Q.

Explain the theory of DIVISION OF LABOR BY KARL

MARX
q. Divisions of Labour has been discussed by various
sociological theories. Discuss in detail the point of view
taken about divisions of labour by Karl Marx

The more the division of labor and the application of

machinery extend, the more does competition extend
among the workers, the more do their wages shrink
together.
Karl
Marx
Read
more
at
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/karlmarx16
3680.html#QQ2UVesrpmz8f9CK.99

The man whose whole life is spent performing a few

simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps,
always the same, or very nearly the same, has no
occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his
invention in finding out expedients for removing
difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses,
therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally
becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a
human creature to become. (The Wealth of Nations, pg.
839-840)

Karl Marx, the Division of Labor, and Employee Engagement

Share
One of the single most important elements of industrial efficiency
and technical progress is the concept of "division of labor." The
original thesis behind division of labor was stated succinctly by
Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, with his classic description of
the pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized
steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people
and machines. When an analogous principle is applied to nationstates we get the theory of comparative advantage, which
underlies the benefits of free trade. Both division of labor and
comparative advantage presume that people can perform
separate tasks and then trade with each other for mutual benefit.
Trading is critical. Without trading, among people and nationstates alike, progress is stunted.
By dividing labor and trading for mutual benefit we have now
progressed to the point where virtually every artifact around us
that is "man-made" can only be produced through the collective
efforts of many, organized in a way that is far too complex for topdown management (or state planning), and using expertise that
no single individual can possibly possess on his or her own. The
economist Leonard Read may be most famous today for an essay
he wrote more than 50 years ago to illustrate this point, using an
ordinary wooden pencil as his example. As simple as a pencil is,
he says, "not a single person on the face of this earth" knows how
to make it! Why? Just consider the task of harvesting the cedar
wood for making the pencil, using saws and axes, ropes and
other gear. Of course, you'd first have to mine and smelt the ore
to make these tools, then raise and prepare the food to feed the

lumberjacks, clear the land for a road, manufacture and assemble

the flatcars or trucks that will ship the wood to the mill, and even
pour the concrete for the hydroelectric dam to provide the mill's
power. You'd also have to travel to Sri Lanka to mine the graphite
for the pencil's core, mixing it with clay enriched with ammonium
hydroxide, and then combining the mixture with wetting agents
made from sulfonated tallow. Finally, you'd have to cut the
graphite mixture to size, dry it and bake it at almost 2000 degrees
Fahrenheit before treating it with a hot mixture composed of
candelilla wax, paraffin, and hydrogenated natural fats. Read's
point is not just that no single human being could ever do all these
things, but that no single human being even knows how to do all
these things. No one. (Quick: Have you ever heard of candelilla
wax or sulfonated tallow? Could you recognize graphite when it is
in the ground, before being mined?)
Pin factory or lead pencils, in other words, division of labor and
economic progress clearly go hand in hand.
But carried to its logical extreme, division of labor has a dark side
as well. Frederick Taylor's landmark theory of "scientific
management" was famous for its controversial contention that the
best laborer would be a tireless and unthinking automaton.
Enter Stage Left: Karl Marx. More than 150 years ago he
suggested that sooner or later workers of the world would unite
against their capitalist oppressors. One of the reasons he gave for
this prediction was that specialized work was alienating. Marx
believed that workers who were tasked with doing repetitive,
uniform tasks became disconnected not only from the completed
products that would give their work meaning, but from themselves
and from their essence as human beings, as well. Today, we
would say that such workers are "disengaged" in their work.
"Engagement" is one of those fashionable management terms
that can have a range of exact meaning, but Hay Group's

definition of employee engagement is good enough: "a result

achieved by stimulating employees' enthusiasm for their work and
directing it toward organizational success."
Division of labor, scientific management and the alienation of the
worker are all concepts that pre-date information technology. The
modern production process doesn't need efficient workers to be
automatons, robotically inserting Tab A into Slot B eight hours a
day at the pin factory in order to collect their pay. This is
something easily automated. But technology is a two-edged
sword. When we aren't conscious of the human need to be
engaged and interested in the work to be done, technology can
alienate even the information worker. Dan Ariely, in his new book
The Upside of Irrationality, tells an interesting story of his own
research assistant, Jay. Jay is an information worker, in that he
spends most of his day managing Ariely's research projects and
budgets. But according to Ariely,
"...accounting software he used daily required him to fill in
numerous fields on the appropriate electronic forms, sending
these e-forms to other people, who filled in a few more fields, who
in turn sent the e-forms to someone else, who approved the
expenses and subsequently passed them to yet another person,
who actually settled the accounts. Not only was poor Jay doing
only a small part of a relatively meaningless task, but he never
had the satisfaction of seeing this work completed."
When it is used more thoughtfully, however, technology also
allows us to re-integrate the mechanical tasks assigned to
individual people, engaging them in their work and improving their
enthusiasm and output simultaneously. When a customer service
representative is allowed to handle a complaint as a "case" to be
tracked from first call to final resolution, for instance, or when a
line engineer at an automobile assembly plant suggests a better
way to handle a technical support process - these are both

