Alienated labor
Alienated labor.
Peter Singer’s Analysis
Summary of chapter 4 of Peter Singer’s Marx: A very short introduction.1
Karl Marx wanted to gain a deeper explanation of the meaning and importance of economic laws. What is a deep explanation? The answer appears to be found in an article with the subtitle “Alienated labor” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Here, he makes a parallel argument to Feuerbach’s criticism of religion.
The more the worker externalizes himself from his labor, the more strongly he is alienated. As his inner life becomes poorer and there are fewer things he can call his own, the objective world he creates is a world opposite to his own. The same holds for religion. The more you put into God, the more empty you become. Workers put their lives into objects. This means that life does not belong to oneself but to things. … The fact that the worker’s labor is externalized into the product it creates not only means that the labor itself is made into an object, that is, an external being, but also means that it is made into a being that exists outside the worker as an independent and alien entity and has sufficient power to oppose the worker. The life that the worker lends to his goods insults the worker. Objects become hostile and alien to workers.
Next, Marx diagnoses the current alienated state of humanity. One of his premises is that ‘humans are species-beings’. This concept was originally from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but was slightly modified through Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx.
Hegel originally assumed Weltgeist. Ludwig Feuerbach transformed this into a less superstitious concept. For him, the difference between humans and animals is that humans recognize that other humans are of the same species as themselves and seek to participate in the perfection of the entire species. Humans misunderstood this as ‘God’, but in reality, it is humanity itself. Marx transforms this concept again and defines ‘productive life as species-life’. It is said that the act of production reveals humans as a species-being. The basis is that animals only produce according to immediate needs (spider webs, etc.), but humans produce according to universal standards.
He mentions three ways of alienation of workers:
- Alienation from the products of labor
- Alienation from labor activity itself
- Alienation from species-being
This again leads to the fourth alienation. Because workers obey capitalists and form a hostile relationship with them, capitalists are alien beings.
- Alienation between capitalists and workers