Alienated work

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The alienated labor (also alienated labor ) is one of Karl Marx coined concept of alienation . For Marx, work is the central, all-grounding category , with the analysis of which he reveals alienation in the various social formations and makes it understandable.

"Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts"

Marx formulated the concept of alienated work in the economic-philosophical manuscripts of 1844, which were unpublished during his lifetime and which are Marx's first major political-economic work and were only published in 1932. Marx recognized that the worker produces the growing private property of the capitalist, who thereby exploits the worker . The private property is therefore the product of alienated labor, as well as means by which the alienation of the work will be reproduced. The worker therefore not only produces a growing number of goods that are alien to him, with them he also reproduces at the same time the wage labor relationship exploiting him and the commodity form of his work. With the ongoing "valorization of the world of things", the "devaluation of the human world in direct proportion increases". The more wealth he produces, the poorer the worker becomes. The alienation through the wage employment relationship between worker and capitalist manifests itself in four forms:

  1. The worker faces his work product as an alien being and an independent power. His work product does not belong to him, but to someone else.
  2. The own activity is an external activity that does not belong to the worker. The work activity does not satisfy the needs of the worker, it only serves as a means to satisfy needs outside of it , so that work is escaped as a plague unless there is material constraint. The externality of the work is shown in the fact that the work done is not the worker's own but belongs to someone else.
  3. Neither the generic character of man, the free and conscious activity, as well as his generic life, the working of the environment and society, are not possible for the worker, his generic nature is alien to him.
  4. A direct consequence of the alienation of work product, activity and the human being is the alienation of the human being from the human being.

Changes in the "Theses on Feuerbach" and "The German Ideology"

At the time of writing the economic-philosophical manuscripts, Marx was still heavily influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's terminology , which is reflected, for example, in the deliberations on the alienation of the genre. 1845 Marx criticized in his lifetime also unpublished until 1888 by Friedrich Engels out brought Theses on Feuerbach the fire Bach's materialism and his humanity . Feuerbach sees people and nature as finished objects and does not recognize that people manipulate and change their environment and themselves. The human being must therefore be understood as an ensemble of concrete social conditions and not as an abstraction that sits outside the real life processes of people. Those phenomena of reality that were grasped under the concept of alienation, as recorded in the work Die deutsche Ideologie (1845/46), which was also published in 1932 , could not be understood from an idea or an abstract human being. The alienation must be won from the real social contradictions that people must enter into in their life process. In order to combat those phenomena that have been conceived as alienation, one cannot appeal to an idea or the abstract human being; the social conditions that produced alienation would have to be changed.

In the work Die deutsche Ideologie, Marx also problematizes the concept of alienation in that it is idealistic and can therefore often be misinterpreted. There he only speaks of "alienation", "in order to remain understandable to the philosophers". By alienation, he means above all that the hierarchical social division of work , the establishment of social activity, in short the formation of classes and the associated disposal of foreign labor, restrict individuals in their free development. Social cooperation in the production of life does not appear to individuals as their own power; it is an alien force, standing outside of them , mediated by social relationships. This circumstance can only be eliminated if people, on the one hand, recognize and organize their own forces as social ones, i.e. This means that they recognize and eliminate the social contradictions that would result from the concrete social relationships of people. On the other hand, comprehensively developed productive forces are a prerequisite for abolishing the hierarchical division of labor. Thus, humans can consciously actively shape and change their environment; His social being is no longer opposed to him as a foreign power that determines him, but as an opportunity for comprehensive individual development.

"The capital"

In Marx's major economic work, Capital , alienated labor is not a theoretical category. Marx only occasionally uses the term in different contexts. Whether he systematically integrated the concept of alienation into his theory of the capitalist mode of production or whether he used other concepts is a matter of dispute.

“In manufacture and craft, the worker uses the tool, in the factory he uses the machine. There the movement of the work equipment starts from him, the movement of which he has to follow here. In the manufactory the workers form the links of a living mechanism. In the factory a dead mechanism exists independently of them, and they are incorporated into it as living appendages. ”Marx: Das Kapital MEW 23: 445

For example, Marx notes that the “independent and alienated form which the capitalist mode of production gives to the working conditions and the labor product in general towards the worker” develops with “the machinery into complete opposition” ( MEW 23: 455). He formulates this consideration in connection with the production of relative surplus value (increase in surplus value through increased productivity) and the real subsumption of labor power under capital . In big industry, the tools are not the means of the workers, but the workers are only accessories to the machinery of production.

Elsewhere, as in German ideology, he formulates alienation as a power that grows out of social relationships and confronts the actors as a foreign power. He writes that capital is "increasingly showing itself as a social power ... - but as an alienated, independent social power that confronts society as a thing and as the power of the capitalist through this thing." (MEW 25: 274)

In a summary of certain remarks in Capital , Marx takes up some points of alienated work, as he already formulated them in the economic-philosophical manuscripts:

“On the one hand, the production process continuously transforms material wealth into capital, into means of utilization and enjoyment for the capitalist. On the other hand, the worker continually emerges from the process as he entered it - personal source of wealth, but stripped of all means of realizing this wealth for himself. Since before his entry into the process his own labor is alienated from himself, appropriated to the capitalist, and incorporated into capital, it is constantly objectified during the process in another product. Since the process of production is at the same time the process of consumption of labor power by the capitalist, the laborer's product is not only continuously transformed into commodities, but into capital, value that sucks up the value-adding power, means of subsistence which people buy, means of production which the producer uses. The worker himself therefore constantly produces objective wealth as capital, a power that is alien to him, dominating and exploiting him, and the capitalist just as constantly produces labor power as subjective, abstract, separate from its own means of objectification and realization, existing in the mere physicality of the worker Source of wealth, in short the workers as wage laborers. This constant reproduction or perpetuation of the worker is the sine qua non of capitalist production. "(MEW 23: 595f.)

reception

Crucial works of Marxian alienation theory were not published until the 1930s, which is why earlier Marxist theorists could not deal with these Marxian considerations in the same way as later ones. The publication began a boom in receptions, which often tried to reinterpret the Marxian theory in the context of the changed source situation. The economic-philosophical manuscripts in particular were used to contrast them with real socialist practice.

The reception can be roughly divided into two directions. One saw in the early work the philosophical basis for later economic studies or the basic philosophical program of Marx. His work revolves around the conditions for abolishing the alienation of people in modern society and thus around the emancipation of people. Others, on the other hand, emphasized the theoretical break between the early work and the later - Marxist - works. In his early work, Marx argued in the ideas of Feuerbach and Friedrich Hegel . For example, he repeatedly resorts to Feuerbach's version of the genre of human beings (as he criticizes them in the theses on Feuerbach) and otherwise thinks in terms of Feuerbach and Hegel. The theoretical revolution of Marx consists precisely in the break with Hegel and Feuerbach. The concept of alienation, which was later practically abandoned by Marx, suggests that he replaced this theoretical concept with other concepts. The theses formulated in the economic-philosophical manuscripts can therefore not be understood from this second perspective as Marx's philosophical program.

literature

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