examples of how labor is being re-integrated. It is information

technology and the increasingly efficient electronic connections
we make with others that allow this to happen. Don Tapscott and
Anthony Williams, in their book Wikinomics, suggest that
ubiquitous electronic connectivity is changing the very nature of
work, making it "more cognitively complex, more team-based and
collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time
pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more
mobile, and less dependent on geography." Because of this, they
suggest, firms are decentralizing their decision making, relying
more and more on individual initiative and responsibility.
Another way to view this is that computer technology now allows
us to divide labor not by the rote, physical steps involved in
manufacturing and assembly, but by the actual planning and
decision-making processes involved in managing these steps. In
effect, rather than just trading physical tasks and manual skills
with each other to improve productivity, we are using technology
to trade ideas and insights to improve productivity. And our rate of
technological progress and economic growth is accelerating as
we continue to move "up market" with the division-of-labor
concept.
So, as social media tools allow ever more pervasive, immediate,
and complex communication and collaboration among people, it
may be that the ultimate form of "division of labor" is not turning
people into alienated automatons at all. Instead, it will eventually
involve replacing hierarchical, top-down organizations with selforganized social groups of individuals, each pursuing a commonly
agreed set of goals. We can catch glimpses of this future now,
from large companies such as Cisco and ExxonMobil flattening
their organization charts to push decision-making down down
down, to retailers and up-and-coming firms such as Best Buy and
Zappos encouraging their individual employees to use their

Twitter accounts to distribute the customer-service task more

effectively.
Workers of the world, unite!

Karl Marx
Marx argued that increasing the specialization may also lead to workers
with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. He
described the process as alienation: workers become more and more
specialized and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete
alienation from the process of production. The worker then becomes
"depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine".[10]
Marx's most important theoretical contribution is his sharp distinction
between the economic and the social division of labor.[11] That is, some
forms of labour co-operation are purely due to technical necessity, but
others are a result of a social control function related to a class and
status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it might appear as
though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and
immutable, rather than (in good part) socially constructed and influenced
by power relationships. He also argues that in a communist society, the
division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human
development occurs where people fully express their nature in the
variety of creative work that they do.[12

In a section entitled "The Capitalist Character of Manufacture,"

Marx says that the modern division of labor makes it necessary to
have an increased number of workers under one capitalist. The
minimum amount of capital that the capitalist has must continue to
increase. The worker is transformed by these manufacturing
developments. He loses some of his identity in order to fit his
specific job; he must become an appendage of a larger machine.
Marx says, "the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual
potentialities of the material process of production as the property
of another and as a power which rules over him." The worker
becomes impoverished of his individual productive power.
Capitalists wish to discourage imagination, and they make the
worker machine-like. Manufacture attacks the individual at his
very basis, and is thus "the first system to provide the materials
and the impetus for industrial pathology."
Manufacture is originally spontaneously developed. However, with
time it becomes "the conscious, methodical and systematic" form
of capitalist production. The division of labor is a specifically
capitalist form of social production; it is a way of creating surplusvalue at the expense of the worker. It is both a necessary part of
civilization's progress and a more refined way to exploit workers.
There are obstacles to the development of the division of labor
during the manufacturing period. However, with the advent of
machines these obstacles are pushed aside and capital takes
center stage.
Analysis
First, it is important to understand what Marx means by the
division of labor. With the division of labor, workers specialize in
one task and work together to produce commodities. For
example, in building chairs, one person would cut the wood, one
person would put the pieces together, and one person would paint
it. No one person is responsible for the final product; each simply
does his own task. This is typically thought to be more efficient

than to have each person make a whole product, and it is

considered to be an important aspect of the industrial revolution.
Now, considering that Marx believes labor to be integral to the
human character, it is not hard to guess that he would find such
as change in how people labor to be extremely important.
According to Marx, its impact on the individual worker is quite
devastating. Being forced to do the same repetitive task every day
squelches the imagination. It makes the worker little more than a
machine. Marx gives a very harsh critique of the role of
manufacture and of the division of labor on the individual.
However, he was far from alone in making such a critique. For
example, Adam Smith, commonly thought of as the father of
classical economics (and a major supporter of capitalism), was
very concerned about the division of labor's detrimental effects on
the worker. Smith's response was to encourage public support for
education. Marx mentions Smith's observations, but he does not
believe that education is a suitable solution. How convincing do
you find Smith's and Marx's criticisms of the division of labor? Do
you think there are solutions within the capitalist system for this
problem?

