Alienated Labor and The Operation of Capital: Is That All - Essay Example

?Alienated Labor and The Operation of Capital: Is That All? [ID In Marxist theory, the worker is alienated from themselves due to the operation of the class struggle (Novack and Mandel, 1972). “So much does the labor's realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital. All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of 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”. But since Marx, left movements have become more complex and embraced a more multi-modal operation of oppression (MacKinnon,1982). Michael Albert, for example, advances a “four forces” theory where four spheres of society (gender and kinship, race and culture, economy and polity) interact in what a Marxist would term a dialectical fashion to reproduce different oppressions, with the consequence that oppressions can be caused by one to all four of the spheres and the consequence that a gain in one sphere can be offset by increased problems in another (Albert and Hahnel, 1981, 18-38). Applying the four forces model, we see that, in fact, there are more sources for alienation than just the operation of capital. The traditional Marxist idea of alienated or “estranged” labor is simple enough. The fruits of one's labor goes to the capitalist, the circumstances under which the labor is controlled and done are mandated by the capitalist. The only thing the worker keeps is his pay. The problem is that this means that most people spend eight hours a day, far more when Marx was writing, in totalitarian environments (Albert and Hahnel, 1981). Further, it means that that most important part of their life, almost a third to a half of it, is not “theirs” but is done to service others. This alienates the worker from their own labor process. When they go to work, they are not their own man, their work is not their own, and the fruits of their work are not theirs. Note that, in any service industry, even a self-employed person (for whom the alienation model does not strictly apply) offers a product to someone else who then owns it. But that person at least owns their own tools, owns their own time, determines how to spend their time, etc. The process of alienation leads workers to become estranged from much of their own life, almost on auto-pilot. Immediate objections crop up. Let us imagine a future society that is not capitalist in any way: It has no markets, no private ownership of the means of production, no class relations to speak of. There is a landscaping worker's council. They collectively own their tools, make decisions for their workplace (how the break room functions), etc. A customer calls them and asks them to plant roses. The landscapers recommend violets, given the soil, climate and the colors of the area, but the customer insists on roses. The landscapers need to discharge that requirement, because the service provided by a landscaper is to make a customers' lawn more beautiful for them. Even a just society will have orders, and people producing labor not entirely under their control. Even within the worker's council, no worker will ever win every vote regarding their labor. The Marxist response would be that alienation is a specific consequence of the operation of capital, but how is that really different from the above except by a matter of degrees? Perhaps a more astute Marxist would argue, “Yes, but assuming I embrace your model of the post-capitalist state, the workers still control their tools, control their time, control all elements of their production. Of course they provide a service to customers, that is the task and that can't be changed”. This is a fair point, but it is nonetheless important to note that, in a strict sense, “alienation” from labor can't ever be completely eliminated. No one will ever have absolute autonomy over their workplace, or indeed anything in the economy or any of the other spheres of life, because absolute autonomy means denying that autonomy to others. Far more importantly, applying the four forces theory, it is clear that alienation can be caused structurally by more than the operation of class factors and this can impinge psychologically upon the worker in different ways. In the field of gender, a woman can feel alienated from her labor because of kinship relationships, the family, etc. (MacKinnon, 1982). Both Marxists and feminists would agree that tasks like doing dishes, child-rearing, going to PTA meetings, etc. have to be counted as “labor”, even though they're not remunerated, because they are the backbone tasks of society that must be done. These domestic tasks can be very alienating, almost a psychological assault. A woman can feel almost obligated by society, pushed by social norms into marriage and children, then forced to pick up and clean up, alienated from the independent life she used to live. A wife with a husband that doesn't help in the domestic tasks can feel virtually identical to a worker whose boss doesn't come out onto the factory floor. Further, many tasks are clearly gendered. Some workplaces, even though women work at them more than men, are certainly more alienated by class than by gender. A secretary, for example, is likely to be less bothered by the sexist treatment around her, unless it is very bad (and that is coincidence), than the fact that she is in such an inferior class position and is being heavily controlled. That having been said, in practice secretaries wield enormous influence because they manage things so strongly, which indicates that the alienation model in the economy isn't absolute: Even people at the lowest rungs can get quite a bit of power. A Marxist can call this a “contradiction of capitalism”, and it is a fair enough argument, but at the same time, can't any blemish on their model be claimed just to be a “contradiction”? Then there is the sexual orientation issue. A gay man might find himself alienated and needing to seek refuge with others due to constant messages from society that what he is and what he does is sinful. But when we come to women doing highly gendered and therefore subordinated tasks, like caretaking professions, they might very well feel that the alienation they experience dealing with a very unpleasant job is far more about them being a woman and actually caring about this work but finding it so unremittingly awful than it is about class. Class relationships, after all, do not necessitate putting old people into homes and letting them rot. That is the result of relationships in society. Similarly, in the field of racial relations, a slave or sharecropper in the South might have found that their alienation was fundamentally racial. It wasn't “the boss” who they toiled unjustly for, it was the white man. True, the situation may have been no better if they had black bosses, but that didn't change the racial relations at the time. Worse, the alienation from themselves extended far beyond the field of work. There was a constant psychic assault on the dignity of African-Americans in Jim Crow, a literal alienation in that they were made to be alien to the society, unwelcome, almost squatters allowed by the grace of the white man to live and prosper. A Marxist would reply that this is all the operation of class, that racism came from the need to divide and conquer workers as well as the relations between economy, but we will come to why this is not a compelling response. While this is not the 19th century, racial exploitation per se is still an issue. Highly exploited illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly in that position due to the operation of the global South and their coloring. It is “Mexicans” who pick crops and clean houses. Similarly, people in the inner city are likely to find themselves “alienated” from society as even the black middle class are overwhelmingly locked in with the black poor rather than their cohort. They still face daily assaults on their dignity from discrimination, media images, etc. For them, their alienation might be perceived in distinctly racial terms. A Marxist would reply that all of this is just superstructure analysis. It is the needs of capital that arranges the nuclear family and the domestic sphere thusly. It is the needs of capital that creates race the way it does. But the four spheres analysis helps explain why this Marxist reply is so uncompelling. First: Why is it women who are on the bottom of the gender hierarchy? Why not men? If the capitalist needs to create a distinction between people, why not between “tallies” and “shorties”, or people with brown eyes and people with blue? Racial signifiers were codified long before the capitalists, and gender oppression existed before capitalism. A Marxist would say that this is because of the operation of the deeper substructure, the economic and class relationships of prior societies, but that is no better. Someone like a Marxist who wanted to boil everything down to economic relationships would point out that, ultimately, everything is a matter of production, consumption, distribution or allocation. Clearly, then, everything is about class. But an anarchist or political scientist could counter that everything is politics. Everything is about decisions being made, power being exerted, political and social capital being expended, contacts being used, etc. Look closely enough, they'd say, and it's all pretty much like a parliament. Hold up, the critical race theorist argues. Everything's culture and ethnicity. Who we are and what is done is all cultural artifact. No, the feminist replies, it's all gender and kinship. Who we are and what is done is determined by how we were raised, our procreation patterns, etc. Ultimately, everything else is just a long exercise to procreate, right? Any theoretical model in a complex society can put itself at the center and say that others are just “superstructure”. This is just special pleading, handwaving. In fact, all four of the institutions mentioned serve alienating roles: They force people to become something else than what they would prefer, distorting their labor and their lives. Read More