Alienation

1. What is Alienation and what do you know about it at an experiential level (have you experienced /seen/felt of) and does reading Marx make you think or feel about alienation differently?

What is Alienation?

A dictionary definition of the term alienation is “withdrawing or separation of a person or his affections from an object or position of former attachment” or, in the case of property, “a conveyance of property to another” or transfer of ownership of title” (Webster, 2002). Marx develops the term Alienation by using the notions of separation and transferring something to a new owner. According to Marx, alienation is the separation of work or labour from the worker, and separation of the products of labour from the worker. The worker does not own his labor and the products of his labour. Both his labour and the product are owned and controlled by the employers (capitalists). Marx argues that alienation is manifested not only in the result of human labour but also in the act of production i.e. within the producing activity itself (73).

Marx argues that as the worker becomes poorer, the more wealth he produces, and the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes cheaper as he creates more commodities. As the value of the products increases, the more the worker is devalued. Therefore, the object that labor produces (labor’s product) confronts the worker’s labour as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour and it is expressed in form of an object which becomes material. Thus labor produces not only commodities but also produces itself and the worker as a commodity. The products produced by the worker become alien to him because the worker does not posses them. Thus the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. Alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him (71).

What do you know about alienation at an experiential level?

When I read the notion of alienation, what came to my mind was the assembly line workers. In one of the classes I took last semester, we watched the movie “the assembly line” where workers in the textile industry were alienated from human nature and the products of their labour. Workers were subjected to too much work and there were no policies in place or norms to protect them. Workers were powerless and not valued. It was the end product of their hard work which was of value to the employers. Life seemed meaningless and their complaints were not heard. Workers were socially isolated, dehumanized and estranged from their products. The products were owned by the employers and sold to consumers. Alienation leads to loss of control over work, lack of meaning in work, and the difficulty of self-expression in work. I observed a similar situation in the meat packing plants in Iowa, which we visited during summer last year. The Hispanic workers are completely alienated from work. When we visited the plant, I had an opportunity to talk to one of the workers who expressed a high level of powerlessness, social isolation and lack of control of production.

Does reading Marx make you think or feel about alienation differently?

What I feel about the notion of alienation is that it is context specific and its manifestation is highly driven by structural organizations. Marx tends to concentrate on capitalisms or private property as the only causes of alienation, and puts less emphasis on other institutional factors that govern what we do. Issues such as values, attitudes, policies, race, ethnicity which influence social organization could possibly lead to alienation. I think that there are many other social relations that could have effects similar to what Marx discusses such as gender. Work and labor as alienating refer only to work done in the capital-labor relationship. But work in general and production may be alienating in some of the same senses as Marx discusses. For example in Uganda, you find that majority of women (especially the illiterate) do not own the fruits of their hard work such as agricultural produce. After harvesting, the husbands control the harvest and decide how to use the money without consulting the women. According to Marx, the solution to alienation seems to be removal of factors that cause alienation rather than reorganizing societies to benefit from capitalism.

Marx makes me feel that in the process of production, man is transformed into something else and takes up a different position. However, I think that in the process of production, all factors of production are interdependent and relate to each other. Factors of production do not operate in isolation. Feeling alienated stems from personal attitudes and it is what one feels about him or herself that creates a feeling of alienation. I also noticed an element of male dominance in Marx’s discussion about alienation. He uses the word man and does not show the variations in alienation among different sexes.

2. What of the Marx reading in Tucker did you find really hit home?

When Marx emphasizes that labor is external to man and man does not own it. I agree with him especially in the capitalist community. He further goes ahead to stress that labor does not belong to man but in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. A result, man loses his human nature and feels himself as an animal. When man is at work, he does not feel at home but he feels at home when he is outside work. In Uganda, when people are subjected to hard work by their employers, they (workers) are referred to as donkeys. When such workers are away from work, they claim their employees treat them like donkeys because donkeys are over worked and fed only at the end of the day. This implies that when at work, workers feel dehumanized and treated like animals. They are expected to contain all the hard labor and stress as though they have no human senses. I think that when one buys your labor, they lose a sense of humanity and decide to exploit or manipulate you so as to recover the money invested in you.

What left me fuzzy?

I very much wanted to see variations in the level of alienation among different categories of the population such as the elites. To what extent are professionals such as professors alienated? The fact that elites can have control, meaning, and opportunities for self-fulfillment in their roles, to what extent can they be alienated and how? Towards the end of the section on estranged labor, Marx attempts to draw a cause - effect relationship between private property and alienated labor. On one hand, Marx indicates that private property is the product of alienated labor and on the other hand, he claims that private property is a means by which labor alienates itself. I think he did not come up with a clear relationship on what leads to what.

Reference

Tucker, R. c. 1978. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English language unabridged, Merrian-Webster Inc. 2002