Marx's View of the Division of Labor

by GARY NORTH
The division of labor is a subject which has fascinated
social scientists for millennia. Before the advent of
modern times, philosophers and theologians concerned

themselves with the implications of the idea. Plato saw as

the ultimate form of society a community in which social
functions would be rigidly separated and maintained;
society would be divided into definite functional groups:
warriors, artisans, unskilled laborers, rulers. St. Paul, in
his first letter to the church at Corinth, went so far as to
describe the universal Church in terms of a body: there
are hands, feet, eyes, and all are under the head, Christ.
Anyone who intends to deal seriously with the study of
society must grapple with the question of the division of
labor. Karl Marx was no exception.
Marx was more than a mere economist. He was a social
scientist in the full meaning of the phrase. The heart of
his system was based on the idea of human production.
Mankind, Marx asserted, is a totally autonomous speciesbeing, and as such man is the sole creator of the world in
which he finds himself. A man cannot be defined apart
from his labor: "As individuals express their life, so they
are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their
production, both with what they produce and with how
they produce." The very fact that man rationally
organizes production is what distinguishes him from the
animal kingdom, according to Marx. The concept of
production was a kind of intellectual "Archimedean point"
for Marx. Every sphere of human life must be interpreted
in terms of this single idea: "Religion, family, state, law,
science, art, etc., are only particular modes of
production, and fall under its general law."2 Given this

total reliance on the concept of human labor, it is quite

understandable why the division of labor played such an
important role in the overall Marxian framework.
Property vs. Labor
Marx had a vision of a perfect human society. In this
sense, Martin Buber was absolutely correct in including a
chapter on Marx in his Paths in Utopia. Marx believed in
the existence of a society which preceded recorded
human history. In this world, men experienced no sense
of alienation because there was no alienated production.
Somehow (and here Marx was never very clear) men fell
into patterns of alienated production, and from this,
private property arose.3 Men began to appropriate the
products of other mens labor for their own purposes. In
this way, the very products of a mans hands came to be
used as a means of enslaving him to another. This theme,
which Marx announced as early as 1844, is basic to all of
Marxs later economic writings.
Under this system of alienated labor, Marx argued, mans
very life forces are stolen from him. The source of mans
immediate difficulty is, in this view, the division of labor.
The division of labor was, for Marx, the very essence of
all that is wrong with the world. It is contrary to mans
real essence. The division of labor pits man against his
fellow man; it creates class differences; it destroys the
unity of the human race. Marx had an almost theological

concern with the unity of mankind, and his hostility to the

division of labor was therefore total (even totalitarian).
Class Warfare
Marxs analysis of the division of labor is remarkably
similar to Rousseaus.4 Both argued that the desire for
private property led to the division of labor, and this in
turn gave rise to the existence of separate social classes
based on economic differences. The Marxist analysis of
politics relies completely upon the validity of this assumption. Without economic classes, there would be no
need for a State, since a State is, by definition, nothing
more than an instrument of social control used by the
members of one class to suppress the members of
another. 5 Thus, when the proletarian revolution comes,
the proletarian class must use the State to destroy the
remnants of bourgeois capitalism and the ideology of
capitalism. The opposition must be stamped out; here is
the meaning of the famous "ten steps" outlined in the
Communist Manifesto. Once the opposition is totally
eradicated, there will be no more need for a State, since
only one class, the proletariat, will be in existence. "In
place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and
class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which
the free development of each is the condition for the
development of all." 6
Marx actually believed that in the communist society
beyond the Revolution, the division of labor would be

utterly destroyed. All specialization would disappear. This

implies that for the purposes of economic production and
rational economic planning, all men (and all geographical
areas) are created equal. It is precisely this that
Christians, conservatives, and libertarians have always
denied. Marx wrote in The German Ideology (1845-46):
.. in communist society, where nobody has one
exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
regulates the general production and thus makes it
possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.7
A Utopian Ideal
A more utopian ideal cannot be encountered in serious
economic literature. While some commentators think that
Marx later abandoned this radical view, the evidence
supporting such a conclusion is meager. Marx never explicitly repudiated it (although the more outspoken
Engels did, for all intents and purposes). Even if Marx
had abandoned the view, the basic problems would still
remain. How could a communist society abandon the
specialization of labor that has made possible the wealth
of modern industrialized society and at the same time

retain modern mass production methods? How could the

communist paradise keep mankind from sliding back into
the primitive, highly unproductive, unskilled, low capital
intensity production techniques that have kept the majority of men in near starvation conditions throughout
most of human history?
The whole question of economic production "beyond the
Revolution" was a serious stumbling stone for Marx. He
admitted that there would be many problems of
production and especially distribution during the period of
the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat." This period
is merely the "first phase of communist society as it is
when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs
from capitalist society."8 Marx never expected great
things from this society. However, in the "higher phase of
communist society," the rule of economic justice shall
become a reality: "From each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs!"9 This will be easy to
accomplish, since the vast quantities of wealth which are
waiting to be released will be freed from the fetters and
restraints of capitalist productive techniques. As Mises
has pointed out, "Tacitly underlying Marxian theory is the
nebulous idea that natural factors of production are such
that they need not be economized." Maurice Cornforth,
the Marxist philosopher, confirms Mises suspicion that
Marxists see all scarcity as a product of institutional
defects rather than as a basic fact of the order of the
world in which we live:

