Marx's theory of alienation
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Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, 'species-essence') as a consequence of the division of labour and living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.[1]
The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.
In the
Forms of alienation
The terms Entfremdung ("alienation" or "estrangement") and Entäusserung ("externalisation" or "alienation"), derived from
People are objectively alienated if the social world they inhabit is not a home.
People are subjectively alienated in two cases: 1) when the world they inhabit is a home but they fail to understand this; 2) when the world they inhabit is not a home, yet they believe it to be. Hegel believes the first of these two cases to be the most common cause of alienation. People are subjectively but not objectively alienated. They reject the modern social world because it appears to them as not a home, even though it objectively is. Hegel sees acceptance that subjective alienation is a persistent feature of modern social life as part of the task of becoming reconciled to the modern social world.[5] He wishes not to reform or change the institutions of the modern social world, but to change the way in which society is understood by its members.[6]
People are completely alienated if they are both subjectively and objectively alienated. Where Hegel believes this to be a condition unique to people in
Dimensions of alienated labour
Marx stated that in a
Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings . . . In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.[8]
In the
From a worker's product
The design of the product and how it is produced are determined, not by the producers who make it (the workers), nor by the consumers of the product (the buyers), but by the
From the act of production
In the
The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor is external to the worker,"[10]: 74 it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being.[10]: 74 A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another."[10]: 74 This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labour's form and direction belong to someone else.
From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-essence)
The
Conceptually, in the term species-essence, the word species describes the intrinsic human mental essence that is characterised by a "plurality of interests" and "psychological dynamism," whereby every individual has the desire and the tendency to engage in the many activities that promote mutual human survival and psychological well-being, by means of emotional connections with other people, with society. The psychic value of a human consists in being able to conceive (think) of the ends of their actions as purposeful ideas, which are distinct from the actions required to realise a given idea. That is, humans are able to objectify their intentions by means of an idea of themselves as "the subject" and an idea of the thing that they produce, "the object." Conversely, unlike a human being, an animal does not objectify itself as "the subject" nor its products as ideas, "the object," because an animal engages in directly self-sustaining actions that have neither a future intention, nor a conscious intention. Whereas a person's Gattungswesen does not exist independently of specific, historically conditioned activities, the essential nature of a human being is actualised when an individual— within their given historical circumstance— is free to subordinate their will to the internal demands they have imposed upon themselves by their imagination and not the external demands imposed upon individuals by other people.
Relations of production
Whatever the character of a person's consciousness (
Despite the ideological promise of industrialisation—that the mechanisation of industrial production would raise the mass of the workers from a brutish life of subsistence existence to honourable work—the division of labour inherent to the capitalist mode of production thwarted the human nature (
In the communist socio-economic organisation, the relations of production would operate the mode of production and employ each worker according to their abilities and benefit each worker according to their needs. Hence, each worker could direct their labour to productive work suitable to their own innate abilities, rather than be forced into a narrowly defined, minimum-wage "job" meant to extract maximal profit from individual labour as determined by and dictated under the capitalist mode of production. In the classless, collectively-managed communist society, the exchange of value between the objectified productive labour of one worker and the consumption benefit derived from that production will not be determined by or directed to the narrow interests of a bourgeois capitalist class, but instead will be directed to meet the needs of each producer and consumer. Although production will be differentiated by the degree of each worker's abilities, the purpose of the communist system of industrial production will be determined by the collective requirements of society, not by the profit-oriented demands of a capitalist social class who live at the expense of the greater society. Under the collective ownership of the means of production, the relation of each worker to the mode of production will be identical and will assume the character that corresponds to the universal interests of the communist society. The direct distribution of the fruits of the labour of each worker to fulfil the interests of the working class—and thus to an individual's own interest and benefit— will constitute an un-alienated state of labour conditions, which restores to the worker the fullest exercise and determination of their human nature.
From other workers
Capitalism reduces the labour of the worker to a commercial
Philosophical significance and influences
The concept of alienation does not originate with Marx. Marx's two main influences in his use of the term are Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.[12]
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
For Hegel, alienation consists in an "unhappy consciousness". By this term, Hegel means a misunderstood form of Christianity, or a Christianity that hasn't been interpreted according to Hegel's own pantheism.[12]
In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel described the stages in the development of the human Geist ('spirit'), by which men and women progress from ignorance to knowledge of the self and of the world. Developing Hegel's human-spirit proposition, Marx said that those poles of idealism— "spiritual ignorance" and "self-understanding"— are replaced with material categories, whereby "spiritual ignorance" becomes "alienation" and "self-understanding" becomes man's realisation of his Gattungswesen (species-essence).
