Karl Marx was one of the founding fathers of sociology. He ideas were highly influential in establishing the socialist movement.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany, to a German-Jewish family. In 1848, Marx co-wrote The Communist Manifesto, alongside his close friend, and fellow supporter Fredrich Engels. This is his most famous piece of work. Marx’s main social theory was the alienation of the worker in a capitalist society.
From a Marxist perspective, the alienation of the worker discusses the limitations and loss of workers control over their work and lives due to the destruction of conscious creation. Marx had four dimensions to his theory of alienation: Alienation of the product, alienation from productive activity or work itself, alienation from other people, and alienation from ‘species being’. According to Marx, capitalism needed to be put to rest just like any other political oppression in order for a society’s emancipation to be complete.He believed that a society needed to be a political, economic and social democracy (Bramann, 2009). The main problem with capitalism for Marx was that he saw ‘us’ as a society, separated within this capitalistic society, that there was a gap between ‘human essence’ and human existence, meaning what we are as human beings and how we are living in today’s society.
Marx describes the ‘human essence’ to be social, creative, and productive (Marx, 43). His argument is that we’re not living as stated by this idea of ‘human essence’; therefore we are alienated in society.The first level of alienation that Marx discusses is that of the worker from the product. Marx’s defines the act of production by saying that it is continuous, because a society is unable to stop production as long as it is still consuming (Marx, 711).
The worker becomes a personal source of wealth for the owner of the workplace – the bourgeoisie. Marx said, “What we are is what we produce”, but under capitalism, the products that we create are not owned by us. The worker is the working class and the owner of the production means is the capitalist class.The portion of the product received by the working class is a vicious circle where the worker receives wages, which go toward the purchase of products, and are ironically put right back into the hands of the capitalist class (Marx, 712). This form of alienation can be put into practice with an example of a shop worker and the owner of the shop. The worker is given their share of the profit made from the product in wages.
The worker then spends their wages on products from another shop.Despite this not being an immediate proceeding between the worker and owner, the money is just circulated and arrives back in the hands of the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie. This example shows that capitalism depends on constant repetition of the working class. A modern example of this is prison inmates in the United States of America, a nation that so proudly flaunts their idea of ‘the land of the free’. There are 2. 3 million Americans behind bars, away from the public eye.
These are the “modern-day slaves of the 21st century”.Corporations exploit prison labour by hiring staggering amounts of convicts who are disenfranchised from society. These actions go almost completely unobserved by the public. The prisoners make for perfect employees, as they are unable to form a union and don’t need to be paid wages, if any (Khalek, 2011). The next level of alienation is the alienation between the worker and their work.
Alienation from the worker and their work is when the employee’s capacity to work no longer belongs to them, but to someone else (the bourgeoisie).The worker no longer has control of what they are producing, the hours they work, and there is no room for creativity. Marx and Engels state in The German Ideology that the essence of the individual is dependant on the physical condition that controls their production. Marx continues to argue that the relation between work and an established way of expressing their life is lost with capitalism. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels are in essence arguing that under capitalism, workers have become cogs in the machine that is capitalist production.
They are also lacking the decisions that go with the ownership of production means. Marx said that he believed individual ownership of production means was not feasible for the whole of society due to the increase of production scale in society. However, he encouraged communal ownership in some form, despite this, he didn’t promote pure socialism (Bramann, 2009). Repetition and specialisation were of concern to Marx.
He said that repetition of production, the division of labour, and specialisation reduced people’s work and narrowed down the work that could be done.Marx said that this brought about the destruction of conscious creation; workers are unable to truly express themselves in their working life. Furthermore, Marx stated that rather than a harmonious community; we are becoming a society that is in constant competition with one another. If we were to take an example of this destruction of conscious creation in modern society, we only need to look at corporative office buildings, large groups of people all working in the same place, doing the exact same work day in and day out. There is little room, if any, for expressing creativity.The labour is routine, with no control of the hours they work, their pay, or the conditions in which they carry out their jobs.