The eventual and final abolition of shortages

constitutes the economic condition for entering upon
a communist society. When there is socialized
production the products of which are socially
appropriated, when science and scientific planning
have resulted in the production of absolute
abundance, and when labour has been so
enlightened and organized that all can without
sacrifice of personal inclinations contribute their
working abilities to the common fund, everyone will
receive a share according to his needs."
Who Shall Plan?
A critical problem for the Marxist is the whole question of
communist planning: How is production to be directed?
By what standards should the society allocate scarce
resources? Whatever Marxs personal dreams were concerning the abolition of scarcity, resources are not in
infinite supply. It is because of this very fact that society
must plan production. Marx saw this activity as basic to
the definition of man, yet this very activity implies the
existence of scarcity, a peculiar paradox for Marxism. The
fact remains that automobiles do not grow on trees.
Someone must decide how many automobiles should be
produced in comparison with the number of refrigerators.
Planning is inherent in all economic production, and Marx
recognized this: "Modern universal intercourse can be
controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled

by all." But how can they "all" register their

preferences? If there is no private property (and,
therefore, no free market economy), and if there is no
State planningno political planningthen who decides
which goods are to be produced and which goods are
not? Murray Rothbard has stated this dilemma quite
accurately:
Rejecting private property, especially capital, the Left
Socialists
were
then
trapped
in
an
inner
contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the
Revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually
"withering" for Marx), then how is the "collective" to
run its property without becoming an enormous
State itself, in fact even if not in name? This was the
contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the
Bakunists were ever able to resolve.
The Problem of Scarcity
The need to coordinate production implies the existence
of scarcities which the production is designed to alleviate.
If everyone had all he desired at the moment of wanting
it, production would be unnecessary. Raw materials must
be fashioned into goods or indirectly into services, and
these goods must be shipped from place to place. Such
actions require time (interest on the investment of capital
goods), planning (profit for success and loss for failure),
and labor (wages). In short, production demands
planning. No society is ever faced with the problem "to

plan or not to plan." The issue which confronts society is

the question of whose plan to use. Karl Marx denied the
validity of the free markets planning, since the free
market is based upon the private ownership of the means
of production, including the use of money. Money, for
Marx, is the crystallized essence of alienated production;
it is the heart of capitalisms dynamism. It was his
fervent hope to abolish the use of money forever." At the
same time, he denied the validity of centralized planning
by the State. How could he keep his "association" from
becoming a State? The Fabian writer, G. D. H. Cole, has
seen clearly what the demand for a classless society
necessitates: "But a classless society means, in the
modern world, a society in which the distribution of
incomes is collectively controlled, as a political function of
society itself. It means further that this controlled
distribution of incomes must be made on such a basis as
to allow no room for the growth of class differences." 5 In
other words, given the necessity of a political function in
a supposedly stateless world, how can the Marxists
escape the warning once offered by Leon Trotsky: "In a
country where the sole employer is the State, opposition
means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who
does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new
one: who does not obey shall not eat." 16
Ultimately, the acceptance of the existence of scarcity
must be a part of any sane social analysis. In contrast to
this Rousseauian Marxian view of the division of labor

stands both the traditional Christian view and the

libertarian view of Professor Mises. Men have a natural
propensity to consume. If unrestrained, this tendency
might result in looting, destruction, and even murder.
The Need to Produce
The desire to consume must be tempered by a
willingness to produce, and to exchange the fruits of
production on a value for value received basis. Each
person then consumes only what he has earned, while
extending the same right to others. One of the chief
checks on mens actions is the fact of economic scarcity.
In order to extract from a resisting earth the wealth that
men desire, they are forced to cooperate. Their cooperation can be voluntary, on a free market, or it can be
enforced from above by some political entity.
Scarcity makes necessary an economic division of labor.
Those with certain talents can best serve their own
interests and societys interests by concentrating their
activities in the areas of production in which they are
most efficient. Such specialization is required if
productivity is to be increased. If men wish to have more
material goods and greater personal services, they must
choose occupations in which they can become effective
producers. Those who favor a free market arrangement
argue that each man is better equipped than some
remote board of supervisors to arrange his own affairs

and choose his own calling according to his desires,

talents, and dreams. But whether the State directs
production or the demand of a free market, the specialization of labor is mandatory. This specialization
promotes social harmony; the division of labor forces
men to restrain their hostile actions against each other if
they wish to have effective, productive economic
cooperation.
In this perspective, the division of labor promotes social
unity
without
requiring
collective
uniformity. It
acknowledges the existence of human differences, geographical differences, and scarcity; in doing so, it faces
the world in a realistic fashion, trying to work out the
best possible solution in the face of a fundamental,
inescapable condition of man. In short, the cause of
economic scarcity is not the "deformed social institutions"
as the socialists and Marxists assert; it is basic to the
human condition. While this does not sanction total
specialization, since man is not a machine, it does
demand that men acknowledge the existence of reality. It
does demand that the division of labor be accepted by
social theorists as a positive social benefit.17
A Faulty Premise
Anyone who wishes to understand why the Marxian
system was so totally at odds with the nineteenth century
world, and why it is so completely unworkable in practice,
can do no better than examine Marxs attitude toward the

