Karl Marx on Labor - Essay Example

What is produced, how it is produced, and how it is exchanged determine the diversity in people’s wealth, power, and social status (Elwell). Marx therefore, was primarily concerned with how people are related to the ‘means of production’ (Morrison 44) which embodies anything that people use to survive; in other words anything that provides how a man can “obtain livelihoods, produce income and acquire needs” (Morrison 44), such as tools, raw materials, employment that provides monetary rewards and land that provides food, drink, and fuel.

Further to Marx’s concept of means of production is that a person’s relationship to it, ascertains their position in society, their class (Ebeling 9). One class however, according to Marx has owned and controlled the means of production all through history; thus society is divided into classes based on economic status, with the owners of the means of production becoming the ruling class.  His theory, therefore, posits that the forces of production are conveyed through social relationships that are autonomous of individual purpose or will.

Marx called the ruling class the bourgeois society and defined them as those who live on the profits of the labor of others; the important point here is that for Marx, the possession of money does not in itself define bourgeoisie but by the fact that the money is increased by the employment and exploitation of other people’s labor. He called those who provide the labour power proletariats; although he did refer to other classes it was these two that formed the basis of society. The proletariat had no property and only had their labor on which to survive and obtain a monetary return for it; they, therefore, had to work for the bourgeoisie within an ever-recreating exploitative relationship, in that for the employer to make a profit, wages are kept low making it impossible for workers to gain property and move class.  For Marx, the social relationship is not only exploitative but is also contradictory, wherein the concerns of each party are opposed to each other (Quigley 3). He further argued that such a class system then was typified by dispute and class struggles (Giddens & Held 151) focussed on elements that encourage divides and disparities. In fact, for Marx, every aspect of society is based on such factors; government, family, institutions, and religion all help to promote and justify advantage and control for some at the detriment of others. His theories of conflict and power propose that capitalism manipulates the market and becomes more and more powerful and that they endeavor to dominate not only the financial systems via means of production but also the political policies and government (Smith and Rickett 952). It is the ideologies of the ruling class that prevail within a capitalist regime and therefore the workers or proletariat are seen merely as an object of a commodity (Quigley 2) and simply a means to an end; in other words, profit for the ruling class.

The proletariat, with no choice or control over the production or distribution of the products they produce, is therefore, according to Marx, disconnected from that which they manufacture and work on and they are only able to receive a small wage for that labor; thus what they produce does not belong to them in any way (Quigley 2). This separation from the product the workers produce is what Marx calls alienation of labor. Marx noted four aspects of alienation in terms of labor, the first of which is the separation of the worker from the product they produce; these products within capitalism are for sale on the market or for exchange over which the worker has no control (Giddens 5). The second aspect is separation from the production process itself, where within capitalism separation of the worker from the product means the process of production is active alienation. The third aspect of alienation is the separation of workers from their potential as humans, wherein they perform more like machines and less like men and women; the fourth and last aspect refers to alienation from others, which is degraded to market relationships (Giddens & Held 78) and thus become monetary relationships. The product or result of alienation is thus private property (Marx 33), and political economy, according to Marx (34) begins with the essence of production which is labor but gives nothing to the workers but plenty to private property. 

At that time communism was growing and the world was a very different place than it is today. Even so, it seems that much of what he predicted has transpired if not in the same way as he described;  much of what he purported has been validated over the last few years wherein governments have bailed out the big conglomerates – the private property owners – giving them everything but nothing to the workers, who on the most part are the most alienated laborers of all – the impoverished and abused workers from the developing countries.