Marxian Alienation and the Modern Workplace - Assignment Example

Marxian Alienation and the Modern Workplace I. Introduction The modern age witnessed a shifting attitude toward machines. Several scholars highlightthat the faith in the blessings of scientific and industrial development, which characterize the modern outlook, has been significantly undermined and has led to a clearer insight into the rivalry between the machine and the human soul. It is a fact that many individuals in Europe and in America are persuaded that the machine threatens the sacred values of humanity. They discovered it difficult to comprehend the very strong faith in technological advancement which motivated previous generations. This confidence in technology emerged from the state of affairs people confronted in the periods following the collapse of the medieval world. The individual, who until then had recognized himself involved into a universal design enveloping his physical and spiritual being, found himself displaced and casted out from the mystical natural dwellings which had protected and sheltered him in times of his unbending religious conviction (Ollman 1971). Now, in the modern period of burgeoning corporations, he was driven to erect himself a new abode, the pillars of which had to be in the existence of this world. In order to make this worldly home secure and accommodating became a crucial challenge. Individuals could act in response to the degree to which he triumphed in comprehending and familiarizing himself to the forces of nature and making use of them for the fulfilment of his own motives. Hence, the ground was set for man’s demand to the machine. Its supremacy appeared to guarantee the dominance of man’s independence (Pappenheim 1959). Technological advancement became categorized with human progress. Nowadays, people seem to have developed far away from this reliance in the machine, and several individuals respond with a disdainful smile to the wisdom of progress. Apparently, the change did not transpire over night. Even in the earlier period when the accomplishments of modern technology were blatantly admired, warning and disbelieving voices articulated themselves. In those days, nevertheless, the criticisms against the machine were fairly different from its denunciation in the modern period. In the past the accusations poured mostly from men who were more troubled by the economic impacts of rapid industrialization than by its effect on humanity’s soul. The paramount arguments to the impact that the advance of technology implied growth and contributed to man’s emancipation could not dispel their anxieties (Bock 1984). The threatened labourers continued to recognize the recent machines as their foes; and their loathing occasionally burst into violent riots, leading to significant ruin of machinery. II. From Social to Economic Man From the 1970s to the contemporary period, important new schools of thought and research have surfaced while concerns about alienation, now creates a Marxian challenge, persisted to provoke studies of the modern workplace. The current directions have emerged primarily from economics and from activist critiques of capitalism. In both of these supplies of knowledge, the perspective of the worker as a social being is deserted for an economic framework (Mayer 2000). The sweeping critiques have depicted workers as submissive objects manipulated by distant capitalistic components, or have abandoned them completely out of the picture. The latest and continued path of interest have characterized three key areas of literature, namely, “the labour process, the dual economy and dual or segmented labour markets, and earnings determination” (Simpson 1989, p. 572). Harry Braverman, a contemporary sociologist, released a radical social critique that emphasized massive transformations of labour, the workplace and the labourers caused by capitalists in order to strengthen their control over workers. Braverman’s degradation-of-work argument illustrated how the alienation of workers had evolved historically. The argument is in line with the other sociological premises recently put forth by sociologists about alienation but Braverman established his argument in clearly Marxist terms and thought beyond any previous writer to institute Marxism as a foremost perspective in industrial and occupational sociology. Braverman made use of the concept labor process to illustrate the technical nature of work, which had previously been referred to as the work process (Stinchcombe 1959). Dissimilarities between the implications of the concepts ‘labour’ and ‘work’ put forward the reorienting effect that Braverman’s framework had on perspective regarding labour, the workplace and the workers. Labour is “an economic commodity exchanged in the market” (Simpson 1989, p. 572) whereas work “describes the exertion of physical and mental effort to accomplish an end—an activity that a worker performs” (ibid). Braverman suggest that work had been corrupted by capitalism, transformed into plain labour. Scientific management, as espoused by Henry Taylor, and which became the foundation of modern corporation, estranged the hand from the brain and placed the brains in management and the hands in labour. Work became separated from skills as technological and bureaucratic management displaced the self-autonomy of skilled workers. This system of deskilling uniform work processes, deprived work of meaning, and ranked skill divisions among workers. It increased and regulated the proletariat, which came to integrate clerical and semi-professional livelihoods (Kaplan 1976). Braverman’s emphasis on skills had the consequence of conceptualizing the repercussions of the industrial transformation as scientific, psychological and economic relatively than social. He does not elucidate his meaning of skills, but because he perceives the degradation process as incorporating the estrangement of mental and physical actions, it appears that he has recognized skills as cognitive capabilities