The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Download 2.09 Mb.
|
2NC -- AlienationA workers life in the capitalistic society is diminished by alienation and reduces humans to animalistic like actionsSwain 19 Swain, 2019, Dan, Professor of Life Studies at the University of Life Sciences Prague Alienation or Why Capitalism is Bad, Chapter 2, 322-343 - IShone These two aspects of alienation—from products and from the process of labor itself—became interwoven in an important concept for Marx’s later economic theory: commodity fetishism. In a notoriously complex section of Capital, Marx described how the conditions of capitalist production and exchange lead to objects taking on a life of their own. Human beings relate to one another in the market as bearers of commodities—labor power on the one side and capital on the other. This means that, as I. I. Rubin (1973:29) put it, “Production relations are not established only for things, but through things,” and as a result cooperative social activity appears as a kind of relationship between commodities. This leads to commodities acquiring a social significance over and above their specific use and purpose, appearing to have a life of their own. Marx (1867: 165) here draws direct comparison with fetishistic worship of objects, which involves projecting human powers onto objects that do not possess them: “There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” (Marx [1867] 1976:165). In the age of the smartphone, it has become almost a cliché to talk about people being ruled by their devices, seeing them not as useful products but as organizers of our lives. For Marx, this is simply the latest manifestation of a system where things dominate activity, not vice versa. Marx did not stop, however, at observing workers’ alienation from their product and from their labor itself. He suggests that in separating workers from their labor, capitalist production also separates them from what makes them distinctively human—their “essence” or “species-being.” This is the source of much controversy, some of which will be addressed in section 2, but at its core is a claim that alienated labor is inhuman labor, since it denies the realization of distinctively human capacities (in later works, Marx talks about species powers, rather than species being). Marx identifies in humans a distinct capacity for consciously planning and reflecting on their activity: “Man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created” ([1844]1975: 329). Alienated labor denies this capacity. Labor is frequently reduced to the status of merely reflexive and repetitive activity, and even when it is more creative or complex, it appears fundamentally as the plan of another and dominated by abstract labor time. (p. 365) Marx ultimately saw this as having devastating consequences for human well-being. The worker “does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind.” (Marx [1867] 1976:326). At worst, workers are reduced to mere appendages of a machine, with their bodies fundamentally marked by the kind of labor they perform. As John Berger vividly describes, “The repetition by which gesture is laid upon gesture, precisely but inexorably, the pile of gestures being stacked minute by minute, hour by hour is exhausting. The rate of work allows no time to prepare for the gesture, to demand effort from the body. The body loses its mind in the gesture.” (Berger and Mohr, [1975] 2010:100). In Capital, Marx ([1867] 1976:474) observed how this kind of specialization also has broader social consequences: this division of labor seizes upon not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation for that specialization, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all others, which already caused Adam Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: ‘We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens.’ Thus, in narrowing down human activity to a particular form of abstractly and largely unconsciously expended labor, capitalism stunts human development, leading to “incomplete” human beings dominated by “animal” functions rather than human ones. Marx’s reference to the division of labor “seizing upon” every other sphere of society also indicates the importance of the broader social consequences of alienation—alienation from others. Those who engage in wage labor are alienated both from those they work for, and those they work with. As already discussed, the will of the capitalist appears as the dominating will of another, while other workers appear as much as potential competitors as cooperators. Workers are only capable of engaging in collective activity through the sale of their labor power, and so while in the workplace they appear as separate elements brought together only by the capitalist, outside they must compete with one another to get the best price for their labor. Moreover, to the extent this appears (through commodity fetishism) as first of all a relationship between things, it takes on a kind of false objectivity, in which such relationships appear “natural,” rather than historically specific. Relations of production and exchange take on the appearance of a natural force, like the weather, which can be understood and even manipulated but not ultimately transformed. In this sense, alienation is self-reinforcing, since it both gives rise to and depends on representing human activity as an external, dominating force. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
|