Tansu KUCUKONCU , PhD
( Tansu KÜÇÜKÖNCÜ ( in Turkish alphabet ) )
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Technology and Alienation in the Thought of Karl Marx
A Survey by Tansu KUCUKONCU
Nowadays besides lots of troubles, I think alienation is one of the important problems which is brought into human life by technology (which is extending in a very speedy way).
Every day, technology solves new problems. But unfortunately it makes this most of the time by creating new problems. Most of the problems we have today did not exist i.e 20 years ago. Every passing day this turns out to be a more complex situation. Every solution makes the definition of human being needs to be revised. Is any human being living today more human than any human being lived i.e 50 years ago. I think it really is a difficult question to answer. I think some logical answers can be found in researches about alianation problem of human beings (both to itself and to nature).
In this paper I will try to examine and try to find feasaible answers to alienation problem of human being from the viewpoint of grand-master Marx.
We can define 'alienation' easly, in a paradoxial way, as 'situation of being alien'. But before using alien-rooted words and terminology, it should be better to define 'what 'normal' (that's, the man's essence for our case) is, or should be'. Otherwise it would be difficult to understand what 'alienation of man' can mean, if we don't know what man has become alienated (or enstranged) from. (1)
The mature Marx held man's essence involves the foundation and basis of man's survival and basic factors behind the development of mankind. Therefore it is not anabstract inherent in an individual person but a reflection of the supra-individual definition of a new charecter engendered when individuals combine to form themselves into society.
The bearer of man's essence, the main body of the history of mankind , is none other than the 'individuals existing among mutual relations'. Such individuals are not only the creators of the world of material wealth but alsocreators of themselves and their mutual relations.(1,79)
He remarked that productive forces and social relationsare two different aspects of the development of individuals in society. (1)
In the view of mature Marx, man's essence has two levels.
1. Antropologic essence: which takes material need as its natural prerequsite and shapes up and develops through labor, that the ability for practice, a practical force that shapes up and plays its role through activities.
Sometimes Marx called this as 'man's innate essence' or 'man's natural instincts in general'.
Labor is the basic determinant of this essence and sociality and ideology are derivative determinants. This are at primary level. From such determinants at the primary level a series of determinants at the secondary level, such as ethics, freedom, and aesthetic feeling, are derived. (1,80)
As Marx saw it, the antropological essence is only at the secondary level of man's essence, namely, the natural prerequisite for man's real essence.
2. As far as the real essence is concerned, that which is far more important than its natural prerequisite is its actual basis. This means the living conditions under which man moves about to bring into play his ability and creates a force able to control nature and society; in other words, it means the 'the sum of total productive forces, funds, and the form of social communications which every individual and every generation take over as things that are prepared for them. Man's real essence is determined mainly by the living conditions of the society, especially the mode of production. This is the viewpoint of historical materialism. (1,81)
It is the basic concept of the mature Marx that living conditions such as productive forces and social forms essential to individual activities are themselves the 'products of man's activities'; they are 'the results ofman's ability to practice' and 'the wealth of man's natural instincts' -in other words, things created by man through the role of his essence. Marx also held that in the life of the society only the products of and results of man's activities can become the social premise that decides man's social activities. This is a dialectical point of view.
All forces, wealth, relations, and the system of human society are the products of man's activities of practice, the objectivization of man's essence. In the life of society there is no necessity or a mysterious, fatalist force that bears relation to man's activity.