division of labor. It becomes obvious why he always shied

away from constructing "blueprints for the communist
paradise" and concentrated on lashing the capitalist
framework: his view of the future was utopian. He
expected man to be regenerated by the violence of the
Revolution. The world beyond would be fundamentally
different: there would be no scarcity, no fighting, and
ultimately, no evil. The laws of that commonwealth would
not be conformable with the laws that operate under
bourgeois capitalism. Thus, for the most part, Marx
remained silent about the paradise to come. He had to.
There was no possible way to reconcile his hopes for the
future with the reality of the world. Marx was an
escapist; he wanted to flee from time, scarcity, and
earthly limitations. His economic analysis was directed at
this world, and therefore totally critical; his hopes for the
future were utopian, unrealistic, and in the last analysis,
religious. His scheme was a religiona religion of
revolution.

Marx: Capitalism and Alienation

Karl Marx (1818-83) grew up in Germany under the same conservative
and oppressive conditions under which Kant and other German
philosophers had to live. The Enlightenment had had some liberating
effects on German life here and there, but most German principalities
were still autocratic, and the idea of democracy was combated by all
their rulers. The presence of police spies at major universities was a

regular feature of German student life, and some students served long
prison sentences for their political activism. As a law and philosophy
student at the University of Berlin, Marx joined a political club that
advocated political democracy. Very soon after receiving his doctorate,
however, his ideas went beyond mere political reform. His future friend
and collaborator Friedrich Engels introduced him to socialist and
communist ideas, i. e., to ideas which progressed from mere political to
social and economic reforms. For the rest of his life Marx dedicated
himself to the project of radically restructuring modern industrial society
along socialist and communist lines. In time he became the single most
important theoretician and prominent leader of a growing international
labor
movement.
Since Marx participated in the Revolution of 1848 as an influential
newspaper editor (in a revolution that was defeated by the monarchists,
and the defeat of which led scores of liberal Europeans to emigrate to the
United States and elsewhere), he found it preferable to leave the stifling
and backward conditions of his fatherland and to go into exile. He spent
the rest of his life in London, the powerful center of advanced capitalism
and modern industry. As one of the organizers of the international
working class movement he found that most labor radicals had all sorts
of moral misgivings about capitalism, and a number of utopian ideas of
an ideal society of the future, but no solid grasp of how a capitalist
economy actually works. Marx also found that his own understanding of
economic matters was far from complete. He therefore embarked on a
two-decade long study of what was then called "Political Economy"
(sometimes
also
dubbed
"the
dismal
science").
Living with his family in great poverty, and maintaining himself as a
free-lance writer and journalist, Marx walked almost daily to the British

Museum to study the works of such classical economists as Adam

Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. He slowly wrote his main
work, Capital, which was published in 1867. As he was personally much
more interested in natural science, literature, philosophy, and
mathematics than in economics, he resented most of the time he had to
spend on the analysis of how money was made. As a classical humanist
he thought that making a living or creating wealth should be nothing
more than a means for the pursuit of more worthy things, not a serious
end
in
itself.
It was not until the 20th century that scholars found an unpublished
study by Marx, the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844. This study consists of somewhat unorganized, difficult to read,
but highly insightful notes which Marx jotted down while giving a first
reading to the classical economists as a young man. The study has since
gained prominence because in it Marx formulated more or less explicitly
his Theory of Alienation--his analysis of how people are bound to
become estranged from themselves and each other under the conditions
of capitalist industrial production. This Theory of Alienation is often
considered the philosophical underpinning for his later more technical
critique
of
capitalism
as
an
economic
system.
In a nutshell Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in
modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will
inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work.
Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense.
Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would
own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working
conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his
product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom

he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.

Under the conditions of modern factory production, by contrast, the
average worker is not much more than a replaceable cog in a gigantic
and impersonal production apparatus. Where armies of hired operatives
perform monotonous and closely supervised tasks, workers have
essentially lost control over the process of production, over the products
which they produce, and over the relationships they have with each
other. As a consequence they have become estranged from their very
human nature, which Marx understood to be free and productive activity.
Human beings cannot be human under these conditions, and for this
reason the implication was obvious for Marx: Capitalism has to be
abolished as much as any political oppression if a societys emancipation
is to be complete. Capitalism is just as incompatible with selfdetermination as absolute monarchy or any other autocratic system. But
while an absolute monarchy limits peoples autonomy by controlling
them in the sphere of politics, Capitalism does so by controlling their
workplaces and their economic life. A society of truly free citizens,
according to Marx, must therefor not only be a political, but also an
economic
and
social
democracy.
More specifically, real liberty does not exist unless workers effectively
control their workplace, the products they produce, and the way they
relate to each other. Workers are not fully emancipated until they work
not in the way domesticated animals or robots work, but voluntarily and
under their own direction. To accomplish this workers have to become
the owners or controllers of their work places--the factories, railroads,
hospitals, offices, and so forth on which they depend for their livelihood,
and at which they spend the better parts of their days and lives. In
contrast to earlier times, however, this ownership of the means of

