Alienation
From the time Karl Marx began to write about economics in 1843 until about 1858 (roughly a decade before Capital was published), he devoted a significant portion of his writing to a phenomenon he called alienation. Very little on the subject was published by him during his lifetime. Thus we do not know whether Marx really considered it important and would have included it in the portions of Capital published after his death, or whether he purposely did not publish it because he changed his mind and decided it was a false direction.
It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, when the Soviet Union began to publish some of Marx’s accumulated notes and manuscripts, that the materials on alienation became available to the public. But once the idea was made public, it attracted a great deal of attention among Marxist scholars, particularly among those who specialized in political science and sociology. And while the concept of alienation seems to hold less appeal for economists, it is useful for helping us reconstruct some of what Marx was after.
Actually, alienation seems to refer to at least two different concepts. The first, which has most intrigued noneconomists, describes the psychological state of workers in relation to the capitalist production process. According to Marx, capitalism, by replacing artisanship with mass-production techniques, by putting workers on assembly lines where their functions are reduced to repetitive detail rather than concern with the quality of the whole product, and by treating workers (or, rather, their labor power) as mere commodities that are bought and sold as part of the profitmaking process, causes workers to lose any sense of satisfaction from their labor and any means for identifying with their output. In short, modern workers are alienated from the production process in ways that the medieval artisans were not.
What… constitutes the alienation of labour? First… that in his work… he does not… feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind…. Lastly, the external [alien] character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s… that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.”
The second concept of alienation, which has more relevance to our present discussion, describes the connection between the accumulation process and the produced means of production that are made available to the economy. According to Marx, such items as plant and equipment are as much the product of labor as are any other commodities. However, in industrial economies, the worker’s job depends on the availability of factories and machinery. Thus, after she has labored to make these particular products and product management, the worker must confront them again, this time as domineering, alien objects that hold the power to determine whether she will remain employed. The very items that the worker has made with her own hands become the means by which capitalists can control her.
Aside from the domination to which the worker is subjected by the alienated products of her own making, this form of alienation is significant because it has an inherent tendency to escalate. Accumulation, by its very nature, builds up the economy’s stock of productive equipment. As this happens, workers become increasingly dependent on more and more equipment in order to remain employed. And as time passes, their dependence on the alienated products of their labor continues to grow proportionally with the economy.
In the early stages of capitalism, workers could easily find employment on their own in industries that utilized relatively few machines. But as capitalism matures, workers more and more are forced into automated factories with all the frustration and alienation that attends such work places. Here we have the seeds of the class antagonism that Marx predicted would contribute to the demise of capitalism. In other words, here we have a law of motion of capitalism.
If this interpretation of alienation is valid (and it is not entirely clear from Marx’s unfinished writing on the subject), it is a problem that lies at the heart of the dynamics of capitalism as Marx saw them. The very mechanism that produces surplus value and capital accumulation must aggravate alienation, and through it, we are told, capitalism does indeed sow the seeds of its own destruction.
Thus, Marx felt that a revolution spurred by worker alienation might be one way that capitalism would die. Another would be through a spasmodic business cycle.
