Esstranged Labour

689 Words2 Pages

“Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” (71-72)

In reading the portions on “Estranged Labour” and “The Power of Money in Bourgeoise Society,” I found Marx’s writing to be quite compelling but also incredibly applicable to other fields outside of political economy. I could not help but be reminded of the famous playwrights George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht whose works were profoundly influenced by Karl Marx’s work. Specifically, Bertolt Brecht addresses theatre as a mode of production and centers his work on …show more content…

He presents within the text distinct ways in which the worker is alienated from his labor. Firstly, He explains that the worker’s “labor is external to the worker” in that it “does not belong to his essential being” (74). Marx seems to imply that the worker’s labor is not his own because it only seeks to mortify the worker’s physical and intellectual being. Moreover, he presents alienation by positing that workers are continuously making products that they cannot access or simply enjoy. He writes that “the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside of him … it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (72). Marx’s perspective of alienation is indeed a negative one, but it also alludes to an objectified hostility. One can almost picture the object confronting the worker that produced it, almost as if it were laughing at his producer. On a distinct level, the product of the worker’s labor is estranged because it belongs to another man, the non-worker. Yet, it is important to note that Marx ends this portion of the work by explaining that “everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement” …show more content…

It is the conception of “commodity fetishism” in which the non-worker is so separated from the labor that went into the production of the object that he now holds in hand, that it’s existence is almost a mere “mystery.” However, my question is: how can we move away from concealing the mode of production? It seems that although we can sometimes be aware of it and try to not be in a state of estrangement toward labor, we still attempt to console ourselves through such a state. In the modern era, everyone seems pretty removed from how our everyday products came to be. We can see this with the specific product of cellphones and how we, as people, pretend that their existence is

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