Relation to the world· Work and technology
Alienation
Axis: Meaning of work — Does work fulfill us, alienate us, or is it merely a necessity?
In its dominant forms, work dispossesses the worker: one becomes a stranger to one's activity, one's product, and oneself, reduced to a cog paced by the machine. The meaning of work remains confiscated as long as its conditions are not transformed.
Movements 1
Marxismexplicit
Labor is held to be the activity in which the human being objectifies and realizes himself: he imprints his mark on nature and recognizes himself in it. This is what makes the diagnosis so severe under capital: alienation is not mere drudgery or low pay but the turning of that activity against the one who performs it, along four dispossessions: of the product, which belongs to another and confronts him as an alien power; of the labor process, undergone rather than chosen; of his species-being, what makes the human a creative being; and of other people, reduced to competitors. Marxism thereby shifts the question of labor from reward to the very form of the activity: even well paid, wage labor remains crippling so long as the worker masters neither its end nor its process.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" · Marx, Capital, vol. I
Philosophers 2
Marxexplicit
Labour is in essence the act by which man objectifies himself and recognises himself in what he produces: it is this positive definition that makes its perversion measurable. Yet once the product belongs to another and the worker sells his labour-power as a commodity, what ought to fulfil him maims him: Marx breaks this alienation into four dispossessions, of the product, of the act of producing itself, of man's species-essence, and of other men. Against the economists who take this relation for a natural fact and against , who saw only its religious version, he roots it in private property and the relations of production: the dominant weight therefore goes to as the truth of present labour, fulfilment remaining the horizon of emancipated labour.
1844 Manuscripts, first manuscript (alienated labour) · Capital, vol. I, on <c>abstract labour</c> and the <c>fetishism</c> of commodities
Show inferred positions (1)
Sartreinferable
Under the influence of , Sartre analyzes labor in scarcity as the site where human praxis congeals into the practico-inert, turns back against those who produced it and breeds alienation. Yet labor remains the mode through which man transforms the world and objectifies himself in it, which leaves it a measure of possible fulfillment, beyond its dominant alienated figure.
Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), scarcity, the practico-inert, alienation