On Estranged Labour by Marx

Here is one explanation of how/why our economic system leaves such a large majority of the population scrambling to live.
This explanation helped some things “click” in my head after hearing all the statistics on how minimum wage barely allows people to subsist even working over 40 hrs/week and after hearing Susan Kask speak about the economy and supply/demand. I thought some of you might like to hear it as well.
*Keep in mind this is just my understanding from the reading and the discussion in my class plus my own views of the situation and some background from other readings/authors. So feel free to add comments, corrections, and questions. Also if you economic students want to add some of the pertinent knowledge you are getting (either connected to this post or in another post) I would love/appreciate that. *

From the discussion of Marx’ “Estranged Labour”:
As humans naturally exist in the physical world they must work to live a.k.a. turn raw resources into food, shelter, medicine, etc. In this situation an individual makes something which is hers/his to use to live.
However in a capitalistic society a change takes place. Instead of
an individual making something she/he needs > to live,
the individual makes something > to get money > to live.
This middle-man, money, is introduced. An abstraction, which while having a practical function, Marx says leads to some not so great things:
The worker is estranged from his labor her/his product (Marx says some things about the product then having and external/alien existence which confronts the worker- I don’t fully understand the implications of this).
But basically labor becomes a commodity, the worker becomes a commodity to be bought and sold (and what’s even worse is that the worker is the one selling themselves, putting themselves in this situation).
Think about what Susan was talking to us about while you are reading this. -In this system there is competition; businesses are competing to get customers by trying to offer the lowest price.
Businesses have two basic costs: resources and labor
All the businesses will be paying essentially the same for the resources so the way to cut prices is by paying less for labor.
-If you think through the cycle wages would just keep dropping. But at some point, you might say, wouldn’t the workers stop being willing to work for less pay?
-So another element in this system is expendability: there are always more people waiting to fill your place and probably at a lower pay.
So then wages can continue to fall.
*unless: the government steps in and says ‘whoa you have to pay people at least this amount which is an amount they can live on!’ > minimum wage<


Marx is saying this is all happening because as a wage earner the worker is not a human but a commodity.

Also, from the information we’ve been looking at it seems that most people get sucked into this and don’t have much of a choice, why is that?
Marx says that once a worker becomes a wage earner she/he no longer create what she/he directly needs to subsist but rather the means to get that- “life itself appears as only a means to life”. The means (the $) is dependent on the employer. Because of this “labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced, it is forced labor”
Workers (that’s us) may feel we are free. But if our work (the products we make) does not belong to us and our pay is dependent on someone else (so we can’t just decide to do something different at work, whether it be creative/positive or purposefully vengeful, because your employer might fire you or not give you the raise that, as a single mother of three dependent children working for minimum wage, you might really need) are we really free?

So we need to either a) make sure the government is making sure workers are treated as the human beings they are and given a pay truly suitable to live on or b) as Marx insists, create a new/different system.

We are working on “a”, with the living wage campaign, however Marx would say that the negative effects of the system with continue; workers will continue to be exploited because the two classes, “the property owners and the property-less workers”, still exists so a master-slave relationship is still in place, the property owners benefiting from the relationship at the cost of the workers.
*keep that in mind*

Also here are my teacher's notes(Jessica Mayock) pertaining just to that essay.

I hope all this is helpful and/or sparks some thoughts…

there are three basic levels to the estrangement of labor:

(1) Estrangement between worker and his product: the worker uses his own life-activity, energy, and time to create the product and, whatever the product may be, it is essentially his life-energy put into an object. The product is a physical manifestation of his own life-energy. It is like a part of him now lives in this object, since he has conferred life on it through his work. When he is working for someone else (i.e. for wages and a boss), this product belongs to someone else, so the worker is never able to experience it as his own-- this means that something that is really a part of him, made with his own life energy, "confronts him as something hostile and alien" (as Marx says). The product of labor is the externalization of his life-energy; any life that this object has was given to it by the worker, only now this part of him seems like it only exists outside, like it never came from within him.
(2) Self-estrangement: this means that the whole process of alienation described above happens through the worker's own activity-- it is not only that someone is "doing this to him" but that he is being forced to do this to himself (this is why Marx makes such a point to show that labor is coerced, rather than voluntary).
(3) Estrangement on the level of species-being: human beings naturally work. Our free, conscious, life-activity is labor-- this is how we use natural resources to support our lives. Humans are also naturally social, and work together to do this. This working situation, brought about by competition, capitalism, and private property, creates a situation where human beings no longer feel themselves when doing their work, which is their natural activity, after all. Instead, they only feel themselves in "animal functions", like eating, sleeping, procreating, etcetera. This alienates human beings from one another, and most of all, from their true nature as free, conscious, working beings.