Marx presents the concept and realities alienation in several forms as they relate to the worker. He offers few specifics of how to prevent or reverse this alienation, but instead gives vague generalities and leaves the rest to his vision of historical progression. His descriptions of the end-game communist society would frighten any die-hard capitalist; and can, at times, be momentarily confusing even to a die-hard social radical1. The various forms of alienation have many manifestations in the everyday world, which I will discuss at the end of this paper.
A generalized causal pathology of Marxian alienation2 goes something like this: The development of private property leads to exchange wherein people negotiate value of their products against each other, leading to valuation of people by the valuation of their products, leading to the worker’s domination by eir3 product and the accumulation of the means of production (capital) into the hands of a relative few, leading to the power of other people over the worker, leading to forced labor, labor as means to existence, and the various forms of alienation. Marx pays particular attention to several specific forms of alienation the worker undergoes. The first is the worker’s alienation from eir product. When the relationships between people are defined by the relationships between their products and the values attached thereto, the product and its value become more important than the worker who produced it. When this happens, the worker ceases to serve eirself, and begins to serve eir product, in order to increase its value and thus eir own. E throws eir entire being into the creation of greater product-value to increase eir own person-value. "[T]he more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself ... becomes, the less belongs to him as his own."4 The second is the alienation of the worker from the process of working. "[T]he relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him"5 This is the disillusionment of the worker with the act of creation, in which the conditions under which e works dehumanize and debase em. These two forms of alienation lead to the third and fourth forms, alienation of the worker from emself, and from others. When the valuation of a product is the basis for the valuation of a person, and a person can not live without producing, production becomes a means to existence. Marx’s analysis is that this goes against the way things should be, wherein labor should be the end to which existence is a means. Instead, the worker is separated from eir natural state, alienated from eir true self. Further, with the commoditization of the individual, and the accumulation of the means of production in the hands of a few, the worker loses control of how eir work is performed. E becomes merely a part of the larger system of production, a microscopic cog in the great machine. "[T]he worker’s activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of the self."6 The worker loses control of what Marx considers to be eir most fundamentally human trait - conscious labor activity - and feels only truly in control when performing the most basic acts. "What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal."7 Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, both eir fellow workers and the non-worker. Marx seems to use the term ‘non-worker’ primarily to refer to the capitalists and/or the management class, who perform no direct labor, but have power over those who do. However, he could also be read to say that the consumer, who confers value upon the worker’s product by desiring it, has power over the worker in that e can, by stifling eir desire, make the product - and thus the worker - valueless. In both situations, however, Marx indicates that it is the worker who places emself in the position of powerlessness. "[H]e creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own."8 Excluding the Manifesto, in the selections I have read thus far Marx provides little in the way of specifics regarding the de-alienation of society. What he does give are - not inappropriately - tied in to the development of the communist society. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme he discusses indirectly some of the requirements for the emancipation of labor in his attack upon the demands of the Lessalleans. "Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production the producers do not exchange their products; similarly, the labour spent on the products no longer appears as the value of these products, possessed by them as a material characteristic."9 When the worker’s labor is not a characteristic of the product, but rather of the worker, the worker is not devalued relative to the product, and thus not dominated by it. The product thus becomes a part of eir value, and e is not alienated from it. However as mentioned this requires the common ownership of the means of the production, which implies the elimination of private property to some degree. Presumably, individuals would still be able to own personal items10; Marx does not, however, make any mention of such in what I’ve read. Thus, the elimination of private property would, in theory, lead to de-commoditization which would, in turn, lead to the emancipation of labor and workers identifying with, rather than alienated from, their products. This, in turn, leads to the worker’s de-alienation from emself and labor for its own sake, rather than as a means to other ends. And again, in turn, the result is that no person dominates another. Finally we come to the examination of alienation in the present day world. One might suggest that, given how little Marx’s theories are discussed in the larger society, that they must no longer apply. Christopher Phelps argues, however, that "labor's alienation is today so ubiquitous and unchallenged that it is taken by most social thinkers to be a natural, inescapable condition." He