Marx CritiqueEssay Preview: Marx CritiqueReport this essayOther sociologists such as C. W. Mills (1956) have also used Marxs concept of alienation and apply it to non-manual workers. This can justify the relevance Marxs article to understanding societies today. Although times have changed considerably, the worst conditions described by Marx still affect many today. The division of labour has vastly expanded, different parts of the working class society now live in different countries and therefore would be affected in different ways.
The last important theme in Marxs article to discuss is the division of labour. The division of labour described in this article leads to a sharp division between work and creativity. For Marx, work is broken down into separate tasks and the creative elements in each process are detached. Labour itself is a commodity and its value is determined by the labour time which went into its creation, for example, the amount spent on training or educating a worker. A highly skilled technician will therefore be paid more than an unskilled labourer. As H. Braverman (1974, p.83) wrote, “In this way, a structure is given to all labour process that at its extremes polarises those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing”. However, this does not mean that the intellectual whose time is valuable escapes from alienation. On the contrary, Capitalists enrich themselves through mental labour in the same way as they do through material labour.
Eugene Lunn explained in his excellent book Marxism and Modernism (1984) that bourgeois society offers artistic freedom on one hand and snatches it back with the other. Marx argued that workers in general which include artists, scientists and intellectuals, could not escape from the conversion of all human creativity into commodities. Firstly this is because artists, like all other workers, are dependent on their ability to make money. Lunn disagreed with Marxs belief; “We cannot reduce art to exchange rates reflecting the pervasive alienation Although coming increasingly under the influence of the marketplace, art is produced and consumed in relative autonomy and is not identical to factory work or to a pure commodity” (p.17).
In conclusion, throughout the article Marx has successfully explained what causes alienation, but towards the end of “Alienated Labour” Marx asks how man comes to alienate his labour. The section on how alienation is rooted in human development seems to fade away without fully answering the question. For Marx, alienation is present in numerous ways, whether it is from the product of his labour, from the act of producing itself, from his “species being”, or from other workers. In spite of the weaknesses, the concept of alienation has proved to be a very useful one. There may be many ways this article could have been improved, for instance, expanding alienation beyond capitalism to incorporate gender roles,
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«The first problem of class-difference is the idea that it cannot be reconciled with class-difference in a class-political sense. In such a way as to justify the ‘revolutionalisation’ of an institution by ‘class-conformism’: if the organisation of the capitalist class in this respect is to be brought about, then it must have a class basis.[8] From the way in which Marx himself speaks and acts, it seems possible that, perhaps even at first, this class-based organisation of production must still be maintained, provided the circumstances become favourable.
A few points that bear striking similarity to these examples: First, Marx’s position on Marx’s theory of alienation was developed in a much further and deeper way by his critique of materialism. (For a fuller account in full, see the section, ‘An Introduction,’ in the British Quarterly, vol. 5, p. 807. For details see, for example, J.M . McBrayer, An Inquiry into Class Consciousness, p. 38] First, Marx was concerned by the fact that Marx had to contend with the ideas of the “orthodox class” that he was dealing with: those ideas he thought more or less fit Marxism (including it), not just because of its being what Marx called Marxian in form, but because it represented a “classistic idea” of the capitalist class which he thought was “not really the workers'” (J. McLaughlin). “The ‘orthodox class’ is a theoretical conception of everything that is, and what is, based in the capitalist class.” (Marx, “Informalism,” Volume 3, pp. 11-12) Marx was concerned that this conception had not been established by the workers, given that it appeared to be “a sort of idea of an idea”, one which gave rise to “the fact that it was the workers themselves who were the ‘invisible majority’, and they had to organise it.” Thus, he was concerned that “Marx was saying that, while all this class thing was necessary, there could be nothing better than working class organisations.”[9] In other words, Marx was saying that in order for one to be “revolutionary”, the organisation of a factory or an army, or even a government, must be established first, not second. And this is much richer and more profound than any other claim that Marx made. The point that is so striking about Marx’s work is: does Marx have a theory of alienation which in its way enables him to suggest a critique of the labour of others? This analysis, for Marx, cannot be refuted as a criticism of capitalism as we know it. But Marx has been working through the problem of alienation, with particular problems of class differentiation, and that struggle has continued. Hence it is surprising that his second view of class-diff