The conditions of living are the products of labor and history. They continuosly change and develop, and so does the real essence of man, which is not a fixed, determined value. The development of labor that determines the conditions of living is also a process of ever growing socialization of labor, whose concrete expression is the progress of division of labor. 'The different stages of the progress of division of labor are also the different forms of ownership'. Thus 'man's essence' is transformed from the abstract, antropologic determinant into the concrete area of social economy and becomes a vital concept in grasping historical development in its totality. The progress of history is thus the progress of man, the progress of man's essence. (1,82)(3)
Human being is to be defined in terms of a relationship to a setting which is at the same time an activity. Human being begins and continues as a project of seeking to fill basic life needs by engaging actively with an environment to produce the things which meet those needs; and this active engagement, presupposing as it does for Marx that the basic relationship to the setting is one of oppposition, is seen as an enterprise of achieving mastery over that setting, that is, over the world of nature. To be more precise, the engagement is an action of making, an action of production, an action by which the portions of the setting are made into objects suitable to the satisfaction of human needs.
For the present purpose (that's trying to express the relations between tecnology and alienation) of outlining the place of technology in studies of Marx, however, what has to be emphasized is
1. that with the filling of needs by acts of making new needs are created. 2. that filling needs by acts of making in the first place is itself the elemental techical performance, and
3. that this action of filling by making things is the action that begins human being as such.
As Marx says, 'the first historical (properly human) act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. (3,xi)
In fact that filling needs, thereby creating new needs, through an action of making is the performance that institutes the human species as human, that is, having its own proper sphere of activity with its own charecteristics, among them that of being a history, three important points have to be emphasized.
First of all, technology has its roots in the very constitution of mankind as such.
Second, that same constitution contains a relationship of opposition/mastery with respect to the world of nature; so that to establish and maintain himself as human being the human species has constantly to impose species-suitable charecteristics upon item in and from its environment -that is, in order to achieve its own humanness, human being must transform nature into nature-for-man. But one must not to fail to include a
third point here, namely, in asmuch as making things to feel needs creates new needs, which in being filled by further making lead to still more new needs, the project of human self-achievement through engagement with nature to transform it into a human world is a progressively expanding process whose dimensions are limited only by limitations that might lie within the capabilities of human activity.
- Here, we face with the question of 'where to stop ?'. I think that the roots of man's alienation lies in this question. In the craziness of acting (making, doing, etc.) for trying to live, he, in fact, is not aware of this question.
The very activity that wins man his humanness, the very action of making that gives him the means to fill his needs, that gives him the instrumental objects whereby to impart a form to things that makes them appropriate to him, this very activity which should be his self-achievement is disrupted from the very first and leads instead to self-negation. Here we have the Marxian concept of alienation. (3)
Techne -a making that produces something, art, skill, method. Techno-logy in a strict sense, then, means an articulate thinking (logos) turned toward production andmaking (techne) so as to probe their meaning in an appropriate, radical, and comprehensive way. Technology is the thinking of technique, while tecnique is the productive transformation of being. (3,xv)
There is another way, however, in which it is used technology (la technologic) so as to require us to distinguish it clearly from technique (la technique). Technique, that is, any operation of making, has been with mankind from its beginnings. Technique has come actually to posses almost an absolute creative power, to undertake the transformation of all being, to be inherently unrestrained by limits of any sort from any source, and to promote a universally integrated and similar plan, purpose, and set of methods and means in a single hole of historical movement. In short, what we today call technology is simple technique nowseen finally in full possession of the role it plays within the perspective of historical development credited to Marx, a role that while placing it in basic continuity with the past also makes it unlike technique in the past. In a word, technology is techniqued as total and universal. (3,xvi)
Technology, science of technique, on the one hand, it is a pactice conditioned and promoted by a 'logos' of a specific sort, that is by explicitly theoretical insights in the form of rational science, on the other hand, it is a practice, a 'techne', that conditions and promotes that same science. Technique becomes technology because it fuses with science in an intimate mutual engendering and conditioning.
For Axelos this is a logos of abstraction -and power-minded scientific reason (Marx would say of alienating and alienated reason) which corresponds exactly to and fuses with the performance of making that, as themselves dehumanized power-minded operations, compose that industrial system we call in more offhand fashion 'modern technology'.
Technology, being a practical achiever precisely on the scale of the concepts in theoretical science, because the two now form a single thing, is the concrete power not only capable of but actually on the way to achieving a transformation of the work and human beings every where and in all respects.
