Do you ever feel detached from your job? Does it feel completely meaningless? Is there a sense that work is something imposed on you – that drains your very life force. Well, you’re not the first person to think that. Welcome to the Marxist theory of alienation.
Marx set out his theory of alienation in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Capitalism, he claimed, separates workers from their own sense of self. They are reduced to mere commodities. This is rooted in how our economy is owned and the way it’s separated into social classes.
Basically, there’s private property concentrated in the hands of the few and wage labour is essentially a form of slavery that estranges you from the product or service being made or delivered.
Under capitalism – where the means of production are owned by the capitalist class, work is not a creative or fulfilling activity. It’s a forced activity done to earn a wage and make the capitalist a profit.
Drilling down further in to this theory, the worker produces goods that they do not own. The capitalist owns the products from which they derive a profit. Work is repetitive and owned by somebody else.
The monotony has got worse under capitalism, compared to pre-industrial societies, because of the division of labour – where tasks are broken down and performed over and over again by different groups of workers.
The worker has a sense of being a cog in a machine – something that Charlie Chaplin satirised in the movie Modern Times.
To Marx, the alienation from work destroyed human potential. Human beings want to be creative and work collectively. But under capitalism, that is not the priority. And so, personal growth is stifled. Also, competition creates mistrust and ‘office politics’. It pits workers against each other, which leads to feelings of helplessness, despair, anger, and frustration.
Some have argued that AI – artificial intelligence – will intensify these feelings. That is disputed by AI advocates who say that this technology will free up workers to make more strategic decisions and remove mundane, routine tasks from their daily lives. What is certain is that AI is seen as a way of reducing the headcount and extracting more value from the remaining workforce.
Critics of the Marxist theory of alienation say that the experience of Stalinist communism in the 20th century showed that this can be experienced by workers in a fully state-owned environment as much as one where private ownership prevails. Many Marxists (influenced by Trotsky) would counter that the bureaucratic nightmare of Stalinism was not what Marx had in mind for the future workplace.
Louis Althusser, a French communist and academic, thought that Marx’s theory of alienation was a product of his younger, more romantic years and that he downplayed it when he got to grips with capitalist economics later on.
Categories: Philosophy
Marxism Explained 
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