Description of the Alienated Labor Concept - Essay Example

Alienated Labor Institution Alienated labor To be alienated from something implies a situation where one lacks wholeheartedly the identification with something and instead regards it as strange and perhaps an obstacle in one’s way. An individual speaks of alienation only in situations where there is a preceding anticipation that one will recognize with the idea in question as one’s own or closely connected to or continuous with one’s self. Estranged labor can be separated into four which include: alienation from one’s action of laboring, from one’s indispensable human nature, and to conclude from the other human beings as an outcome of the character of one’s work. This essay will look at the concept of alienated labor in details. The alienated laborer normally finds no joy in the work that he does, and he ends at benefiting herself and not the community by her work. Features of alienated labor are objective in that the alienated laborer lacks freedom to choose whether or not to labor and in what traditions to labor and this lack of the freedom of choosing may bring about a negative attitude towards the job. One being estranged is not just to endure various unconstructive characteristics in one’s occupational life. Besides, one must act in response to these characteristics by experiencing one’s work as alien rather than as a fraction of one’s life with which one unconditionally identifies (Marx, 1844). Realization of labor appears to be a diminution that the worker is actually diminished to the point of starvation. Objectification appears to be a loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the most essential objects both in life and the aims of achieving her career goals. In reality, work itself becomes a thing of which he can take possession only with the greatest effort and that he can take possession only with the greatest effort and with most unpredictable interruptions. In most cases, the appropriation of the object appear as the alienation that the more objects the workers produces, the fewer he can own and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. In labor alienation, the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an actual alien object. According to this principle, the more the laborer exerts himself, the poorer his inner world becomes, and the less there is that belongs to him from his labor. In most cases the worker commits himself in the production of the commodity; finally the products no longer owned by him but to the objective. At times, the more the effort the worker applies, the more, poorer he becomes. What the product of his hand is he is not. The more the value of the products produced the poorer the worker. In the process of externalization of the product work is made to be an object, that is an external existence, and it exists outside the worker independently, an autonomous power, an alien, and opposed to the worker. The life given to an object conflicts the worker as a hostile and an alien (Marx, 1844). When the worker is forced by compulsion of economic necessity to go to work as a factory worker, he does not only experience himself as unfree but also does not identify himself even halfheartedly with his labor role. Externalization and estrangement are consequences of social structures that oppress people, denying them their essential humanity. Alienation is am objective condition inherent in the social and economic arrangements of capitalism. All the forms of production result in objectification, a process in which people manufacture goods that embody their imaginative talents yet come to set apart from their producers (Marx,1844). Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labor. Alienation of the worker from the product itself makes the act of production become a meaningless activity; hence it offers little or no intrinsic satisfaction. At times alienation affects the state of the mind and it brings about the feelings of powerlessness, discontent, and isolation at work especially when it takes place within the context of large, interpersonal, bureaucratic social organization. Alienation of labor makes a worker become a slave to his objects, in that first he gets an article of labor that is, he gets labor, and secondly, he also receives the means of subsistence. The first one enables him to exist as a worker and the second as a physical subject. The terminus of this slavery is that he can only maintain himself as a physical subject so long as he is a worker, and only as a physical of the worker. Estranged labor turns man’s being both environment and his religious species possessions, into a being strange to him, into a way to his personality reality, it estranges man’s individual body from him, as it does exterior nature and his religious essence, his human being (Marx, 1844). Externalization of labor makes the worker not to be part of his nature-and not to affirm himself to his work but deny himself, it makes him to feel miserable and unhappy, and he develops no free material and mental power but mortifies his flesh and ruins his brains. The worker feels at ease at the time he is only outside work, and during work he is outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working and at the time he is working he is not at home. His labor therefore, is not deliberate, but it is forced labor. It is normally not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means to satisfy other needs. We normally perceive that wages and all private property are identical; this is because when the product, the object of labor, at most times pays for the labor itself, then wages are only a necessary consequence of the alienation of labor. An enforced raising of wages would, therefore, be nothing but a better slave-salary and would not achieve either for the work or for labor human significance and dignity. In the actual sense, the wages that are paid to labor are a direct result of alienated labor; an alienated labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of one is necessarily the downfall of the other (Marx, 1844). Man is a typical being, not only for the reason that in practice and in theory he assumes the species as his objective, but this is only another way of communicating it, but also since he treats himself as a common and therefore, a free living being. The alienation of labor espouses disadvantages, as well as advantages. This alienation allows individuals to get payment that they use to buy the basic needs that they need for their day to day life. Also, the capitalists act in such a way to enable workers do better in their lives that they in fact do. Alienation also helps in that it clearly brings about a difference between different social classes. Alienation also makes people work hard with an aim of achieving their goals which in the actual sense raises their living standards. Production is the man’s dynamic species life. Through and since this production, environment appears as his work and his authenticity. The rationale of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s typical life: for he replaces himself not only, as in awareness, academically, but also actively, in authenticity, and therefore he considers himself in a world that he has fashioned. In the process of tearing away from people the object of his invention, therefore, alienated labor, consequently, tears him his typical life, his real species impartiality, and transforms his pros over animals into the shortcomings that his non-living body, nature, has derived from him. References Marx, K. (1844). Alienated labor. Committee for Marxist Direction. Read More