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Marx's Arguments Against Modern Labor Practices

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Karl Marx argues that modern labor practices lead to the alienation of human beings from the product of their work. He states that human beings will become alienated from their product because there will be no “pride” in the product, humans will become alienated from one’s own labor because the task will be so mindless that it will become autonomous, losing his free will, humans will become alienated from others because todays labor practices are based on everyone fighting for the best jobs; forcing everyone to only look out for themselves, and finally alienation from oneself in the sense that what people contribute to the world is a manifestation of oneself and when we do not have to be creative we begin to lose who we are as people. More like people will live to work instead of work being an extension of our own being. I disagree with Marx on his idea of alienation because people it is impossible for someone to come completely alienated from everything because they did not have full hands on experience with the creation of the product. Karl Marx first argues against modern labor practices by saying that people will become alienated in four ways, from their product, from their labor, from their counterparts and finally from …show more content…

“the more the worker produces the less he has to consume, the more value he has to creates the more worthless he becomes, the more civilized the product the more barbarous the worker; the more the work manifests in intelligence the more the worker declines in intelligence and become a slave to labor” (496). Meaning that the more quantity and quality the worker will produce the more devalued he becomes making him just a component to the product instead of the full creator. He will suffer from a lack of pride in the product because of object will assume an external existence and will exist outside of himself and alien to

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Essentially, the worker does not control what he or she produces because the capitalists control it to ensure an increase of profit. In Alienated Labour, Marx explains that, “this relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous exterior world and to natural objects as to an alien and hostile world opposed to him”(McIntosh 1997:18). He argues that the workers feels alienated form their own work because they know that they will be unable to reap the benefits (McIntosh 1997). An example of product alienation is how Z understand that he is digging tunnels to increase the production of the colony however is alienated because he does not receive any personal benefits of his work. The general stands in front of the entire colony and says, “We are the hero’s.

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Marx's analysis of modern slavery was centred on the realisation that slaveowner capitalism was more dreadful than any other type of slavery that had ever existed. In his critiques of capitalism, Marx highlights the consequence of extreme labour to be alienation, with the main one being Alienation of Man from Man, which is made extremely evident in the slave trade, with non-white people becoming isolated from white people because of their labour. Similarly, Douglass found that the economic system of slavery, required the alienation of African Americans from their own identity to continue operating because the slaves could see how they were being oppressed but could not reject the only thing they knew. In Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx emphasises that the working class must be alienated from others, themselves, and their labour in order for the capitalist system to function and for the working class to remain unaware of the system they support. Despite having conflicting opinions on whether their respective economic systems can be perceived, Marx and Douglass both view their respective economic systems as unsustainable in their essays, Wage Labour and Capital and Life Narrative, respectively.

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In his capitalist system “the worker receives means of subsistence in exchange for [their] labor power,” which serves no purpose but “immediate consumption,” whereas the capitalist receives “a greater value” than they had previously (Marx 209). The worker, despite creating additional earnings for the capitalist, only receives their “means of sustenance,” or their bare minimum for survival. Because the worker has been alienated from their work and the system however, they normalize this exchange, and are content with receiving a mere fraction of what they produce, unaware of their exploitation. Alienation provides the framework for both Douglass’ and Marx’s economic systems to function, as it allows the ruling class to establish a norm of

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When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his labour, to the product of his labour, and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labour and the object of the labour of other men.” (Marx 1844) We have evaluated the four types of alienation labor in relation to the worker: The estrangement of the worker from the product of his work, the estrangement of the worker from the activity of production, the worker’s estrangement from species-being or human identity and the estrangement of man to man or the estrangement from our fellow workers.

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Marx, equally, believes that the outcome of industrial capitalism is alienation of the proletariat, the working class, from their society.