Alienation is abreak of the entire process away from what it is supposed to be, namely the actualization of humanity through the making and use of the means for filling needs.
Tecnique in the modern world, technology, finally has the actual capability of being all-inclusive, of involving the totality of human beings and of transforming the totality of the natural world. (2) (4.a) (8)
Alienation is for Hegel another term for 'growing-up', a process of progressive and alternating self-differentiation and self-identification, or relating to others in order to become what one is, and of distinguishing oneself from others in order to be what one is, and of distinguishing oneselffrom others in order to be what one is -and in order to relate. (2,42)
Feurebach:
'Man has a constant tendency to project outside himself qualities which belong properly to human nature but which man idealizes and places in a God, who thus becomes all man looked for but did not find in himself.
Religion is the very essence of alienation; it is man's refusal to become all his capable of being, his unwillingness to find the perfection of human being in human being, relinguishing that responsibility in favor of submission of an alien God, who is the idealization of those qualities which in their essence are properly human.
The concept of alienation, then, has changed from the becoming-other which is essential to a developmental process; it has become a degradation of man from what he truely is or should be. (3,48)
Marx's alienations' roots are economic; its ramifications are political and religious; and it constitutes what human 'praxis' must overcome, if man is to become what he truely is.
Common points of
Marx-Hegel: their systems are dialectic, and
Marx-Feurebach: they emphasize on negative significance.
Marx adopted Feurebach's viewpoint, holding that religion was a form of alienation. Under Feurebach's influence, he broke with Hegel's idealism and turned toward materialism.
In Marx's view Feurebach's work was important, but it had not been carried through the end; the criticism of religion was only the first step, and there were many thingsto be done after taking it.
Marx points out that Feurebach's starting point is religious 'self-alienation', due to which the world is duplicated into heavenly, imaginary world and earthly, real one.
Feurebach discovered the antithesis of the heavenly and earthly worlds, while Marx proceeded to show that the latter contained within itself the antithesis of state and society.
The term 'alienation' occurs only in the writings of the young Marx, however, the concept expressed by this termremians a constant in his thought to the very end of hisendeavors. (7.a)
Alienation can be defined according to six different attitudunal states:
1. powerlessness
2. meaninglessness
3. normlessness
4. cultural enstrangement
5. self-enstrangement
6. social isolation (7.a,67) (4.a) (8)
To be human is to be something more than merely a being of nature. Man distinguishes himself from beasts, says Marx, by the fact that he produces the satisfaction of his own needs. Man can produce for himself what is not yet given. What is the distinctive of man, then, is productive activity. (4.a,17)
If production, of course, is to be more than haphazard and minimal it requires planning, and planning requires thought (intelligence); if it is to satisfy the increasing needs which emerge as the result of its own functioning this productive activity more than individual, it must be cooperative, social, and this requires communication through language; if producing the satisfaction of increasing social needs is to be economically feasible, not every man produce everything, and this requires a division of labor. Thus, in his development man distinguishes himself more and more from the beast; he distinguishes himself by thought, by language, by social living, by specialization of activities. All these are subsequent to and grounded in the one distinguishing charecteristic -productive activity. It might be objected that there are many distinctively human activities -artistic, literary, recreational- which are in no sense of the word productive. To this Marx would reply that all human activity is neither contributory to or derivative from the productive forces. Whatever significance other activity has inseperable from this relationship. (4.a,19)
Through this productive activity, by transforming nature he distinguishes himself not only from the beast but also from what he was originally was. Productivity, however, is truely human, and man is truely himself, only to the extent that through the activity whereby he transforms nature he continues to create himself. But this he cannot do, if either the activity of producing or the product of the activity belongs to another than himself.
Marx means by the most fundamental form of alienation, the alienation of labor.
If more than one kind of work enters into the productive scheme, as indeed must be the case, quite obviously one kind of work will be valued more highly than another.
