Umass Graduate Workshop in Economics 2016 the CONCEPT
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Annual New School – UMass Graduate Workshop in Economics 2016 THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION, ITS ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES IN CAPITALISM Dai Duong, PhD student in Economics Abstract This paper examines Marx’s treatment of workers and capitalists’ alienation in capitalism and numerous further research of forms of alienation. For Marx, wage-workers are alienated from products that they produced, from their working process, from fellowmen, and from human species. Meanwhile, capitalists are alienated to be greed and cruel because their private property encourages their sense of having. However, alienation spreads through society to dominate lives of various types of people, not just workers and capitalists. Alienation is different to each person in capitalism. Diversified forms of alienation are identified such as powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, normlessness, self-estrangement, lack of self, lack of meaning, loneliness, social alienation, and so on. Although alienation becomes pervasive in capitalism, the origin of alienation does not root in this mode of production but in commodity production, in which, division of labor play important role in causing alienation. From individualistic approach, alienation is the result of the human enigma that, on the one hand, human body is animal body which desires basic needs of living, on the other hand, human beings are thinking beings who desire to make sense of living, or freedom. Alienation leads to serious social and individual problems such as commodity fetishism, one-dimensional thought, and limiting freedom. It is difficult to overcome alienation when this phenomenon exists with a vicious cycle that reproduce alienation by itself. For each individual, alienation weakens his or her personality and constrains to live himself or herself life. Main Paper Alienation is a persistent phenomenon in the modern times. It is recognized in psychological and socio-economic processes. This research is to identify the concept of alienation which had been explored deliberately by Marx in capitalist mode of production in the 19th century. It is also useful to identify forms of alienation in in the 20th century because the state of alienation is not the same to each person in the society. Besides, the research figures out what causes alienation and its consequences to human beings as a society and as an individual. 1. Marx’s theory of alienation in the 19th century capitalism Alienation is a broad concept that is explored from diversified perspectives of theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, history, anthropology, education, literature, political sciences and political economy (Johnson, 1973: 24). Usually, it is considered as a negative challenge that individuals and society as a whole need to overcome (Bryce-Laporte and Thomas, 1976: xxiii). Before Marx, problems of alienation had been analysed, in particular, by Hegel and 1 Feuerbach. For Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), alienation is the process in which characteristics of the Geist (God or Spirit) exists externally to human beings. Consequently, Hegel’s understanding of the nature of human beings is built on ideal features of the supreme power (DoĞan, 2008: 62). In contrast, for Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), the alienation of human beings results in the image of God in which the image of God contains the alienated characteristics of human beings (Feuerbach, 1957: 195). Marx develops his theory of alienation against a background of the labour theory of value. He pays special attention not simply to alienation, but to specific forms of alienation under capitalism in which waged-workers and capitalists are alienated in different ways. The concern with alienation is more evident in his early writings (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Holy family (1844), and Grundrisse (1857)) although a special type of alienation termed “commodity fetishism” appears in his later work (in Volume I, Capital (1867)). Approaching from perspectives of religion, philosophy, and political economy, Marx examines the phenomenon of alienation in industrial capitalism in the 19th century. Generally, the theory of alienation is one of Marx’s great contributions to the academic literature together with the theory of labour value, theory of surplus value and so on (Singer, 2000: 46). For Marx, alienation refers to the phenomenon whereby human beings are estranged from human nature so that they live in the way they are not themselves in nature. In the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, after refusing the common notion “human as specie”, Marx claims that human nature is built from “the ensemble of the social relations” (McLellan, 2000: 172). The social relation changes over time so does human nature. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx claims that “all history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature”. Therefore, human nature is historically modified (McMurtry, 1978: 37). It is not fixed, but is made by and through human activity. Human nature is not based upon egoism, but sociality (Meszaros, 1970: 148 - 149). If essential social relations are broken (relations expanded upon below) human beings are not themselves, not as they should or could be. Broken essential social relations mean alienation (Ollman, 1976: 133). Alienation is a complex process of interaction that, whilst having its roots in production, produces structural changes in all parts of the human totality (Meszaros, 1970: 183). In that sense, alienation is viewed as a mistake, a defect that needs to be corrected by other processes (Ollman, 1976: 132). 2 Alienation degrades human beings by distorting their unique characteristics. Many of the qualities that distinguish human beings from other species are reduced to the lowest common denominator (Ollman, 1976: 134). Such degradation is caused because their main internal relations are interrupted, and then the alternative ones create alien characteristics. Hence, people become “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings” in different ways (Ollman, 1976: 155). Alienation emerges and embeds itself in the activity, thought, and lifestyle of the people who engage in commodity production (Yuill, 2011: 109). For Marx, both wage-workers and capitalists are alienated, but in different ways. Wage- workers’ are alienated by and from their labour; meanwhile, capitalist are alienated by and from their capital. Alienation of wage-workers Wage-workers are alienated from their labour power as the latter is sold as a commodity. The internal relation between wage-workers, their products, and their living activities is broken when they cannot determine what, how, and when to do something. At the same time, the external relations of wage-workers with fellow men and with human species are alienated. Wage-workers have no possession of the products that their labour power are embodied in. Hence, wage-workers lose degrees of independence in their working lives. Since the need for living labour in production is determined by capital, the living labour depends on the production and circulation of capital (dead labour). The more workers sacrifice living labour for capital – dead labour, the lower the status of workers in society as well as in production. This domination of dead labour over living labour is one of the key manifestations of workers’ alienation. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx explains that wage-workers are alienated in four ways during the working process. Firstly, workers are alienated from commodities, that is, from the goods and services produced by them – which can, of course, be non-material such as a computer programme, a book, or even a smile – e.g. workers such as air stewards or sales assistants. The commodity is the manifestation, the phenomenal form of alienated labour. The more commodities they produce does not guarantee that they have a better life. Indeed, the more commodities are produced, the stronger the power of the commodity exercised over workers because commodities have become powers independent of wage-workers and rule over them. This is an inversion of the relation between 3 producers and products, in which, the former is determined by the latter instead of determining the latter. Secondly, workers are alienated from their working activities because the product of their labour is sold and does not belong to them. The first and second types of alienation relate closely to each other. Marx asserted that “alienation appears not only in the result, but also in the process, of production, within productive activity itself. How could the worker stand in an alien relationship to the product of his activity if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself” (Marx, 1844: 98). It looks like workers become components of machines. Workers feel like strangers in the workplace, when work is not voluntary but compulsory (McLellan, 2000: 88, Ellis and Taylor, 2006). In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx underlined the meaninglessness of time spent in work when their alienated labour activities are for their existence as a species does (Tucker, 1978: 204- 205). The function of working is distorted from creating humanistic identities to transforming wage-workers to be part of a machine. The worker – machines relation has been reversed from the human usage of machines to the machinery usage of workers. To put it differently, workers have to follow the operation of machines. Initially, working distinguishes human beings from other species. Working is to live, not