“Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express their essence. Human beings are essentially productive creatures, but, Marx alleges, under capitalism they produce in an inhuman way.”

The above quote comes from Jonathan Wolff’s book, Why Read Marx Today? It’s a great book, and I thought about it recently while reading an article that Gordon Marino wrote in the NYT. I like his conclusion in the article, which takes into account Miya Tokumitsu’s argument–in regard to doing work that we love–that “sometimes we should do what we hate, or what most needs doing, and do it as best we can.”

Early on in the article Marino describes being an occupational counselor, having to counsel students who were faced with the grueling decision of having to pick an occupation that they could live with. Now I’ve most certainly had issues with work, but the question for me as a young high school or college student was never ‘what do I love to do?’ it was more, ‘why does work suck so much?’ I was always a poor student in school, so for me, worrying about what my “career” would be was never something that I lost much sleep over. To be honest, I fully expected to be someone who worked in a factory the rest of my life because, for one, I barely made it though high school. Perhaps my adolescent rebellion and bad grades, spared me from having to deal with the existential anxiety of “following your heart” that most kids (college and high school age alike) seem to deal with each year around graduation time.

The problem I did encounter, however, while out there working in factories and print shops–and which I fully encountered while working in an advertising agency–is the problem of alienation. I remember first learning about Karl Marx’s theory of alienation and saying something to myself like, “Yeah! That fits my experience exactly.”

Essence and Existence
In german philosophy, the term alienation has a deeper meaning than the colloquial meaning of dislocation or disorientation. For philosophers like Hegel, alienation means that things which belong together are torn apart; in this case, essence and existence. Karl Marx was very familiar with German philosophy, and Marx’s observation was that humans aren’t living in accordance with the way they ought to live. For marx, the essence of human beings and existence of human beings was being torn apart.

One might rightly ask: Isn’t this just the human condition, that we’re constantly faced with this feeling of being torn from the whole? But Marx would say no. The human condition under capitalism, according to Marx, is not necessarily the human condition. For Marx, it is possible to conceive of social conditions where human life is lived in accordance with it’s essence. This is the goal of social thought and action, for Marx, to get to the “good life.”

According to Marx, in a capitalist society the worker is alienated in four different ways:

1. Alienation from Product – Three parts to this one: separation, mystification and domination.

Separation:
This is the most straightforward and common sense observation. Basically, “the worker produces an object, yet has no say or control over the future use or possession of that object. In this sense, then, the worker, individually, is separated from, or alienated from, that product” (Wolff, p.31).

Mystification:
This is a fairly simple and excellent observation. In essence, the things we produce re-appear in alien form. For example, we don’t know how the things around us work, even though the things of our world are largely human creations. A good example here is that I don’t really know how my refrigerator works, even after it’s been explained to me, it’s still a mystery. As Wolff puts it, “we human beings have created a world that we simply do not understand; we are strangers in our own world” (Wolff, p.32).

Domination:
Marx’s observation about the domination of products over us is remarkably similar to McLuhan’s fourth law of media: every human invention can, when pushed to the extreme, reverse and become the opposite of what it was intended for. Wolff again:

“Production line technology is the chief culprit. But who invented this technology, and who built it? We did. Thus it is an example of a product that dominates us.”

Of course the idea here goes much deeper. Ultimately, according to Wolff and Marx, the market is essentially a human invention, “simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption” (Wolff p.33), and in a very real way, we are at the mercy of the so called “market forces.”

2. Alienation from Productive Activity – I think this is perhaps the aspect of alienation I encountered the most in my experience.

Basically, according to Wolff, each individual is “reduced to performing a highly repetitive, mindless task, with little understanding of their place in the total process. We become little more than machines, programmed to make the same movements over and over again” (Wolff, p.34).

I experienced this aspect of alienation most starkly in my time working at an advertising agency as a designer. A division of labor of the worst kind, I was purposefully left in the dark about certain aspects of projects and, god forbid, I was never allowed to deal directly with clients; my briefings came from project managers. I see clearly now that this is a standard practice in capitalist enterprises. Nevertheless, without complete involvement in projects, I was left feeling alienated from my work in a very substantial way; I had no sense of ownership. I  half-jokingly describe the experience as “soul-sucking.”

3. Alienation from Species Essence – This aspect of alienation has two dimensions, one dimension is closely tied to the above aspect of productive activity, and the other ties into the next dimension, alienation from other human beings.

Biology aside, what makes humans a distinctive kind of creature? This is the question Marx borrowed from Feuerbach and answered by saying two things:

a. Social productive activity in accordance with human self-determination and consciousness.
b. Our co-operation throughout history.

So, in other words, unlike animals such as beavers (who make dams), humans can produce a wide variety of things, and do so in elaborate and unpredictable ways. Likewise, humans also have the benefit of learning and building upon our past, which other animals don’t necessarily seem to do so much.

The other type of human essence that is denied under a capitalist system, according to Marx, is our communal nature. This leads into the fourth type of alienation.

4. Alienation From Each Other

Wolff sums up this last domain nicely:

“Here the essential point is simply that we do not appreciate our ‘species-life’ for what it is. Rather than conceiving of ourselves as members of the vast scheme of co-operation just described, we think of ourselves as people who go to work to earn money, and then go to shops to spend it. We are people with tunnel vision. As Marx somewhat obscurely puts it: we use our species-life as a means to individual life. In other words the way in which we pursue our self-interest would not even be possible if we did not have a communal species-essence. Yet we utterly disregard this communal aspect of our lives. We barely give a thought to the question of who will use the things we make, and even less to how the objects we purchase came into existence. We screen everything off except our immediate consumption decision” (Wolff, p.37).

So, again, after learning about Marx’s theory of alienation I was able to make more sense of my negative feelings towards work. I, presumably like most people, had always felt the most human away from work, doing things like eating, or drinking, socializing or being with loved ones. I took this to mean that these things were of the most important things in life, which of course they are, and that work was just supposed to be terrible. But I still felt the need to create and be productive, and that impulse couldn’t–and shouldn’t–be ignored.

In an effort to bring this back around to the Marino article, I really feel that no account or exploration of work is complete without Marx’s vision of alienation. The reason for this, I think, is because when people say things like, “I want to do something that I love,” what they might be insinuating is perhaps something closer to, “I don’t want the most engaging part of my day to be the drive to and from work.” In other words, we long to feel like humans both at work as well as away from work.

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Photo credit: Kramer O’Neill

Tags:alienationeconomicsGordon MarinoHappinessKarl Marxlaborwork