production cannot be individual anymore, since modern industrial

production has irrevocably outgrown individual production in small
shops; workers ownership of the means of production cannot but be
communal or collective. Communities or societies as a whole have to
make all major economic decisions in the way they make their major
political decisions: by means of democratically elected legislatures and
administrations.
The communal and democratic ownership and control of the major
means of production, and thus of the economy as a whole, is Socialism.
In light of the largely failed attempts to realize Socialism in the 20th
century (attempts that for various reasons ended mostly in undemocratic,
oppressive, and economically weak regimes), it is important to point out
that Socialism without political democracy is not what Marx had in
mind. A society without democratic rights and freely elected
governments cannot be considered truly Socialist, even if the means of
production are nationalized or communally owned, as one of the main
purposes of the introduction of Socialism is an increase in the degree of
freedom and self-determination, not a lessening of it. 20th century
Communist Party dictatorships have, therefore, always been defended by
their organizers as merely temporary arrangements, as a way of
preparing the conditions for genuine popular democracies that were to
develop in the future. As mentioned earlier in the chapter on Plato, there
has always been a debate--often acrimonious--within the political Left
concerning the wisdom of such temporary dictatorships. Democratically
minded Socialists and Communists always thought that the temporary
dictatorships inaugurated by Lenin had existed far too long to be of any
benefit
for
workers
or
anyone
else.
To turn to the details of Marx Theory of Alienation: The most basic

form of workers alienation is their estrangement from the process of

their work. An artist, unlike an industrial worker, typically works under
his or her own direction; artists are in total control of their work. (That is
why artists usually do not mind working long hours and even under
adverse conditions, because their creative work is inherently meaningful,
and an expression of their most personal desires and intuitions.) Even
the typical medieval artisan, although more closely motivated by
economic needs, usually worked as a relatively independent person-controlling his own shop and up to a point choosing his own projects.
In modern industry, however, workers typically do not work under their
own direction. They are assembled in large factories or offices, and they
work under the close supervision of a hierarchy of managers who do
most of the important thinking for them. Planners and managers also
divide complex work processes into simple, repetitive tasks which
workers can perform in machine-like fashion (Adam Smiths famous
principle of the division of labor"). The rhythm of work is dictated by
the quasi-military discipline of assembly lines or other regimented
production systems, and by the requirements of the machines to which
the workers are assigned. Workers thus are mere extensions of their
machines, rather than machines being the extensions of workers. (They
are the tools of their tools, as Thoreau put it.) Although workers have
to exert themselves, often strenuously, in operating their machines, they
are, in an important sense, passive--mere objects. Modern factory work,
although highly productive compared with medieval craftsmanship, has
become
dehumanized
drudgery
work.
Marx describes the situation in his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts
of
1844
as
follows:

In what, then, consists the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that
labor is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong to his nature,
that therefore he does not realize himself in his work, that he denies
himself in it, that he does not feel at ease in it, but rather unhappy, that
he does not develop any free physical or mental energy, but rather
mortifies his flesh and ruins his spirit. The worker, therefore, is only
himself when he does not work, and in his work he 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, therefore, is not voluntary, but forced-forced labor. It is not the gratification of a need, but only a means to
gratify needs outside itself. Its alien nature shows itself clearly by the
fact that work is shunned like the plague as soon as no physical or other
kind
of
coercion
exists.
Workers do not control the process of their work because they do not
own the means of production--the factories or offices, the land, the
machines, the raw material, the fuel, or anything else that is necessary to
manufacture a product. The entrepreneur who owns these means also
buys the labor power of the workers that he employs. The workers,
therefore, do not only have to work under the direction of the
entrepreneur, they also have to leave the finished product in the
entrepreneur's possession. This latter fact establishes the second aspect
of alienation: the workers' estrangement from the product of their work.
Modern industrial production produces a great variety of impressive
things, but these things have mostly little to do with the lives and needs
of the workers who produce them. In Marx' words:
Labor, to be sure, produces marvelous things for the rich, but for the
laborer it produces privation. It produces palaces for the wealthy, but
hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but cripples the worker. It

replaces work by machines, but it throws part of the workforce back to a

barbarous kind of work, while turning others into machines. It produces
sophistication, but for the workforce it produces feeble-mindedness and
idiocy.
There are some things here to which one may want to object. For one
thing, it may have been true in the 19th century that workers had to work
under sweatshop conditions, that the workday lasted twelve to fourteen
hours, that sometimes children were literally chained to machines to
work, that workplace safety did not exist, that workers were deprived of
education, and, most of all, that wages were so low that workers rarely
could afford to buy the things they produced. But all this has since
become very different. Capitalism in the 19th century may have been
rather brutal, but the system has been reformed. Wages have increased,
all sorts of benefits are provided by employers or social security
systems, and today's industrial workers sometimes own and consume
more material goods than even members of the upper classes of earlier
ages. The old political cartoons that showed the Capitalists with top hats,
coat tails, and big guts, while depicting workers and their bedraggled
families as emaciated, subdued wrecks, are surely outdated. Todays
workers are not as exploited and miserable as Marx describes them, and
the relation of Capital and Labor is not so antagonistic and bad as to
justify such old concepts as class struggle or class war.
Such objections are not pointless. Due to the long and often arduous
struggle of unions, as well as the vastly increased productivity of
industrial labor, the economic position of many workers has significantly
improved since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the following
facts make Marx' over-all theory still relevant. First, while many
workers today are indeed better off, many others are not. There are

