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

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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

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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 nation-states 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 nation-states 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 top-down 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 self-organized 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 surplus-value 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 NORTHThe 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 species-being, 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."¹ 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 men’s labor for their own purposes. In this way, the very products of a man’s 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 Marx’s later economic writings.

Under this system of alienated labor, Marx argued, man’s very life forces are stolen from him. The source of man’s 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 man’s 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

Marx’s analysis of the division of labor is remarkably similar to Rousseau’s.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 as-sumption. 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 ex-plicitly 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 re-main. 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 ma-jority 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."¹º 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 Marx’s personal dreams were con-cerning 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."¹² 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 planning—no

political planning—then 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.¹³

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 market’s 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 capitalism’s 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."¹5 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 men’s 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 coop-

eration 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 society’s 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 spe-cialization 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, geo-graphical 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 Marx’s 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 religion—a 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 society’s emancipation is to be complete. Capitalism is just as incompatible with self-determination as absolute monarchy or any other autocratic system. But while an absolute monarchy limits people’s 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 Smith’s 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. Today’s 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 human-made 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 human-made 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 self-determination 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