of workers and has then concluded further than that position to establish skills technical attributes of jobs. Sociological formulations of work founded on workers’ relations to one another, group power over decisions and actions, and standard definition of technological attachments are lacking (Zamudio 2004). Moreover, Braverman advocates the impact of technological adjustments and managerial control of workers in modern corporations. A Marxian alienation analysis which Braverman highlighted in his works has been supported by other sociologists, specifically with regard to the labour process in the modern workplace. There are other recent sociological arguments that show workers as bringers of extra-occupational orientations to their jobs, but these orientations barely influence their responses to the labour process (Simpson 1989). In a machine shop, workers endure the production process as a group and developed rules to limit production in a conflict with management over production objectives and pay systems. Or, workers experienced the labour process not as individual workers seeking for self-fulfilling work, but as group members whose rules arbitrated between them and managerial manipulations and technological restrictions (Zamudio 2004). On the other hand, yielding to powerlessness at work does not concede moral agency. Employees remain moral agents even thought they do as what they are told by the managers since they remain morally accountable for their actions and are unrestricted to refuse to comply in instances of conflict of interests. The circumstance would be different if employment demanded self-enslavement, but the conditions of the two agreements are really fairly discrete. Self-enslavement involves not merely alienation of an assertion to control in the collective created by the agreement but also, and more relevantly, alienation of the privilege to direct one’s own decisions and actions (ibid). To be slave in modern corporations, akin to the medieval feudalism, is to be stripped off the right to freedom or independence itself. The right to autonomy is fundamentally inalienable, but it is not that control which employees hand over to their superiors. The ordinary employee remains an independent driving force at work; however restricted he/she may feel by the rules of the corporation and by the demands of economic necessity (Mayer 2000). III. Alienation Takes on a Different Path When Marx coined the concept of alienation in his famous manuscripts about economy and philosophy, he described it as the “objectification and commodification of the worker in industrial society” (Zamudio 2004, p. 60). He argued that the labour process within capitalism necessitated that workers are no longer one with the products of their labour or over the production procedure itself. This separation from the fruits of one’s own labour, from the worker’s human innate capability to produce, implied that the object of production at present dealt with the worker as an antagonistic and alien entity (Tucker 1978). The significance of alienation made more sense throughout the industrial period. Labour, and not one’s individuality or humanity, was the source of alienation. Even though workers of race or ethnicity are compensated less than white workers in the factory, the essential commodity remains to be one’s labour in the physical domain. But, the transformation of work has distorted the circumstances of typical alienation in the labour process, where one’s labour and individuality are commodified to produce and sell products. Modern management in service-oriented corporations obviously shows that immigrant workers are perfect labour for the customer service industry, in which attitude and rapport with clients are the sought for skills. This emphasis on flexible skills gave rise to a greater role of one’s ethnic background in the labour process (Zamudio 2004). Therefore, with the shift from a goods-producing to a service-producing economy, it may be practical to rejuvenate the concept of alienation to comprehend working-class resistance in the modern world. IV. Conclusion Karl Marx has been criticized by contemporary intellectuals because of the failure of his prediction of a class struggle that would topple down capitalism to become a reality. However, examining the elements revolving around Marx’s assumptions, such as alienation, one can see that those are applicable up until today. Alienation has been an enduring component of Marx genius and this phenomenon has not been more manifest than in the modern workplace. The intensifying division of labour due to the application of scientific management has elevated the occurrence of alienation to primary scholarly concerns. Apparently, workers have their own self-identity and their own moral ascendancy and in the contemporary economic context there is an urgent need for the enhancement of these individual aspects due to the ever imposing threat of alienation in the workplace. As have been aforementioned, labor value is still the most important host of estrangement or alienation. Works Cited Bock, B. et al, (1984), The Impact of Modern Corporation, New York: Columbia University Press. Kaplan, M. A, (1976), Alienation and Identification, New York: Free Press. Mayer, R., (2000), Is There a Moral Right to Workplace Democracy? Social Theory and Practice , 301. Ollman, B., (1971), Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge, England: University Press. Pappenheim, F., (1959), The Alienation of Modern Man: An Interpretation Based on Marx and Tonnies,. New York: Monthly Review Press. Simpson, I. H., (1989), The Sociology of Work: Where Have the Workers Gone?, Social Forces , 563. Stinchcombe, A., (1959), Bureucratic and Craft Administration of Production: A Comparative Study, Administrative Science Quarterly , 168-87. Tucker, R. C., (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Zamudio, M., (2004), Alienation and Resistance: New Possibilities for Working-Class Formation, Social Justice , 60. Read More