatively to labour is to be denied our humanity. This is the ontologically most significant aspect of alienation: alienation from the capacity to create, or to transform the world, nature, and culture through labour. Third, Marx insists, there is an additional dynamic (Ollman, 2006).

As we are alienated from the results of the process and the process of ...