Sunday, January 25, 2009
Alienation and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The questions posed and my reflections to this work of Marx appear in the first comment. Once again, I type them in word, but if I try to paste it into the text box, it pastes outside of the box, but I am allowed to do it as a reader post. Since I like to work within Word, this s how they will appear until I can learn another way.
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Notes on Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
ReplyDeleteIsaac Christiansen
1) What is "alienation" and what do you know about it at an experiential level (have you experienced/seen/felt it) and does reading Marx make you think or feel about alienation differently?
The definition of alienation, according to the Oxford American Dictionary (my Mac version) is typically used in a general sense of being estranged, or left out of a given group- however the word takes on many new meanings or levels in a Marxist sense. On one level it means that the worker is estranged from the result of his labor, the product. How? The capitalist owns his product, and so his product is alien to him. “In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation (Marx 1844; Tucker 1978).”
Furthermore, it means that the worker is estranged form the process of labor itself and is estranged from his own labor power, for he has sold his very labour power, and not merely the product of his labour, to a capitalist in return for a wage. (Under which much more could be said in terms of surplus value and the euphemism used by many economists of “free contract”). Marx asks himself how this is possible and elaborates. “First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being, that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself… External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of 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 (ibid.).
I have experienced all of the levels of alienation described by Marx here at various levels and at various jobs. I have sold my labour power to a pizza company many times in which I made part of pizzas and/or delivered them. In this time, during down time, I was not the owner of my labour power, even if all was done to use for any purpose of mine- one is to handle personal problems on personal time. If there was no more to be done, and the capitalist could no longer profitably use your labour power on a given day, you were sent home- sometimes without working at all and receiving no pay.
Also, at The Principal Financial Group I experienced alienation, (and I was also reading Marx at the time which heightened my awareness to many things going on- particularly in Wages, Labour and Capital) in many of the same ways. Within Principal as a call center representative, I was alienated from my very humanness. Human interaction, in what has been dubbed, emotional labour, was intensely monitored and the use of my knowledge was estranged from me. How? While answering a call, there were hundreds of “soft skills” scrutinized by a call review team, whose job it is to monitor the worker, as well as by machines that monitor your time available for calls. Any time you get up from your desk (even to go to the bathroom), you do it at the risk of hurting your “adherence”, which in turn impacts your pay- (along with many other criteria). Thus, I did not sell to Principal a give number of calls answered for any particular day, but my ability to answer them, to how they see fit- and was divorced from both the product of my labour and the process.
Reading Marx informs and heightens the awareness of exploitation and alienation. It also, extends the general (and legal) definition to the region of political economy. Reading Marx also informs the reader (as it did me) that one is not alone in these feelings of estrangement, reflected in low job satisfaction, and explains the difficulty in leaving a particular profession as your are paid only enough to minimally sustain you as a worker. Marx’s writings are both the antithesis of pusillanimity and perfunctoriness in critique, thus his writings drive at the heart of the issue as well as to the depth of it.
2) What of the Marx readings in Tucker did you find really hit home; that is, what had a strong and significant impact on you and what parts have left you a bit fuzzy as to what was going on and what could possibly been the point?
There are so many parts which hit home so, please pardon me if the answer is a wee longwinded. Marx begins to discuss the bi-polar nature of private property and discusses how to schools of economics, (one which reminds me of what Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic) even though they appear to be arguing necessitate their opposite. “The one side (Laudedale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and execrates thrift. The other, (Say, Ricardo) recommends thrift and execrates luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour (i.e. absolute thrift); and the latter admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth (i.e. luxury).” The whole passage is fantastic.
Here we can discern how use value is subverted to exchange value, and the hypocrisy of those who recommend thrift to the worker in order to realize luxury themselves. This is echoed also in his discussion of population, and in other Marxists critiques of Malthusian recommendations to the poor to slow down their reproduction without taking into consideration that in many cases poverty (particularly rural) necessitates large families (and not vice-versa). “Even the existence of men is a pure luxury; and if the worker is ethical he will be sparing in his procreation (ibid.).”
Also, the analysis and critique of the power of money is exceptionally profound. It reflects the luck of birth in a society divided by haves and have-nots. Here, he outlines the absence of ethics within a reality in which the possession of money is the determinant of merit in real (i.e. economic) terms. Should not society be based on something other that the whims and desires of the rich?
I could continue to indicate point after point, which rings of truth and resonates deeply, but if I were both honest and exhaustive, I would necessarily have reproduced the whole work.
If anything in here is not yet diaphanously clear (or perhaps incomplete), it may be in his descriptions of communisms, which leave little guide to those who have endeavored to embark on a socialist construction of society, or perhaps the term “negation of the negation” which must only be a positive.
Reference:
Marx, Karl [1844] 1978. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” pp 66-125 in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker New York W.W. Norton and Company.
The part that is confusing deals with his response to Hegel, and would require a course on Hegelian philosophy (for me) to truly orient me to Marx's critique, (which I take to be a return to the materialist argument essentially).
ReplyDeleteIsaac,
ReplyDeleteYour comment about Hegel is dead on as Dan and I agreed when we were talking last week.
I did have a course of Hegel and the only way I can remember anything I got from the course is to go reread a passage from Hegel and do a bit of research on the passage in order to figure out what the times and his peculiar issues inform us as to his point. I have never heard anyone say that the difference between Hegel and Marx was the quality of translations and so maybe a better one would not help. Save yourself the time, for after all, when was the last time you heard someone describe him or herself as a "Hegelian?"
Bill