occasional sweat shop conditions even in countries like the United

States, and there are many countries where the majority of workers are
as relentlessly exploited today as they were during the Industrial
Revolution in the United States or in Europe. It is only the physical
remoteness of most low-wage countries from the centers of capitalist
affluence that make the often grim exploitation of cheap labor invisible
to
us.
Second, the poverty of the working class to which Marx often refers can
be understood in absolute and in relative terms. In absolute terms (in
terms of how much workers have to eat, how much of a house they can
afford, etc.) the condition of workers in highly developed countries has
undoubtedly improved since the 19th century. In relative terms, however
(in terms of what workers earn in comparison to what the owners of
capital gain), the situation of workers has worsened. If an average
entrepreneur or top manager once earned perhaps fifty times as much as
any one of his workers, today's owners and managers typically earn
hundreds of times more than the average employee. The general trend on
which Marx had his eyes still prevails: The rich still get richer and more
powerful, while the majority of ordinary employees can count
themselves lucky if they have steady employment and more or less
adequate benefits. In America in particular the income gap between the
rich and the rest of society has been steadily widening. Since the
imbalance of wealth usually translates into an imbalance of political
power and influence as well, many capitalist countries tend to be, for all
practical purposes, oligarchies rather than genuine democracies.
Although their democratic institutions may be intact and functioning,
their policies tend to be determined by wealthy elites much more than by
citizens
at
large.

The fact that workers do not own what they produce has far-reaching
implications. Marx approaches these implications by observing: "The
object which labor produces, its product, confronts it as something alien,
as a power which exists independently of the producer." In historical
periods when labor was not as productive as in modern times it may
have sounded like an exaggeration if someone had said that the laborer's
product "confronts the laborer as something alien--simply because the
product does not belong to the worker anymore. Only in special cases, as
when a feudal lord obliges his serfs to build a castle which is then used
to keep down the very people who built it, does such language seem to
be
called
for.
Marx' description, however, is quite appropriate in a period of capitalist
production, i. e., in a period when the productivity of labor is
incomparably greater than under feudalism or in slaveholding societies
like ancient Greece or Rome. The decisive difference is that capitalist
production for the first time in human history has made it possible to
replace, for most practical purposes, the natural world with a humanmade world. While before the Industrial Revolution human civilization
could still be seen as just making inroads into vast areas of wilderness,
the 19th century quickly moved toward a situation where no area of the
planet could escape the effects of industrialization anymore. While until
the Industrial Revolution significant numbers of people may have been
able to live independently of the products and the influence of industry,
this became increasingly impossible as ever greater areas of the planet
were subjected to the administration and utilization of industrial powers.
(The fate of the Plains Indians of North America provides a vivid
illustration of this general process.) The most basic fact of capitalist
industrialization is that it has created a world in which essentially all
human beings are dependent on each other--and on the human-made

environment which they have created with their increasingly productive

labor. It is, thus, the entire human-made world which constitutes the
product that "confronts" its makers as an "alien power."
Part of this human-made world is, of course the market and the business
cycle with its often dramatic ups and downs. Business cycles, as well as
other market dynamics, literally confront workers as forces beyond their
control, as powers which often victimize them like floods, draughts, or
epidemics. A worker's personal skill or willingness to work may not
change at all, but a recession will throw him or her out of work
regardless of his or her personal qualities and qualifications. Without any
fault on his or her part, that is, a worker may suffer all sorts of hardships
because of the impersonal forces of the market--the "invisible hand," as
Adam Smith called them in his classic The Wealth of Nations. Yet, while
workers are at the mercy of forces beyond their control, it is their own
accumulated labor which creates and maintains these forces. For the
market is not a creation of nature, but the result of human production
and consciously organized institutions. Workers, in other words,
decisively help to build the world on which they are so precariously
dependent. They diligently construct and maintain the production
apparatus that determines their lives, and not infrequently punishes them
severely. ("Till now each worker's patient day/ Builds up the house of
pain," as William Morris put it in his poem "No Master.")
The image of workers building and maintaining the machinery of their
own oppression applies not just to the market and its dynamics, but to
the modern world at large. The more people produce (the more they
replace the natural world with an artificial one), the more they become
dependent on what they produce. Today this has become even more
obvious than it was during the lifetime of Marx. Armies of workers,

