Lecture Notes, Marx, p.

PHILOSOPHY 1100: THE MEANING OF LIFE Lecture Notes: Marx's "Alienated Labor" Important Events in Marxs life 1818 Born in Trier 1824 (age 6): Family converts to Lutheranism from judaism 1835-1841 (ages 17-23): Studies Law in Bonne, Philosophy and History in Berlin, and completes his doctorate in Jena. 1841-1843 (ages 23-25): Editor of Cologne's Reinische Zeitung left leading newspaper, shut down 1843 (age 25): Moves to Paris, Meets Engels. - supporter and collabrator 1844 (age 26): Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts only became published 100 years later 1845 (age 27): Expelled from France. he became more radical as time went on and was expelled 1845 (age 27): Moves to Brussels. 1848 (age 30): The Communist Manifesto - known for most 1848 (age 30): expelled from Brussels 1848 (age 30): Returns to Cologne to edit Neue Reinische Zeitung. 1849 (age 31): Arrested and expelled from Prussia - because of work on paper 1849 (age 31): Moves to London 1867 (age 49): First volume of Das Kapital published. - major economic work 1883 (agw 65): Dies
- still no Communist countries after death

Alienated Labour (1844)

- written when he was 26 - earlier period - what is wrong not how to x

Aristotle emphasized that what makes for a good life is our engaging in a certain sort of activity not just how we feel during our lives. Marx picks up on this thought and defends the idea that our capability for certain sort of creative work is what makes us distinctively human, and engaging in such work is essential to having a good and meaningful life. Aristotle (and Athenians generally) wouldnt have considered work to be an important activity of this sort (that was what slaves were for), but both Marx and Aristotle could agree with the claims that:
Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself. For, in a word, everything that we choose we choose for the sake of something else-except happiness, which is an end. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself ... seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity. (Aristotle, p. 11)

Work then, is what can make for a good life, but not just any sort of work will do this. Marx's main criticism of non-communist societies, particularly capitalist ones, was not so much that the division of wealth was unequal, but that labor was, as he put it, "Alienated". In the manuscript, "Alienated Labor" (written when he was 26), Marx argues that labor is alienated in four ways. In particular:

Lecture Notes, Marx, p.2

1. Workers are alienated from the product of work. (pp. 1-2) 2. Workers are alienated from the act of production. (p. 2) 3. Workers are alienated from their "species being". (pp. 2-3) 4. Workers are alienated from other people. (p. 4) 1. Alienation from the product of work
- salary + factory workers

The first sense in which labor is alienated is that workers are alienated from the product of their work. While it is natural for one to identify with the product of one's productive activity just as one would identify with one's own child, this relationship is undermined by the fact that the product of their labor is owned by somebody else. Indeed, since the more productive the workers are, the fewer of them are needed ("The more commodities the worker produces, the cheaper a commodity he becomes" (p. 1)), the workers well-being can seem inversely proportional to the value of what he or she creates. As Marx puts it:
the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For ... the more the worker exhausts himself, the more powerful the alien world of objects ... becomes, the poorer he and his inner world become. (p. 1)

This results in a situation where labor produces "marvels", "palaces", "beauty" and "intelligence" for the owners of the means of production, the workers themselves end up only with "deprivation", "hovels", "deformity", "imbecility" and "cretinism" (p.2). 2. Alienation from the act of production
- before welfare and unemployment money you would end up starving

It is not surprising that once a worker is alienated from the product of his productive activity, he or she will also be alienated from that productive activity itself, and this is precisely what Marx sees with the modern worker. As he puts it:
The worker ... is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His work ... is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying needs external to it. (p.2)

The most important problem here is that work has become, as Aristotle would put it, something that is just a means to other ends, not an end in itself. (That is, it has become an instrumental rather than an intrinsic good.) We choose work for the sake of other things, not for its own sake. It is something that has good consequences (a salary), but is itself burdensome. This alienation from our productive activity is manifested in the fact that, if some stroke of luck (an inheritance, a lottery, etc.) frees a person from the financial constraints they felt before, they almost immediately quit their jobs and avoid such work like the plague (p. 2). If labor were not alienated, on the other hand, workers would view labor as not only something that has good consequences, but also as something that is good for its own sake. In such a context, people would find satisfaction with their work and would thus be able to identify with the largest, and most productive, part of their lives. We currently work simply in order to live, but in non-alienated conditions, one would live primarily in order to work. It is in light of this inversion that Marx claims that:
- completely not enjoying = forced labour - if i won the lottery i wouldn't do this job - job only for economic accessibility - only good thing is the pay check - the things you buy at the end

- alienation = dominant position in industrial society

- free time = not time spending at work (enjoyment for personal pleasure)

- eat at right restaurants + buying nice things - feel free while doing animalistic things (eating, sleeping, procreating)

