marx theory of alienation
... don’t quite fit in with the image of him being a humanist. People like Erich Fromm who wrote Marx’s Concept of Man clearly overlooked the fact that Karl Marx’s views were not in synch with those of the time. Marx’s concept of nature can be summed up as one of ‘power’ and ‘need’. Some of these characteristics being ‘Natural’ and some being ‘Species’. The Natural characteristics are ones which every living thing possesses whereas the Species characteristics are those which only man possesses through our development. Marx didn’t believe the man had a fixed nature which wasn’t influenced by his surroundings. On the contrary he believed that Society formed ones nature. Human Beings need to labour on this nature to keep going; it is our driving force if you like. All natural living things have this driving force but man has developed a conscience from this. At the beginning of Capital Marx said: A spider conducts operations that resemble that of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her calls. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. Ernst Fischer said that human labour is unique; we are constantly improving our methods. Making them more efficient and reliable. Animals have a routine and stick to it vividly. We make progress as appose to animals. As Fischer (1996:51) said “The species-nature of animal is an eternal repetition, that of man is transformation development and change” People don’t always develop connections and relationships for want, a lot of the time it is out of necessity. These relationships are formed so that people can work together and advance to their own personal gain. Marx says that it’s not just a relationship but also a connection or network. He makes the point in Grundrisse that ‘Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’. Labour is how we develop our humanity which means that without our labour we would have a little or no relationships with one another. So, our labour has a direct influence on the society around us. The realisation that we are always striving to improve and develop caused the grouping of people to work together. This partly gave rise to the formation of a class society. With this introduction of class society came labour alienation. Ernest Fischer (1996:54) describes what he calls a denial of the principle of man: The first tool contains within it all the potential future ones. The first recognition of the fact that the world can be changed by conscious activity contains all future, as yet unknown, but inevitable change. A living being which has once begun to make nature his own through the work of his hands, his intellect, and his imagination will never stop. Every achievement opens the door to unconquered territory… But when labour is destructive, not creative, when it is undertaken under coercion and not as the free play of forces, when it means the withering, not the flowering of mans physical and not intellectual potential, then labour is a denial of its own principle and therefore the principle of man. When a class is separated the middle class or the bourgeoisie can produce the necessities for the existence of their society. This causes a further split between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie. Now that we have looked at the relationship between labour and human nature (two big influences of alienation) we can now look at Marx’s theory of alienation in more detail. The theory of alienation Bertell Ollman (1976) gives a great summing up of Marx’s theory: The theory of alienation is the intellectual construct in which Marx displays the devastating effect of capitalist production on human being...