Some will do mental work and others will do manual work. And those who do mental work will enjoy a double advantage:
1. there will be fewer of them, and thus as individuals they will be more in demand
2. their position in the productive will be such that the manula workers will be dependent on them for the very significance of what the latter do. (8,106)
We can say that those who own the means of production amass the larger share of produced value in the form of profits. As profits accumulate, however, they are not permitted to lie idle; eventually they turn into capital, which is qualitatively different from either mere profits or mere wealth in that it takes on the charecter of an independent force, which in a very real sense is controlled by no one; instead it becomes the driving force which controls the productive process.
Capital has laws of its own to which persons engaged in the process must simply submit.
In the religious form of alienation: it is involved man's projection of his own human ideals into a being outside himself, to whom he then became subsurvient.
In the economist form of alienation man has by his own activity produced a monster called capital, to which he is not only subservient but literally enslaved. (8,110)
By unconsciously following out the logic of the productive process, man has engendered a multiple alienation which now crushes him. (1) (2) (4.a) (6.a) (8)
There are basically four kinds of alienation in our sense (which can directly be related to technology).
1. Alienation from the product of work.
Alienation in this sense is the condition of both 'loss' and 'servitude'. It is not man who dominate nature, who shapes it according to his own needs, but raher a nature or technology of man's own making which comes to dominate him as an alien, autonomous force.
2. Alienation from the act of producing, from 'labor as life-activity'.
This is the essential aspect of self-alienation.
3. Alienation from the 'species-being' (from man's essence).
Man is alienated from the product of his own work and activity is no longer able to experience himself as a human being.
Marx:'Alienated labor 'alienates from man his own body' as well as 'external nature, his mental life and his human life'. It produces man as a 'mentally and physically dehumanized being'.
4. Alienation from the fellow man (that's, man from man) (1,83)
He considers the various kinds of alienation involved to be interrelated, sometimes conceptually and sometimes factually.
In the view of mature Marx, the alienation of labor is 'seperation of the laborer from the objective conditions of labor'. that is 'the tramendous material power' created by the workers 'does not belong to the workers but to the personified condition of labor, namely, the capital', and it stands opposed to the workers as an alienated ruling power.
Marx mentioned 'the alienation of the content of the labor from the worker' and the relationship between a worker and his own labor has become one between himself and property of others'. But he pointed out even more profoundly that live labor, the life expression of a laborer, manifest itself as an alien matter opposed to the laborer, because the laborer has sold it to capital in exchange of means ofsubsistence. As the process of labor is the process during which the ability to do labor is being brought into play or the process in which the essence is being objectivized, products are nothing but the results of labor or the objectivized essence.
What the alienation of products and of activity entails is in fact the alienation of of man's essence.
It determines the alienation of of activity, and the alienation of man from man is nothing but its personification. (8,112)
In the situation which productive work has brought about, man's work has ceased to be that which charecterizes him as man and has become a commodity which is bought and sold in the market place. This means that man has accomplished another, deeper alienation -he has alienated himself, for, as his work becomes a commodity, so does he become a commodity, thus alienating his very dignity as man-he no longer belongs to himself.
The work which charecterizes him and is his dignity has become simply a means to an end, that of producing wealth -for another- worse still, of producing money, whose quality is its quantity. Thus man has turned his work into an alien force; he has lost his interest in his work and is interested only in his 'job', i.e. what his work will produce for him in the form of money.
By the same token, man has alienated himself from the product of his work, not only in the sense that he has no control over it -it simply flows into the system- but also in the sense that, given modern techniques of production, he may never even see it; it simply 'stands opposed to him as an autonomous power'.