continues on to say that "[c]orporate managers might seek to sugarcoat the degradation of labor through the institution of programs for better relations between management and workers. But abolish wage labor? End class rule? Return to earth! Talk of eliminating that sort of alienation is beyond the pale."11 Were one to attempt to catalog all the various examples of alienation to be found, this could turn into a full-blown inquisition. Instead, I shall mention a few direct examples, and then elaborate on one particular reaction against modern-day alienation that I’m familiar with.12 The most glaring example of an alienating experience is the modern assembly line. The assembly line worker is entirely disconnected from the product. Eir work is a miniscule part of the total product, e has no control over what is produced, how it is produced, or what it’s sold for. And very often, the wages a factory worker receives aren’t enough to purchase the very thing produced! The work is often extremely repetitive, dehumanizing, and injurious to health. The worker comes to feel like a part of the machine, alienating em from emself. Add to this the boredom inherent in performing the same actions over and over, day in and day out, as well as the health problems one is likely to incur through repetitive stress injury, exposure to toxins, or violent attack by malevolent machinery13, and you get a worker alienated from eir work and eir body. Some say that improved manufacturing technology is elimination alienation on the assembly line. Mary Mastraccio, in a literature review on the topics, finds the following:
Key-cards and other identity-coded security measures are often considered, by those forced to use them, as alienating. Not only are you entirely represented by a small piece of magneticly-altered plastic, but your movements can be instantly monitored why anyone with access to the system.15 Another good example, one which I’m personally familiar with, are standardized tests - particularly those employing bubbleforms. These tests attempt to judge large groups of people based on narrowly interpreted answers to questions in a very small range of topics. Each person is judged based on entirely arbitrary standards which they have no influence on. Further, these tests encourage competition between individuals, in order to increase social prestige, chances to get into the ‘big’ schools - another competition to increase social prestige - and chances of getting good scholarships. And as has been discussed, such competition among people has the result of alienating them from each other. Bubbleforms are conceptually alienating in representing someone as nothing more than a series of dots on a piece of paper. A final direct example is modern banking practice. One of the loudest ways banks have taken to advertising for business is to claim that they - unlike every other bank in the world - will treat you as a real person, instead of an account number. ATMs, it has been argued, alienate people from each other by eliminating direct human contact. The same has been argued for phone- and internet-banking and direct-deposit. Finally, we come to a specific example of a reaction against alienation - attempts by different groups to cope with the alienation they experience in the software industry. What I want to focus on is the Free Software/Open Source movement, the GNU General Public License (GPL), and related items. The free software movement focuses on providing software that can be freely distributed and - most importantly - freely modified. The GNU Project16, from the Free Software Foundation, is one of the oldest examples. More publicly visible in recent years are Linux, a free Unix-like operating system which is distributed under the GNU GPL, and Netscape Communications’s release of the source code to their Communicator web browser under their own version of a public license17. As software companies grew up out of academic computing research centers in the early days of computers, software licenses became increasingly restrictive. Over time it has become illegal to analyze another person’s (or company’s) software to figure out how it works. If the program didn’t fit your needs, you either had to cope with that, or try to find something else that did. The idea behind free software is that users should retain the right to modify a given piece of software to suit their needs, to look at how it works, to share the software with others who need it, and to redistribute your changed versions so that everyone may benefit from them. Looking at the people who produce this free software, ones sees both alienation and dealienation at work. Many megabytes of bandwidth are spent lamenting the state of the mainstream software industry, how programmers are often treated like assembly line workers, have no connection to the final product, and so forth. Within the framework of the present larger society, Free Software development usually won’t pay the bills, and those who work on it often also work in the mainstream, pulling down a paycheck for code they don’t care about. At the same time, the connection these people feel towards the free software they write is strongly evident. This is software they choose to work on, and for which they generally gain no material wealth and little public recognition. They program for the joy of doing so, and for the benefit of everyone, rather than doing so to improve their personal condition. Even those who make only small contributions feel a great sense of accomplishment afterward. A strong sense of community develops around individual projects, and around free software as a whole. These people are dealienated from their product, their work, and from those they work with, within the realm of Free Software. Within that realm, they can, for part of every day, escape from the alienation of the larger world.
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