Marx, in Theories of Surplus Value, quotes James Stuart writing about 'profit upon alienation'. When one sells a good one owns, one has alienated it from oneself. In the typical work relation under capitalism, the managers of firms, that is, the representatives of capitalists, sell the product or services that workers produce. Workers do not own the goods they produce, for they have previously sold their labor-power. That is, they have agreed that their product is not owned by themselves, and neither is their labor.
But alienation means something more in Marx's Paris Manuscripts. The work of Ludwig Feuerbach is important background here. (By the way, this post is based mostly on secondary and tertiary literature, I forget which. I have not read most of the Marx and Engels' works cited here in some time.)
Feuerbach's criticism of Christianity is of some importance for Marx's concept of alienation. According to Feurbach, God's human-like qualities of knowledge, wisdom, and power are projections of extensions of human qualities. We impose them on God. This result of the projection of human qualities is then taken as ruling over us.
Capital goods are themselves the result of human labor. But, in capitalism, the alienated worker is then ruled by these products of human labor. In both cases, human do not usually understand that they are ruled by an entity created collectively by themselves.
The word 'alienation' never appears in the three volumes of Capital as I understand it. Instead, Marx writes about commodity fetishism. I guess the continuity I am claiming is debated among scholars of Marx. But the following sounds like alienation, as developed from the ideas of Feuerbach, to me:
"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses... with commodities... existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
The religious analogy suggests, perhaps, that this supposed relation between things appears as a independent being. That is, capital is an entity with seeming agency and its own logic. Marx uses such metaphors as zombies, vampires, and table-turning for this spectral creature. "Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." In a longer exposition, I would also want to go the formal and real subsumption to capital.
It may seem odd to talk about capital as a creature with agency. Many human beings, following certain protocols, can implement a Turing machine, unbeknowest to themselves. The analogy of markets to a computer is harly novel. More prosaically, every manager or firm owner who justifies layoffs; the closure of factories, stores, and offices; or the abandoment of one line of business and the start up of another is appealing to some such logics of capital. Whatever you may think of such people, they are not wrong in claiming to be ruled by an overarching entity.
Capital is not the only supra-personel entity, discussed among Marxists, that seems to have agency. Hardt and Negri's Empire also seems to be such an entity.
I think that Marx condemns capitalism, inasmuch as he does, because he objects to the rule of capital as a supra-personel entity. This creature is constructed by human beings, and we should be able to rule ourselves without such illusions. The rule of this creature hardly seems consistent with a society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
«capital is an entity with seeming agency and its own logic. [...] Capital is not the only supra-personel entity, discussed among Marxists, that seems to have agency. Hardt and Negri's Empire also seems to be such an entity. »
ReplyDeleteThese are called "slow AIs" today (things like "the church", "the company", etc.) "hive intellects" in the recent past, and that "its own logic" used to be called "genius loci" (or "the logic of the situation"; as someone wrote "when it is steam engine engine, it steam engines").
These entities have oppressed or limited the choices of people throughout history, so nothing so new.
My understanding is that some important bits of context are needed:
* Still in the time of Marx many european households were largely self-producers, growing their own food, baking their own bread and drink, spinning their own thread, weaving their own cloth, making their own clothes, shaping their own tools; the two things commonly bought were metal objects from the blacksmith and later on coal.
* Marx makes relatedly a big difference between *personal* property (of directly used land, house, tool, clothes, etc.), and *privatized* (private) property of the means of production.
* "Capitalism" is in his terminology the arrangement by which free workers do not control their own means of production.
In my understanding his point is that in a self-production environment based on personal property there is a lot of independence of choice: individuals use their personal property to do whatever they want with their own labor in any way they want. This is not the case with "capitalism", whichever form the ownership of the means of production takes (private, cooperative, state, ...). Such loss of independence of choice means that control has been "alienated" (given away) from workers, and such giving away of control has also effects on perception, that is "fetishism", where the social relationship between employee and employer is perceived instead to a factual relationship between commodities (labor-power, means of production, outputs of production as in goods and services), relationships mediated by "money".
Then if my understanding is good the question is what causes the loss of independence in "capitalism", and I think that Marx had different opinions as to this. My opinions are:
* "Capitalism" is intrinsic to the industrial system of production.
* The industrial system involves co-production from several inputs to several outputs over years, often on large scales, and therefore each worker involved *necessarily* ends up at least in part "alienated" from the choice of what and when and how to produce, as each *necessarily* has awareness only of a small part of the industrial system.
* Alienation can come in different degrees though, depending on social relationships and relative power of classes.
* The different degrees depend only in part of the type ownership of the means of production: state ownership of capital can be as oppressive and alienating of individual workers as private ownership.