Finally, within the society there occurs an alienation of men from each other. As Marx sees it, the very fact that a man works, produces, not for himself but for another, means that the productive forces results in an antogonism between those who work and those whom they work, between those who produce the capital and those who own capital. What began simply as division of labor has become a division of classes, and the one class is alienated from the other. This sort of split can be recognized within a paricular society, says Marx, but it becomes more acute and more irreconsilable in proportion as society itself becomes more universal, and a universal antogonism arises between all those who have only their work to sell and those who alone have the means of purchase that work. (4.a)
Precisely because capital has grown into an independent force governed by its own laws and progressively less and less subject to control by human persons, the capitalist himself is governed by the laws which govern capital, most basic of which is that it must increase. He, then, is constrained to increase it. thus, the capitalist is alienated in the overall depersonalization which capital engenders; like the worker he is not the master of his own destiny. (4.a,21)
The very reason behind Marx's lifework was not merely to show the inevitablity of alienation, if things are allowed to continue in the direction they are going, a point which political economists either missed or deliberately covered over, but also to show that man can consciously take matters into his own hands by reappropriating what capital had expropriated and returning himself to himself. (1) (4.a) (4.b) (6.b) (6.c) (8)
Alienation, as Marx indicated, is a historical process of seperation during which the conditions of labor are being transformed into capital and labor into hired labor. The actual action of alienation is the process of exploitation during which production is being transformed into social production in the form of alienation. And Marx added that the different forms of surplus value and the various patterns of capitalist production are all expressions of alienation. For example, capital is an alienated social power, an alienated form of labor. As a material condition of labor itself, it is a 'force that is alienated from labor but controls labor'. For another example, hired labor is labor alienated from labor itself. The wealth it creates stands opposed to itself as the wealth of other people. 'Its the process of getting rich stands opposed to itself as a process of its own pauperizetion, and its social strength stands opposed to itself as a social force that dominates it'.
The capitalist mode of production, as Marx saw it, is but 'a form of alienation represented by capital and conceived in the mutual relationship of different factors of social labor. (3)(7.b)
What allows man to posit himself as man and oppose himself to Nature, in order to wrest from Nature his goods, is the tool.
Need determines the instrument that leads to the satisfaction of the need, and the available needs of production engender (produce) new needs.
The natural and social realtionship of man with (historicized) Nature is a relationship of struggle, and the natural history of man is a product of this struggle.
As long as men used mostly natural instruments of production, water, for example, they remanined subject to nature, whereas the means of production that civilization creates (and that thereupon re-create it as a technicist civilization) help men to oppose nature more effectively. But, while exploiting nature, men have let themselves be exploited by other men; and they remain, thus, subordinated to what they have themselves produced. The development of the instruments of production leads necessarily to the creation and development of the machine, for the labor that presupposes the machine will show itself to be the one most suitable for development.
The machine is in a certain way the synthesis of all instruments. It contains them in that it makes synthetically. Yet man has continued to be alienated progressively in and by his labor. The age of the machine completes this alienation, and man, having himself produced the machine, now finds himself to be a mere cog in the immense machine and machinery of capitalism. (3,79)
While necessity to the development of human societies, the machine nevertheless crushes men; yet it crushes them not simply as the machine but by the way of the relationships that the workers have with it.
These inhuman relationships that bind men to the machine make the essence of man mechanical. Today, Marx observes, the machine adopts itself to man's weakness in order to make weak man into a machine. Man thus become a slave to the machine, just as he is likewise a slave of divided labor, private property, capital, money, industry, and the whole of technicist civilization. The constant progress of thedivision of labor and the continual simplification of machine and the mechanical labor transform the child into a worker and the worker into a child. The development of productive forces, leading to the reign of capitalist machines, has not brought the worker to the maturity but to infantilism and debilitation.
Since real productive forces, in satisfying the material needs of men and in endlessly creating new ones, are the internal motor of historical development, it is their rhythm that determines the rhythm of the development of society as a whole. Any disruption of the rhythm of functioning of these forces, especially on the complex level of general mechanization, becomes a generalized social disruption.
The history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, to exposure to the senses of humen psychology.
