No concept is more central to Marx's critical analysis of capitalism than alienated labour. Marx condemns capitalism not simply because of the exploitation and inequality it breeds, but also because it impoverishes our inner lives and degrades relations among people. As the young Marx argued in 1844, conscious, creative activity that shapes the environment in which we live is central to what makes us human. But under capitalism, this essential life activity—social labour—is transformed into work done according to the dictates of capital. What is produced, how it is produced, according to what techniques and under what circumstances is determined by the logic of capitalist accumulation. Rather than an affirmation of our humanity, of our existence as create beings making our lives together, labour under capitalism becomes drudgery, a detested, mind-numbing loss of life.
The are four essential aspects of alienated labour under capitalism. First the worker is alienated from the product of her labour, since this product goes into the hands of (or in the case of services is controlled by) the capitalist. Second, the worker is estranged from the process of production itself since this is controlled and determined by the employer, managers and supervisors. Third, the worker is alienated from her fellow-workers since, rather than cooperating in a shared and planned activity, she is divided from and pitted against other workers. And, finally, workers are estranged from their human capacity for creative self-development as members of a cooperative community.
An essential feature of alienated labour is the reduction of work to a set of repeatable physical motions, in which different workers specialize, and whose speed is relentlessly increased. The use of "scientific management" to break every work process down into its component parts, each subjected to the stopwatch, is known as Taylorism, after the American Frederick Winslow Taylor. While Taylorism was initially used in assembly line systems of manufacture, it now dominates most sectors of the capitalist economy. Let me offer two examples. The first comes from A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards, a manual used by the likes of General Electric and Stanford University. Almost every imaginable office activity is subjected to time standards (based on fractions of a minute). Opening and closing drawers, stapling, typing (per character and per inching), opening envelopes are all time calibrated. Getting up from a chair should take 0.33 minutes, while swiveling a chair in order to perform another task should take 0.009 minutes.
My second example comes from Wendy's burger chain, part of the ever-expanding global fast food industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, time is of the essence, nowhere more so than in the growing drive-through part of the industry. Every six seconds shaved off time serving each customer at the drive through translates into one per cent increase in sales. So, grillers keep 25 burger patties on the grill and place one in a bun within five seconds of reviewing an order, "Once the meat hits the bun, the griller hands off to the sandwich makers, who have no more than seven seconds to complete each customized option."
An essential aspect of globalization has been a massive speedup of work processes, a drive to make production "lean," to use the jargon—that is, to get more and more work out of fewer and fewer workers. The results, as more and more commentators acknowledge, included physically exhausted workers who struggle with ever higher levels of work-related stress.
As a result of all these aspects of alienation, the very fabric of human life becomes degraded. A single, alienated goal—the acquisition of money in exchange for estranged labour—becomes the central feature of our lives. Everything becomes concentrated on this debased and debasing goal. Sacrificing our human potential in exchange for money warps and deforms all parts of our lives. Instead of a rich social life characterized by creative work, play and recreation, artistic expression, intellectual stimulation, love, solidarity and cooperation, our lives are impoverished. The rich diversity for human possibilities is mindlessly reduced to one narrow, alienated goal: accumulating private wealth. Owning things replaces all the other forms in which we can enjoy and experience life. In Marx's words:
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc.... all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having.
Inherent in this multi-faceted process of estrangement is that we are pressed to think of ourselves as commodities. "Selling yourself" becomes an art in this society. And more and more people are taking it literally. In the United States, for instance, growing numbers of people are agreeing, for a price, to have company logos tattooed to their heads. "Human billboards," they are called—and they sport logos of Toyota, among other companies. And if our bodies are to be overtly commodified, then why not other essential features of our identities? In 2002, for instance, four Canadians whose last name are Dunlop agreed, for about $6,000 each, to change their last names to Dunlop-Tire in order to advertise Goodyear Corporations main brand of tires.
So, while estranged labour is at the root of human degradation under capitalism, multiple forms of alienation pervade all aspects of life: our identities; our connections with nature; our sense of our bodies and our sexualities; our emotional well-being; relations between genders, between young and old, between peoples from different parts of the world. All these spheres of life become yet more areas in which we are estranged from others and from ourselves.
Then, in a vicious circle of alienation, capitalism promises us fulfillment, sense of purpose and belonging through commodities, the very markers our of alienation. Having robbed our lives of meaning, capitalism pretends to sell it back to us in the form of things. Mere means of life—cars, clothes, jewelry, and so on—are offered up as life's ends. The result is "an inverted world" in which things are substituted for human relations. In fact, in a virtual parody of Marx's theory, a whole philosophy of contemporary marketing uses a model in which a consumer brand such as Nike, Pepsi or Ford is meant to represent an actual human relationship. Rather than overcome alienation, these relationships with brands only deepen it. The more we pursue the things on offer from capitalism, the more estranged we become from the human qualities we most deeply seek—cooperation, sense of purpose, belonging, solidarity, creativity.
While Marx's analysis offers us the richest account of the deep roots of human alienation in capitalist society, many studies have confirmed much of what he has to say. A number of social scientists have been struck, for instance, by the fact that rising incomes in the dominant countries does not translate into higher levels of human happiness. Indeed, one analyst of this phenomenon chose to call his book The Joyless Economy. The author of this study noted that most people associate happiness with pleasures such as satisfying work, friendship, intellectual stimulation and so on—in other words, with non-commercial "goods." A later study confirmed the same findings: "if the things that contribute most to well being are unrelated to money, we cannot buy them," its author wrote; "this is the principal cause of money's curious failure to produce happiness." Rather than creating a high level of human fulfillment and happiness, capitalist wealth merely perpetuates the emptiness and lose of meaning built into the system of alienated labour and capitalist property. It comes as no surprise to learn, then, that a very large proportion of Americans who seek psychotherapy complain of forms of "psychic deadness" such as chronic boredom, purposelessness, meaninglessness, and alienation from themselves and others.
Source
McNally, David. Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006, 114-118.
