Is Capitalism to Blame?
Introduction of Karl Marx’s Alienation of Human Nature — Concurrently question the cause of Alienation of Human Nature
Foreword
This is a term paper for my GFH1001 In Dialogue with Humanity, written in May 2015.
Feel free to point out any mistake, both regarding the grammar and my arguments.
Introduction
Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation of Human Nature has been widely believed to be one of the most important criticism of capitalism. This essay reviews Marx’s theory of alienation of human nature and tries to explain how such alienation can or cannot be originated from capitalism in contemporary perspective.
Karl Marx’s criticism points to capitalism. He argued that capitalism is the cause of such alienation. This essay questions this statement. In the age of Marx, the alienation may not be avoided by changing the system of industrial production. The cause is the failure of human to realise how industrialisation makes impacts on the society, which resulted in problems in social structure, further incurred the alienation.
Alienation of Human Nature
According to Marx’s theory, alienation exists in alienated labour, who are in the mechanistic part of a social class. Alienation estranges them from human nature or humanity; thus such alienation is also referred to as alienation of human nature. Marx believes that the cause of alienation is capitalism, which makes the labour, as individuals, lose their rights or opportunities to determine their destinies and their abilities to think and act with their wills.
Alienation of human nature mainly consists of 4 types of alienations: alienation from the labour of its product, from the act of producing, from his Gattungswesen (species-essence), and from other workers. Marx believes that alienation of human nature to worker is incurred under a capitalist system of industrial production.
Under a capitalist system of industrial production, worker has little or even no relation to their product. Lack of such relation is known as alienation from the labour of its product. The worker, including the designer of a product, has no control or right to determine what the product should be like. Instead, they merely follow the instruction from the capitalists and execute their orders. Being like this, it is the capitalist class who makes decisions aiming at maximising their profits. Marx believes that absence of control of worker on their product is one of the causes of the alienation. Such absence is caused by a capitalist system of industrial production. Another close related alienation is the alienation of the worker from the act of producing, i.e., production.
Alienation of worker from production implies that worker cannot even control how his job should be done. As Marx says:
[H]e does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Thus the worker only feels a stranger.” (Selected Works)
The production of labour is not the satisfaction of their need but only a means of satisfying the need of others, i.e. the capitalists and buyers. Workers are under passive obedience, which disables their intellectual part of the mind. They do have free wills, but the will is no longer intellectual. Division of labour limits their means of work.
[S]imilarly mutual completion and exchange of activity itself appears as division of labour which makes of man an extremely abstract being, a machine etc., and leads to an abortion of his intellectual and physical faculties. (Selected, pp 128)
The commodification of workers minimises the salary of the worker, hence workers are forced to work under passive obedience. Here, the species-essence of workers is their lost power to determine the means of production and.
Alienation of workers from themselves — producers, is the alienation of workers from their Gattungswesen (species-essence). “Species, as we saw, is the category of the possible, denoting, in particular, those potentialities which mark man off from other living creatures.”(fn) As Marx says,
In tearing away from man the object of his production…estranged labor tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.(fn)
Such potentialities include the power of the human to create things that are not meant to satisfy the immediate need. However, workers are deprived of such power. Marx believes that “estranged human labor estranges the species from man”(fn).
Another important human nature is the tendency of being socialised. Alienation of workers from other workers, their fellows, is yet another consequence of capitalism.
“By engaging in totally unfulfilling labor, labor which destroys his mind and his body, labor which is forced upon him by his drive to live, labor in which all choice is left to someone else who also controls the finished articles, that is, capitalist labor, the worker is said to produce the degrading social relations that distinguish this period.”
Characteristics of capitalism make workers be mutual competitors, and commodification of workers further intensifies competition between workers for higher wages, which may lead to social conflicts. By this means, they are alienated from their relation and each other.
Is Capitalism to blame?
It was the first time when human faced the problem of being replaced by their product — machine.
This happened with the machine. This remarkable product of human ingenuity becomes a source of tyranny against the worker when the worker serves as an appendage of the machine and is forced to adapt the cadence of his life and work to the operation of the machine. This can become a serious source of alienation in shift work when part of the working class has to work during the night or at odd hours in conflict with the normal rhythm of human life between day and night. Such an abnormal schedule causes all sorts of psychological and nervous disorders.(fn)
Obviously, machines are mostly harmless. This essay argues that the “harmful thing” should be a combination of the failure of human’s realisation of such replacement and the absence of adaption to such substitution. Imagine a situation under capitalism with perfect machines and technology, but the number of workers is much smaller and is merely enough to maintain the machines and make up the depreciation of machines. In this situation, workers could gain at least what they deserve, or even much more for the reason that they own great bargain power. This is an ideal situation where the society could maximise its benefit. However, in Marx epoch, workers were much more than enough. The number of workers failed to decline while more productive machines were quickly deployed. Instead, the population kept its growth with the unchanged social structure.
A term in macroeconomics shall be introduced — The Malthusian trap. Any increase in output, Thomas Robert Malthus argued, would lead to a decrease in mortality, leading to an increase in population until output per person was back to its initial level.(fn) It is known that during Industry Revolution era, the Malthusian trap was invalid, the combination of the extremely fast development of technology and the fact that population growth rate has its limit broke the Malthusian trap. The population growth rate in the 1800s has proven the absence of people’s realisation of the possible situation that worker class may be redundant. Regarding the increased consumption, the redundant worker class has to accept the minimum wage — being “cheaper” machine, which leads to alienation. However, under such unsolvable dilemma, neither capitalism nor communism could handle it well. By no means the production could catch up with the increased consumption without either forcing workers to work like machines or replacing workers with machines. The latter will put workers in a much worse situation in which redundant workers will lose their jobs and starve to death. Alienation of labour from production and product was unavoidable.
With the above conclusion on hand, the other two types close related alienation could be proven to be unavoidable. The alienation of labour from themselves and other workers was also unavoidable since the alienation of labour from production and product was unavoidable. Alienation of labour from production and product deprives the workers of the ability to practice their free wills and leads to the alienation of workers of other workers. Again, imagine the mentioned ideal situation. In that situation, worker class is just merely enough, and it could live comfortably since machines do most of the works, and they could use their intellectual mind to enhance the processes and machines, increasing the productivity. Workers, including the designers and engineers, for instance, are still mutual competitors but not that ruthless. Thus, all types alienations would be eliminated under this ideal situation.
One may argue that such situation is currently unattainable. Human is still under its way towards this ideal situation, on which pain is unavoidable. Machines are still far from the status where the human could be mostly replaced. However such pain is not caused by capitalism. Capitalism is the means by which the pain expresses itself. For instance, drivers must suffer while automatic driving technology develops and be deployed. Under communism, eventually, drivers have to lose their means of contributing to the society. Given limited resources, any society system could not support redundant people who cannot contribute.
If people were able to realise how the industry would develop, and adapt the social structure to a suitable status that meets the need of the future, the pain would have been much less. However such realisation was difficult for people living in the 1800s. Even for contemporary drivers, for instance, they may not be able to imagine the automatic driving technology will be deployed in a shorter time than they could imagine. When they realise, it would have been too late for them and the society to adapt.
Marx’s analysis of capitalism is indeed a great insight and it yields to a groundbreaking solution — communism. However, Marx may ignore the problem in the social structure which is a vital part of the analysis of the cause of alienation. He fails to realise that alienation is unavoidable due to the constraint of output and the increased population. In conclusion, capitalism is not the fundamental cause of alienation, but only a means by which the problems reveal. The causes are the failure of human’s realisation of such replacement and further the absence of adaption to such replacement.