Industry is the most complete form of labor. This enormous productive machinery allows man to set himself up in effective, victorious opposition to nature.The crucial seperation of town and country gave rise to the seperation of production from trade, which in turn fostered the development of manufacturing. The spread of commerce, navigation, and manufacturing speeded the accumulation of moveable capital and gave birth to big industry. It was big industry that completed the victory of the town over the contry, that generated a mass of productive forces, that generalized competition, that established the means of communication and the world market, that gained control of commerce, and that transformed all capital into industrial capital and led to the development of the financial system and the centralization of capital. This mother-goddess of the modern world 'destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie.
Mechanization, industrialization, and the technicism; all these conquests have as well intensified and extended the drama of alienation, pushing the external charecter of man's practical activity and the externalization of his being to their ultimate consequences. Everything seems to have become strange, alien, hostile, and alienating, at the very moment when industry transforms history into universal history.
Technicist civilization has made life and labor unbearable. It has reduced the play of human activity to the role of the worker free to sell his labor force to those who possesses the instruments of production as private property; it has heightened as far as can be done the contradiction between productive forces and the forms of the organization of labor and property; it has consequently made broader and broader the base of social life while making narrower and narrower the closed circle of those who determine the relations of production. In doing this, technicist civilization is an impediment to the full and harmonious development of productive forces, stifling at once industrial workers and the true creative, social possibilities of industry itself.
Men no longer enjoy the products of their labor, since the worker receives anly what is indispensible for him to perpetuate his physical life and and continue to sell his labor force. Those who hold the means of production throw outthe products as so much bait to draw the money of others, creating and awekening needs and desires, too often artificial, in order thereafter to satisfy them. Real needs are far from being really satisfied, while a crowd of artificial needs id artificially produced and artificially satisfied. ' This alienaiton manifest itself in part in that it produces sophistication of needs and of their needs and of their means on the one hand, and a bastial barbarization, a complete, unrefined, abstract simplicity of need, on the other'.
Industrial, technicist civilization thus develops in the heart of a crude barbarism in need and labor: labor is exploited more than ever before, and needs, offeredsatisfaction that is but gross and artificial, remain unsatisfied.
Bourgeois, capitalist civilization, consequently, dissimulates to men all the nature wealth of the material world, mechanizeses needs and the productive means for satisfying needs, and substitutes for the natural, social, real human world an artificial, alienating world technified to the extreme, alien and hostile to those who live in it and have built it.
Capitalist technicism poisons and alienates everything, and only the negativity that is implicated in its very essence will be able to furnish the antidote that can reconcile men with a social and human civilization and technique. (3,84)
Once technicist alienation is overcome, technique will be able to develop in a manner that is integral andnonalienating if it is kept under the control of the whole of the human community. The comprehensive planning of technicalproduction should prevent it from generating alienation and disorder. (3,85)
Capitalist society, by generalizing labor and positing the basis for integral technological development, has brought about the preparetion of what will abolish it.
- Here, Marx's expectations (assumtions) didn't occur. He thought that capitailist system would be its own grave-digger. He expected that communist movements would begin in developed (that's technologically; that's, highly industrialized) capitalist countries as a movemenet of industrial laborers (which have class conscious, etc.). But it begun in different conditions in an unindustrialized country and as a movement of peasants.
It has universalized labor, making it maximally alienating, and set up the practical realty of abstract labor operating in a total indifferencce. Technicist labor is present no longer under a particular form but imposes itself on everyone in the universality of its abstraction; it no longer is intimately bound to the individual.
