Marx’s concept for the estrangement of the worker from their own human activity under capitalism. Developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (“Estranged Labour”).
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself.
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You reproduce yourself as a thing-for-sale, ever cheaper/more productive/dispensible.
Marx identifies four dimensions/aspects of alienation, each following from the previous:
Alienation from the product of labor
The product of your labor becomes the very force that dominates you.
Under capitalism, the total output of all workers (factories, infrastructure, technology, accumulated capital) confronts the working class as an alien power that controls them.
They built all of it, but it belongs to the capitalist. It gets sold, generates profit, that profit buys more machines, those machines replace you.The more productive they are, the more powerful it becomes, and the weaker they become relative to capital.
All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not.
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Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.The worker pours their life into the object, and that life now lives in the object, not in the worker.
Through Bach’s lens (real): capital gets implemented. It acquires causal structure: factories, machines, supply chains, legal systems. It acts on the world. It hires and fires, builds and destroys, reshapes cities and governments. The worker, meanwhile, gets de-implemented. Deskilled, interchangeable, stripped of autonomous causal power. Capital becomes more real (more causal structure, more degrees of freedom), the worker less so.
Same pattern as the religion analogy Marx uses: God is a human creation that gets implemented through institutions, buildings, armies, law. The more causal structure God acquires, the less the believer retains.
Refactor / desloppify the below
Alienation from the act of production
If the product is alien, the activity that produces it must be too. Work is not self-expression but self-denial. The worker feels at home only when not working.
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?
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First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature;
that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content
but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and
ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels
outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not
feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore
not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien
character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor
is shunned like the plague.
The appendage to the machine is the extreme form: the machine strips work of all content, the worker merely serves an automated process.
3. From species-being (Gattungswesen)
What distinguishes humans from animals is conscious, creative, universal production. Animals produce one-sidedly, under immediate physical need. Humans produce freely, universally, “in accordance with the laws of beauty.”
what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces
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universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man
produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.
An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product
belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal
forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst
man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to
apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in
accordance with the laws of beauty.
Estranged labor degrades this free activity to a mere means of physical survival. What makes us human becomes instrumental.
4. From other people
All the previous dimensions express themselves in how people relate to each other. Estrangement from one’s own nature means estrangement from others.
(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor,
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from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man
confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the
product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the
other man’s labor and object of labor.
In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is
estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.
The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is
realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.
Competition replaces cooperation. Social relations become market relations. People view each other “in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which [they find themselves] as a worker.”
" alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is a specific form of alienation; and commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification"
Alienation and private property
Marx inverts the usual assumption: private property appears to be the cause of alienated labor, but it is its consequence. Alienated labor produces the relation of the capitalist to labor. Private property is the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labor. The relationship then becomes reciprocal: private property perpetuates alienation.
Alienation from science
Link to originalCapitalism and Science
Capitalism does not make halt before the cultural or scientific world - It tries to put a common mindset into the masses, which is aligned to the establishment. Captial has an interest to cannibalise the will of the lower classes into supporting capitalism, which is reflected also in the scientific / academic community.
The profit economy transforms every research institute into a factory with its publish or perish mentality.
→ Loads and loads of pointless papers. The same work over and over again without any innovation.
Transclude of reason-in-revolt#^79e056People in the scientific community are extremely overworked, and forced to sell their labour power for really cheap, … The work for an endeavor of new knowledge turns into a work for survival, as academia is turned into a factory.
In an attempt to survive, the try to abide by the system’s rules. Try to follow what other researchers or companies push (see e.g. LLM craze, Quantum (without any actual breakthroughs), …).
Companies decide what research to pursue. Science, education, art, … are not free under capitalism.
marxist economics
labour power
Communism - The higher stage of communist society