To look at the opposite side of this, we have an artist. While still opting to capitalist conventions, there is more sense of individualism and definitely a lot more room from creativity. An artist has the ability to choose who their audience is and how many hours they put into their work (Bramann, 2009). This brings me onto Marx’s third aspect of alienation, the alienation of the worker from others.There is no longer any cooperation, everyone is in constant competition.
The competition between the employers trying to push down wages but ratchet up the hours of work, and the worker wanting to move in the opposite direction. Then there is the competition with other workers for jobs in the first place. So what Marx is saying here is that there is a war of all against all, a mutual hostility among people due to the constant competition. In Capital, Marx talks about the division of labour, the separation of an individual’s actions and needs satisfied.
He talks of the nature of his labour as one-sided, but needs multi-sided. He goes on to describe the division of labour as a “web which has been and continues to be woven behind the backs of the producers of commodities” (Marx, 201). These aspects of alienation has historical value and is still relevant today in regards to the discrimination of women and in connection to this strive to compete against one another in the working place. In the United States, women earned 63. 9% of what their male colleagues were earning in 1951, despite this figure rising to 77% in 2011, there is little improvement.
Marx would argue here that women are continually discriminated against in this competitive, capitalist society. The fourth dimension of Marx’s alienation theory is the alienation of the worker’s ‘species being’. The species being combines the other three aspects and practically brings society on a whole into the spectrum, showing that not only individuals are being alienated from one another. What Marx is effectively saying is that under this capitalist ruled society, human beings simply cannot be human, so to speak. There is no sense of togetherness or unity within our society.The only way Marx saw through this was the necessary action of putting an end to capitalism, this was the only way in which society could become a harmonious community.
With a better sense of community, people will establish genuine connections with one another, effectively living in harmony with one another. Marx says that humans are social and communal beings; individualism is only created within the context of society. There is no such thing as a ‘self-created’ individual, it is purely a fabrication. True self-actualisation means to be closely part of a communal society, living amongst others and doing well by one another.Marx sees the working class to have the power to free human beings, generally speaking. This can bring forth the true possibility of human redemption.
This redemption, as stated by Marx, cannot be found in religion. God did not create human beings; god is an invention of humans. Marx says in his work Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “religion is the opiate of the people”; by this Marx is saying that religion acts like a drug addiction. With the blessing o god, people feel as if they are unable to be violated by life’s troubles.For Marx, this is not a genuine solution, he said that people’s lives aren’t substantially better due to religion, as soon as life starts to get bad, you’re going to want cling back to the substance. He said the world needs to be transformed and the condition that requires religion needs to be abolished in order for a harmonious society where people share genuine connections with each other, a good society to be established, then all the conditions where humans are humiliated, abandoned, and enslaved within this capitalist society can be overthrown.
This los of human essence within society as a whole can be easily found in society today. The notion of outsourcing business to third-world countries, primary American corporations, means higher profits can be made by getting people working for less than they would have to pay employees in the United States for their labour. The desire to create more wealth has disconnected relationships between production companies and their workers. In conclusion, Marx’s theory of alienation displays his comparisons between capitalism and the alienation of workers. There are four categories to Marx’s theory of alienation.
The first aspect is the alienation of the worker from the product; this is about the worker’s loss of determining how a product is made. The second is between the worker and their work; this looks at how the worker has lost the power to control the hours they work, the condition they work with and the destruction of their creative conscious. The third alienation is that between workers. This looks at the way in which people are competing with one another in order to stay on top, a sort of dog-eat-dog world, and a war of all against all.
The only relation people have is under unions in capitalist businesses such as office blocks and factories.The fourth alienation focuses on all three of the other aspects and looks at what Marx calls the species being. This is the alienation of society as a whole, the idea that we as humans are not living by this human essence, that there is a loss of their sense of community. While I don’t agree with a lot of Marx’s ideas, I think he has made some valid points, particularly that of our lost of a sense of community, I think with global capitalism, the world has become a much further spread place, the sense of belonging or kinship is not as strong as it once was. However I don’t believe communist society works in this day and age.