The extreme mechanization and automatization of labor, the transformation of every reality and process into components of an industrialized mechanism, the abstract of automated technicism that has been developed to the utmost by the most modern societies and invades the technically underdeveloped countries, all this moves in the direction of its own negation. This state of affairs -the transformation of all men into workers free to sell their labor force and the development of a total indifference toward the mode of labor- can and must lead to the freeing of all workers, to the superseding of both traditional and modern labor. (3)(8)
Philosophy is nothing other than religion (the 'table of contents of the theoretical struggles of mankind') rendered into thought and developed by thought. Philosophy, that is, metaphysics, continues, crowns, and systematizes all ideological alienation: 'The philosophic mind is nothing but the 'alienated' mind of the world thinking within its 'self-alienation'. Abstract, metaphysical thought stands opposed to concrete, sensuous reality. (3,104)
The act of the externalization of thought, nonetheless, continues to express the real externalization of alienated human activity, without recognizing it. Alienated thought, since it is in no way a truely operative instrument, only further alienates human practice through failure to consider it in all its true reality.
The world of thought is alienated and alienating because it is only the ideological half of the real world, which is itself actually and materially alienated. Whether it work by way of intiution orreason, philosophic thought fight against the tree of reality on which itself has grown only in order to leave it behind.
The man 'alienated' from himself is also the thinker 'alienated' from his essence -that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental shapes or ghosts dwelling outside nature and man. Philosophic thought is thus condemned as having mysticism and religion for its source, as metaphysical, as nonhuman and inhuman.
Since historical becoming has only been a progressive development of alienation and since what men do amounts only at their self-externalization in practical, social labor, it is clear that the theoretical grasp -be it empricist or rationalist, materialistic or spiritualistic- of this process was and remained ideological, that is, alienated philosophically.
Marx's materialism is practical, and in the name of this 'materialism' he condemnes all philosophy as speculative.
Labor, the family, politics, law. morality, self-consciousness, art, religion, philosophy, and science, all that which brought the being-in-becoming of totality to the light of logos, the concept, and the idea, and, finally, to the light of absolute knowledge, all this is regarded by Marx as constituting so many forms and forces of the externalization and alienation of human being. In the phenomena that spirit grasps, Marx discovers the real alienations of man.
It is not philosophic thought or the thinker who can lead mankind to universal reconciliation, although reflective grasp plays a large role in Marx's thinking.
Marx:
'Th philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it'. (3,107)(2)(4.a)(7.a)(8)
'The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mystery over the labor process. The extension of the time of education which modern capitalism has brought about for its own reasons provides the framework ... Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antogonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual laborare overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it'.
When the fashionable concept of alienation is at last returned to the working class, their task of control over the labor will demand:
1. the abolition of wage labor, property relations and the bourgeoise; and
2. the abolition of the current capitalist division of labor and the petty bourgeoisie, including the philosophers and technicians of alienation who perpetuate class relations under the cover of humanism and technical neutrality. Marx:
'If man is to be disalienated, it is not enough to analyze the state he is in; it is necessary to go further and translate thought into action -better still, to recognize that thought divorced from action is not truely thought'.
The entire world has become divided into two antogonistic classes, the bourgeoise and the proleteriat, and the former following out the logic of its own mode of production has engendered not only the capitalist system butalso the socio-economic class which is destined to bring out its demise and put and end to alienation.
As in other exploited classes, the proleteriat's members will manifest themselves as the 'grave-diggers' of the bourgeoisie -but they will do so consciously. It is for this reason that the inculcation of 'class consciousness' isso important. It is for this reason, too, that Marx must makemen conscious both of their alienation in society and of the need to eliminate those bulwarks of capitalist alienation -private property, the state, and religion.
The process has reached such a point that class opposition has become totally universalized: the whole of human society is composed of only two antogonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proleteriat (abstractly put, capital and power). As a result, the elimination of one of these classes by the other will mean the complete elimination of classes, since classes exist only in opposition to each other and by virtue of their competing interests.
The society which is being ushered in, then, is theclassless society, in which, since there will be no classes, there will be no class interests, and the only interest left will be the intersts of man as such. Man, then, will be truely disalienated, and alienation in all its forms will be at end. Because man has reappropriated what the system had expropriated he will regain his alienated self. Quite obviously this reappropriation will not be individual -men cannot as individuals regain the ownership of a product which is social- it will be collective.
