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 3
Simondonexplicit
takes up the Marxian analysis of the worker's and digs deeper. It does not stem only from ownership of the means of production, but from an incomplete relation to the machine, which the worker serves without understanding either its functioning or its overall organization. He refuses, moreover, to conceive technicity in terms of labour: it is technical activity, made of invention and regulation, that links the human to the machine, and industrial labour is only an impoverished form of it. The diagnosis of alienation thus bears on the industrial labour of his time, not on every activity; technical activity itself can fulfil the human, hence a secondary weight on fulfilment.
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), part II and conclusion
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