Ludwig Feuerbach
The middle-period writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, where he critiques Christianity and philosophy, are pre-occupied with the problem of alienation.[13] In these works, Feuerbach argues that an inappropriate separation of individuals from their essential human nature is at the heart of Christianity.[14]
Feuerbach believes the alienation of modern individuals consists in their holding false beliefs about God. God is not an objective being, but is instead a projection of man's own essential predicates.[14] Christian belief entails the sacrifice, the practical denial or repression, of essential human characteristics. Feuerbach characterises his own work as having a therapeutic goal – healing the painful separation at the heart of alienation.[15]
Entfremdung and the theory of history
In Part I: "Feuerbach – Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook" of The German Ideology (1846), Karl Marx said the following:
Things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also, merely, to safeguard their very existence.[16]
That humans psychologically require the life activities that lead to their self-actualisation as persons remains a consideration of secondary historical relevance because the capitalist mode of production eventually will exploit and impoverish the proletariat until compelling them to social revolution for survival. Yet, social alienation remains a practical concern, especially among the contemporary philosophers of Marxist humanism. In The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (1992), Raya Dunayevskaya discusses and describes the existence of the desire for self-activity and self-actualisation among wage-labour workers struggling to achieve the elementary goals of material life in a capitalist economy.
Entfremdung and social class
In Chapter 4 of The Holy Family (1845), Marx said that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but that each social class experiences alienation in a different form:
The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and in the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement, the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis, the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, and the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.[17]
Criticism
In discussion of "
See also
- Commodity fetishism
- Critique of political economy
- Cultural evolution
- Theories of Georg Lukács
- The Society of the Spectacle
- Disenchantment
Footnotes
- ^ "Karl Marx on alienated labour". 2009.
- ^ Hardimon 1994, pp. 119–121.
- ^ a b Hardimon 1994, p. 120.
- ^ Hardimon 1994, pp. 120–121.
- ^ Hardimon 1994, p. 121.
- ^ Leopold 2007, p. 76.
- ^ Hardimon 1994, p. 122.
- ^ ISBN 9780231204477.
- ^ Jaeggi 2014, p. 11.
- ^ a b c Marx, Karl. [1844] 1932. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
- ^ Marx on Alienation
- ^ a b Wood 2007, p. 10.
- ^ Leopold 2007, pp. 205–206.
- ^ a b Leopold 2007, p. 206.
- ^ Leopold 2007, pp. 207–208.
- ^ Marx, Karl (1846). "Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook". The German Ideology.
- ^ Chapter 4 of The Holy Family- see under Critical Comment No. 2
- ^ Bullock, Allan, and Stephen Trombley, eds. 1999. "Alienation." Pp. 22 in The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought.
References
- Hardimon, Michael O. (1994). Hegel's Social Philosophy: the Project of Reconciliation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42914-5.
- Jaeggi, Rahel (2014). "Marx and Heidegger: Two Versions of Alienation Critique". In Neuhoser, Frederick (ed.). Alienation. Columbia University Press. pp. 11–21. ISBN 978-0-231-53759-9.
- Leopold, David (2007). The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics and Human Flourishing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-28935-4.
- ISBN 0-14-044574-9.
- ISBN 978-0-203-34001-1.
Further reading
- Althusser, Louis. 1965. For Marx. Verso.
- Avineri, Shlomo. Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hegel's Theory of the Modern State.
- Axelos, Kostas. Alienation and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx.
- Blackledge, Paul. 2008. "Marxism and Ethics." International Socialism 120.
- Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence.
- Dahms, Harry. 2006. "Does "Alienation" Have a Future? – Recapturing the Core of Critical Theory." In The Evolution of Alienation.
- Elster, Jon. 1985. Making Sense of Marx.
- Geras, Norman. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend. — discusses alienation and the related concept of human nature.
- Gouldner, Alvin W. 1980. "Alienation: From Hegel to Marx." Pp. 177–98 in The Two Marxisms. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Langman, Lauren, and Devorah K. Fishman, eds. 2006. The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium. Lanham.
- Mandel, Ernest. 1970. "The Causes of Alienation." International Socialist Review 31(3):19–23, 49–50.
- Mandel, Ernest, and George Novack. 1973. The Marxist Theory of Alienation (2nd ed.).
- Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory.
- Mészáros, István. 1970. Marx's Theory of Alienation.
- —— Lukács' The Young Hegel and Origins of the Concept of Alienation.
- Ollman, Bertell. 1976. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Pappenheim, Fritz. 1964. "Alienation in American Society." Monthly Review 52(2).
- Plamenatz, John. 1975. Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man.
- Schacht, Richard. 1970. Alienation.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Why Read Marx Today? — an introduction to the concept and types of Entfremdung.
- Wood, Allen W. "Part I: Alienation of Karl Marx." In The Arguments of the Philosophers.
- "Alienation," Glossary of Terms. Encyclopaedia of Marxism.
- "Ludwig Feuerbach." Encyclopaedia of Marxism.
External links
- Warburton, Nigel. 19 January 2015. "Karl Marx on Alienation," narrated by Gillian Anderson. A History of Ideas. UK: BBC Radio 4.