* Ultimately the "slow AI"/"emergent intelligence" that drives all this is not "capitalism" but competitive markets: it is competition in markets that pushes capitalists to be exploitative, just as it can push the self-employed to be self-exploitative.
* Even more generally it is the act of *selling* and not just of labor-power is what constrains independence and control of choice: the "logic of the situation" is that usually the sellers depend on the buyers, whether the seller is an employee or a direct producer.
«the act of *selling* and not just of labor-power is what constrains independence and control of choice»
ReplyDeletehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
“He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”
Indeed the vision of Marx for "communism" is that once production is very cheap and easy then sellers are no longer dependent on buyers, and workers are no longer constrained by the need to meet the demands of buyers in the markets, because there is so much abundance that people can choose what to do and when and how to do it (in a degree proportional to that abundance).
BTW in the same page as the classic quote above:
«The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity.»
«The alienation of labour-power and its actual appropriation by the buyer, its employment as a use-value, are separated by an interval of time. But in those cases in which the formal alienation by sale of the use-value of a commodity, is not simultaneous with its actual delivery to the buyer, the money of the latter usually functions as means of payment.»
«“I may make over to another the use, for a limited time, of my particular bodily and mental aptitudes and capabilities; because in consequence of this restriction, they are impressed with a character of alienation with regard to me as a whole. But by the alienation of all my labour-time and the whole of my work, I should be converting the substance itself, in other words, my general activity and reality, my person, into the property of another.” (Hegel, “Philosophie des Rechts.” Berlin, 1840, p. 104, § 67.)»
«in a self-production environment based on personal property there is a lot of independence of choice: individuals use their personal property to do whatever they want with their own labor in any way they want. This is not the case with "capitalism", whichever form the ownership of the means of production takes (private, cooperative, state, ...). Such loss of independence of choice means that control has been "alienated" (given away) from workers [...] once production is very cheap and easy then sellers are no longer dependent on buyers, and workers are no longer constrained by the need to meet the demands of buyers in the markets»
ReplyDeleteI think that the wdiscussion of alienation by Marx is most concentrated in "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Estranged Labour", where the terms "alienation" and "estrangement" are used repeatedly in what I think is the sense above.:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
“First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is *forced labor*. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.”
That labor is "forced" by the necessary selling of the labour-power, where such sale is not necessary if the worker has her means of production and therefore is in control of her own production process. But perhaps it is cynical to say it, but this is close to saying that to be truly free a worker has to be independently wealthy (a form of autarchic), even if not much wealth is needed, perhaps a smallish farm and some tools.
«this is close to saying that to be truly free a worker has to be independently wealthy (a form of autarchic), even if not much wealth is needed, perhaps a smallish farm and some tools.»
ReplyDeleteI am thinking here of a point made by Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America" (1834), volume 1, part 2:
“In France, most of those who hire out their services to till the ground are themselves owners of a few plots of land which, at a pinch, will enable them to live without working for anyone else. When these people offer to work for a great landlord or a neighbouring tenant farmer but are refused a certain wage, they withdraw to their small and await another opportunity.
I think that, on the whole, it can be said that the slow and gradual rise in wages is one of the more general laws of democratic societies. As conditions become more equal, wages rise, as wages increase, conditions become more equal.
But nowadays one great and unfortunate exception occurs. I have demonstrated in a previous chapter how the aristocracy, once expelled from the political life, had withdrawn into certain areas of industrial enterprise and had created its power there in a different form. This has a strong influence on the rate of wages.
As one must already be very rich to take on the great industries of which I speak, the number of entrepreneurs is very small. Being few in number they can easily league together and fix the level of wages as they like.
Workmen, by comparison, are very numerous and their numbers are constantly on the increase for, from time to time, extraordinary periods of prosperity occur when wages rise wildly, attracting people in the locality into manufacturing industry.
Now, once men have embarked upon this career, we have seen that they cannot escape from it because they soon pick up habits of body and mind which render them unsuited for any other work. These men usually lack education, energy resources. They are, therefore, at their master's mercy.
When competition, or any other circumstances, reduce the master's profits, he can curb their wages almost at will and can easily recoup from them what the fortunes of business take from him. Should they choose to strike, the master, who is wealthy, is easily able to wait, without risk of ruin, until necessity brings them back since they must work every day so as not to die, for they own almost nothing but the strength of their arms. Oppression has long since reduced them to poverty and, as they become poorer, they are easier to oppress -- a vicious circle from which they cannot escape.”
I had not thought of 'the church' as an example of an emergent entity, but I guess it is.
ReplyDeleteI guess it is the case that a lot of rural folks in the USA still do a lot of home production - canning, making jam, making venison, sewing their own clothes. Still, I think a long term trend is for them to become less and less able to live without selling their labor or products on the market.