03.26 // Module I: Class & Labor Lecture
Relevant Links: Syllabus | Provocation Assignment Sheet
We kickstarted the five modules of this course with the lecture around Class & Labor and the relationship with Design. To begin an analysis of the evolution of labor we focused on the work of German philosopher Karl Marx, one of the most important figures in political philosophy in the mid to late XIX century.
Even though Marx has been commonly associated with communism and socialism, the majority of his work was about the analysis of capitalism in its early stages. He wants to develop a theory on how people progress from one socioeconomic system to another, taking into the works of Hegel to develop his thinking:
As part of the enlightenment movement, going from belief systems to science and rationality as the source of knowledge, Hegel’s theory is based on the idea that history is a succession of ideologies that come into conflict, giving as a result a higher level of freedom to people. Hegel anticipated that eventually society will be completely free.
Marx disagrees with Hegel in his focus on rationality and ideas. For Marx is not ideas that create change but the way we as humans change the means for making our own living conditions, therefore his focus on labor in his work. History is not a progression of conflicts of ideas but changes in our relation to material and our labor, which Marx calls dialectical materialism. In this sense Marx has a conception of humans as makers, similar to the concept of Homo Faber, is this aspect of making one of the reasons to its relevancy for design.
Marx looks at different societies throughout history through the lens of making via human production/labor. This is how he discovers that any epoch in human history has two important components:
- The base or foundation / Modes of Production — comprised by Means of Production (the material of labor such as materials, technology and capital) and Relations of Production (the specific types of relationships between individuals and communities around the issue of who owns and who labors)
- Superstructure — Cultural and ideological aspects of society (e.g. art, religion institutions)
The base molds the super structure and the superstructure influences the base. The changes in the means and relations of production from industrialization and capitalism have morphed the superstructure, which Marx thinks is empowering and problematic at the same time. For Marx the human condition is based in connecting with one another, it is about building relations through the exchange of things/labor. Labor should be intrinsically an emotional and spiritual endeavor, one should put oneself in the things one makes, tangible or intangible. This is how Capitalism alienates people, because it detaches the makers from the products they make thought the division of labor and by obtaining a wage in exchange of their labor instead of the bond created by the producer and the one who enjoys the fruit of that labor.
It is through this analysis that Marx starts to speculate into what would be the next socioeconomic structure that might replace capitalism and that is how the ideas of communism and socialism came to be. We began to reflect on how in this sense we can consider Marx a futurist of sorts.
Finally, preempting the class discussions that will be facilitated by this week’s provocateurs on Thursday, we discussed the relevance of the lecture in Class and Labor for us as designers. These are some of the points that the students brought up in the discussion:
- Being a designer of objects contributes to the capitalist cycle. Where do we fit as knowledge workers in the capitalist world?
- As opposed to labor in a production line, Design still preserves the aspect of creative work, however, do we somehow feel alienated from our work in the current socioeconomic structure?
- Whenever we’re designing something, we indirectly design labor.
- Service Design could be interpreted as the design of people’s labor
- How are communication designers changing the nature or work/labor?