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The main concept of alienated labor was developed by Karl Marx in his early work Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 - First Manuscript [Estranged Labor]. As defined, the concept of alienation is profoundly embedded in religions and social and political theories, the possibility that some time in the past individuals feeling like foreigners in the world, however, sooner or later this distance would be overcome and humankind would again harmony with itself and Nature (Encyclopedia of Marxism). Formed from Private Property, the political economy that is Capitalism divided society into two classes¬ - Property owners and Property-Less workers. By exploitation and estrangement, these classes become further designated as masters

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Because Marx believes the worker would “put his [or her] life into the [alien] object” (William, 132) he/she is producing, they are ultimately alienated, unconnected to

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Analyzing his work is fairly easy especially since he wrote everything and separated it into four parts pertaining to alienation. This first kind of alienation is the division between the worker and the product that was made by that person. The second form of alienation is the division of the worker from the act of production, which means the work that the person does, isn’t being done freely and doesn’t belong to them since they are working for someone else and that represents a loss of themself. The third form of alienation is the worker’s division from ‘species-beings’ or human potential. For humans, work gives life a purpose, but Marx thinks that in the ‘private ownership’ and the division of labor, a person will operate and act less like

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Reading chapter 14 and learning about the division of labour and manufacture was very compelling to me. Marx discuses different ways on how a manufactory could be productive and how to get the right people to do the job. I think that Marx was trying to further a division of labor within a production process. The reason why I said that is because Marx felt like having people already in the manufactory trying to do everything. He felt like we should split them up in though out the factory to what there was good at.

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Marx felt that under a capitalism system of private property there creates two types of people, that of the property-owners and of the property less workers. Marx believed that both these classes would struggle and the property owners would dominate over the workers, thus the workers would experience forms of alienation from the world. Marx, explains that in a capitalist society four forms of alienation or separation become present. Two forms of alienation present in a capitalist society are alienation from the product, and alienation from one another. First, Marx introduces alienation from the product, “If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to

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By alienation, Marx means that workers in industrial production systems that operate under capitalism have no control over their lives since they do not have control over their work. “The worker places his life in the object, but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labor is, he is not”. Therefore, these workers cannot be seen as autonomous individuals in any meaningful sense (Economic and philosophical manuscripts, 1844).

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Marx’s theory on exploitation is related to his earlier writings on the theory of alienation. They are both similar in that they are both highly critical of the capitalist system. Grint,(2005) emphasises that before Karl Marx nobody had ever confronted the idea of exploitive wage labour, many great thinkers of Marx’s time like Locke and Ricardo thought that the value of the wage labour was exactly equivalent to the labour expended while producing a product. Watson,T.J (2008) states that “ capitalist employment is exploitive in attempting to take from working people the value which they create through their labour and which is properly their own. ”P.62.

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Writings of Karl Marx had formed the theoretical basis for communism and the continual debate against capitalism. Marx understood capitalism to be a system in which the means of production are privately owned and profit is generated by the sale of the proletariat’s labour. He considered it to be an unfair exploitation of hard work with alienated social interactions and purpose. I agree with Marx that capitalism is indeed unfair and alienating, because it concentrates wealth within a small group of people by exploiting the surplus value of workers’ labour, and creates an alienated workforce. Hence, this essay will first discuss the relevance of Marx’s perception of capitalism as an alienating and unfair system for the contemporary world, before examining the potential of governments to influence the extent of alienation and unfairness that occurs.

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Karl Marx and Max Weber both agreed that capitalism generates alienation in modern societies, but the cause for it were both different. For Marx it is due to economic inequality in where the capitalist thinks that the workers worth nothing more than a source of labour, that can be employed and dismissed at will. This causes the workers to be dehumanised by their jobs (in the past, routine factory work and in the present-day, managing demands on a computer), which leads to the workers finding slight satisfaction and feeling incapable of improving their situation. It was noted by Marx four methods on how capitalism alienates workers. The first, is alienation from the function of working.

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In the Communist manifesto, a well known quote of Marx, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This is introductory to the first part of the pamphlet and a conclusion to Marx’s theory about class struggle. Marx’s highly structured on how the class struggle emerges and affects the development of a society. The development of a society from the old and from the new is the result of the conflict of classes in the society.

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