Lecture Notes, Marx, p.3

the worker ... feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his shelter and his finery while in his human functions he feels himself nothing more than an animal. (p. 2)

The bits of life that we enjoy, eating, sleeping, and other stereotypical 'weekend' activities become what we live our lives for, even though these are the sorts of activities that we share with animals. Our particularly human activities are our productive one's, but these are the one's we feel 'forced' to do. One should note that this is a problem that is in no direct way tied to the fact that workers were paid badly in Marx's day. As he puts it:
An enforced increase of wages ... would therefore be nothing but better remuneration for the slaves, and would have won, neither for the worker nor for labor, their human significance and worth. (p. 4)

That one's labor is 'forced', and that one finds no satisfaction is in it, is not something that can be changed by raising one's salary. It would still remain the case that our 'human' life has been reduced to serving the needs of our 'animal' life, its just that the trappings of our animal life (the home we live in, the cloths we wear, the restaurants we eat at, the whiskey we drink) may be more luxurious. This leads to the third type of alienation that Marx considers, alienation from our "species being."
- corporate lawyers quit because BORING even though the pay check was amazing and high

3. Alienation from our species being Our alienation from our "species being" represents our alienation from our particularly human nature (our 'humanity'). One is a species being, according to Marx, that one treats oneself "as a universal and therefore a free being" (p. 3). He argues that the whole character of a species "is contained in the character of its life activity", and "free conscious activity is the species-character of man" (p. 3). Our particularly human freedom stems from the fact that while other animals have their life activity biologically given, "Man makes his life activity itself into an object of his will and of his consciousness" (p.3). It is because we can redirect and control our life activity, coupled with the fact that our character as a species is determined by that life activity, that our nature as a species (our human nature) is something that we can change over time. That said, 'free' voluntary production and creation is what is characteristic of humans and distinguishes our productive activity from that of animals. As Marx puts it:
The animal ... produces under the domination of direct physical need while man produces even when he is free from physical need and produces truly, indeed, only in freedom from such need. (p. 3)

If this free production is what is characteristically human, then the process of becoming alienated from the act of production alienates us from our nature as humans as well. In conditions of alienated labor, all production is in the service of satisfying the worker's physical needs, and so the alienated laborer is alienated from human nature as well. As Marx puts it, "In degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to the level of a means, alienated labor makes man's species life a means for his physical existence" (p. 3). In other words, our essence becomes a mere means for our existence (p. 3). wolves act the way prone to act - don't look back on nature to preform differently
what is human - free conscience activity - ability to reect on activity
- incapable of changing nature
- birds have drove to build nest to lay eggs - bees build nest because need living space

- when degrading spontanious actvity and turning it into a way to make money it makes man a means to his physical existence

- we shouldn't be working JUST to keep our body alive - our human life is NOT oto serve out physical life (opposite!)

Lecture Notes, Marx, p.4

4. Alienation from other people When one is alienated from human nature, it should not be surprising that one is alienated from other humans as well ("that man's species being is alienated from him means that one man is alienated from another, just as each of them is alienated from human nature" (p. 4)). Other people (at least some of whom may own the labor one is alienated from) are not creatures with which one shares a common humanity, rather they are forces like any other that can be used as means to satisfy one's own individual ends, or as obstacles to such achievements (p. 4). It is this conception of one's fellows that is characteristic of what Marx calls "civil society". Marx thus views our current economic arrangements as preventing people from living meaningful lives, but, unlike, say, Aristotle, who seemed to think that it was just a fact of life that a truly meaningful life would never be available to most people, Marx had a pronounced 'utopian' streak that lead him to think that, if society were arranged differently (that is, according to his conception of communism)1, a meaningful life might be possible for everyone. It should be noted that, even if Marx were wrong about the possibility of such a utopian future, he still could be right about what makes for a meaningful life, its just that his view would then entail the 'pessimistic' conclusion that most of our lives aren't, and could never be, meaningful.
- one man is alienated from another AS WELL as alienated form own human nature

- Marx has utopian idea that id society were better then we wouldn't live like this - wouldnt live where everybody is alienated - every body would be living mengful lives with jobs that do not put them in alienated situations
alienation ISNT workers being paid less - its workers working for the money that comes from it, working TO work, not becuase enjoying it Aristotle - a slave would not be happy (fully meaningful)

- point of life is to create a point of creativity - some people will never have a job that they can identify with so that they will not have a alienated life
IDEAL job would be something you do not give up when you love the lottery - means something to you

And one should note that the type of communism that Marx envisaged was very different from what we have historically seen in communist countries. Indeed, most such countries simply put the state in the place traditionally held by the capitalist (as Marx put it Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist (p. 4)), and did nothing to correct the deeper problem of alienation (even if it (arguably) did treat various symptoms of it such as income inequality.