busy and thoughtless like ants, build huge industrial conglomerates with
their corresponding administrations-- conglomerates which produce
overwhelming floods of merchandise, which in turn transform the
surface of the earth with ever increasing speed. Side products of this
enormous productivity are awesome amounts of toxic waste for which
vast bureaucracies and costly disposal systems have to be developed,
and terrifying stockpiles of bombs, missiles, and other weapons of mass
destruction which could wipe out this whole civilization in a matter of
days. And periodically people are victimized by these, their own
products, without quite understanding how and why. They are vaguely
aware of these present dangers, but they feel powerless, and they try to
escape into comforting distractions. In their everyday lives the millions
are bruised and mauled by the mega-trends and crises of their humanmade world even in times of peace, and they have grown used to the
idea that these forces are something like a fate, and not the result of
human activities and decisions. Hence Marx' description:
All this results from the fact, that the worker relates to the product of his
labor as an alien object. For it is clear ... that the alien, objective world
will become the more powerful the more the worker produces; ... The
alienation of the worker from his product does not only mean that his
labor becomes an object, an external entity, but also that it exists outside
him, independently, as something alien, that it turns into a power on its
own confronting him, that the life which he has given to his product
stands against him as something strange and hostile.
This sheds some more light on the meaning of the "poverty" that Marx
discusses in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The
poverty to which he refers is only in part a poverty of material
deprivation. To fully understand what Marx means one has to understand

that Marx' highest value is not material consumption, but selfdetermination and self-realization. In Marx' philosophy high standards
of living are not defined in terms of ever more food, drink, clothing,
vehicles, appliances--in short, ever more things. A high standard of
living rather means rich experiences, fully developed emotions,
closeness to other people, a good education, and so forth. A person with
very few possessions, but with an intensive life, comes much closer to
Marx' idea of a happy human being than a well-paid worker who can
afford to buy many consumer goods, but who is neither informed
enough to understand the society in which he lives, nor has the
motivation to shape, in cooperation with fellow-workers, his working
conditions or the political system in which he lives. A worker who is
overweight, who spends most of his time watching commercial
television, whose main conversations with colleagues deal with the
sports page, and who is too tired or apathetic to participate in the
political process--such a worker is not well off in Marx' eyes, but a
victim of a system that is ripe with alienation in every sense. Marx was
not so much interested in what people might have, but in what they
could be. He was interested in people being alive, informed, and in
control of their destiny. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker in so far as
he aimed at personal and human autonomy foremost. And he remained
in line with Kant's and Fichte's thinking in that he expected workers to
cease being the passive objects of history, and to become the active
makers
of
their
own
fate.
The third aspect of the alienation of workers follows from the first two:
As workers have no control over the process or the product of their
production, because they do not own the means of production, they also
have no significant control over how they relate to each other. They all
are just an extension of the means of production that the owners of

capital buy, and which the managers of industry employ to create and
maximize profits. On a limited scale, workers sometimes organize
themselves in labor unions, and not infrequently they practice solidarity
in such situations as strikes. (The camaraderie that often develops in
strike situations is a way of being human that usually has no place in the
modern work world.) But even during strikes workers have to contend
with strike breakers, indifferent fellow-workers, or working-class
members who work as spies, hostile policemen, or "goons." For the
over-all situation is such that workers always have to look at each other
as potential competitors for scarce jobs. (Which is one reason why the
managers of a capitalist industry often prefer high unemployment to a
situation where they have to compete for scarce labor.) The competitive
situation among workers sometimes emerges with particular bitterness
when lay-offs lead to conflicts between workers with seniority and
groups who seek a foothold in a particular industry. In the United States,
e. g., white male workers repeatedly displayed considerable hostility
toward women and black men, because in a situation of job scarcity any
newcomers were perceived as a threat. Workers, instead of feeling
solidarity and organizing on the basis of their common interests, found
themselves pitched and played off against each other. The racism and
sexism that could frequently be found among white male workers is one
way in which the general alienation of workers from each other has
found
a
concrete
expression.
The fourth aspect of alienation is the estrangement of workers from their
human nature in general, from their "species" nature, as Marx calls it.
Potentially human beings produce freely and with deliberation. Free and
thoughtful production would be the most authentic form of human
existence. This does not only mean that human beings ought to be in
charge of particular work processes, but also that they be able to produce

without external necessity altogether--like artists who create for the

pleasure of creating or for some other kind of inner satisfaction. Up to a
point, of course, human beings have to produce to fulfill their material
survival needs. But what distinguishes the human species is that human
beings also produce what has no practical use, such as merely beautiful
things. The horizon of human beings is wider than that of other animals:
it transcends the limits of the survival needs of any particular species. It
is, in this sense, "universal." And it is, according to Marx, only when
human beings have become universal beings that they are authentically
human.
None of this can be the case under conditions of capitalist industrial
production, where most people have to labor for utilitarian purposes
alone, and where few are free to work for themselves and under their
own direction. In an economic landscape where the impersonal forces of
the market dictate most aspects of human behavior, most people are
unable to ever develop fully their human potential. Capitalism, in other
words, is in conflict with much of human nature, and thus should be
abolished as soon as that is a realistic possibility