I thought that when making his analysis Marx has skipped some important points. One of these is ethnic problems; situation of minorities in societies.
Another one is unemployment problem. Are underemployed men more alienanated from unemployed (real ones !) men ? A difficult question to answer. I think the probability of its countraverse is higher.
These brings differents aspects to human vs technology relations and to alienation problem.
In a classless society, in which alianetion is overcome, in which sharing (of wealth) is done equally (that's, with social justice), what will the source of motivation for labor in society be ? (That's what will motivate people to work ?) Because there will always be nicer and easier works. And people will prefer these ones rather than worse, and more difficult ones.
.. May be with laws !... But I think there will always be much difficulties.
Division of labor seems as if it always will create problems. I think its unique antidote, in today's conditions, without going back to past's conditions, can be robots (and/or completely automated machines; which can perform very boring and monotonous works for men to be able to live in a lower lever of alienation) if they were used in a good sense.
Marx defines man's essence, but he leaves this definition somewhat open to historical developments's modifications. This brings some problems with itself, too. Priority is of supplying basic needs (just to live) of all the people. But even after performing this how will we control the increasing of man's needs ? How will we make the distinction of alienation and disalienation, then ?
It is not forgotten that man has psylogical needs, too. Human's needs are not limited just with physical ones. But satisfaction of these should be stopped when they begin to give harm to others. Avaricousness, covetousness, etc.; aren't these instincts which lies in the basics of every bad habits, icluding 'private ovnership ?
In today's conditions, it seems almost impossible to classify people strictly in just two categories, as bourgeoise and proleteriat.
Another problem is with 'private ownership': it seems it is not easy and even true to eliminate it completely. But to define its limits, and rules, by saving social justice, seems rather logical; especially of means (that's, tools or macnines) of production.
It seems that Marx also skipped the problem of planning of population. It is an important point which has also a strong effect in increasing of labor, and hence increasing of division of labor.
Technology (in fact, even it is used as a measure of modernity, and contemprorary civilization), besides it brings solutions to satisfaction of man's basic (plus extra...) needs, it also brings solutions (and methods) to how to annihilate more people in an easier and quicker way !!! Hence it causes the highest levels of barbarianism to appear.
(i) i: source material's no. in the Bibliography (i,j)
i: .. .. .. .. .. ..
j: pg. no.
1. A Brief Discussion of Marx's Theory of Alienation, by Cao Tianyu, Chinese Studies in Philosophy, Fall '84, pg. 78..89
2. On the Concept of 'Alienation' -from Hegel to Marx, by Wang Ruoshui, Chinese Studies in Philosophy, Spring '85, pg. 39..70
3. Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, by Kostas Axelos, (Translated into Engllish by Roland Bruzina)
4. Alienation: Plight of Modern Man, edited by William C. Bier,
a. Alienation: Marxist Social Category, by Quentin Lauer (pg. 10..29)
b. Alienation Among Minority Groups, by Madeline H. Engel (pg. 94..112),
5. Technology and Alienation, by Abraham Rotstein, Ultimate Reality and Meaning, March '86
6. Theories of Alienation: Critical Perspectives in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, edited by R. Felix Geyer and David R. Schweitzer, Leiden: Nijhoff Social Sciences Division '76
a. Alienation as a Concept in the Social Sciences, by Peter C. Ludz
b. Alienation and Reification, by Joachim Israel,
c. Using Marx's Theory of Alienation Emprically, by Peter Archibald
7. Alienation: Problems of Meaning, Theory and Method, edited by R. Felix Geyer and David Schweitzer, Routledge & Kegan Paul '81
a. Class Determination in Marxist and Empricist Concepts of Alienation, by John Horton and Manuel Moreno, pg. 61..77
8. Marx's Theory of Alienation by Itsvan Meszaros, The Merlin Press, '72
