Introducing
Prezi AI.
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Loading content…
Loading…
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Karl Marx
39
Transcript
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Karl Marx
Why is Marx so bothered by this?
- If labor and its objects are nothing but trouble to the worker, then they must be good for someone. Thus, people are forcing other people into conditions of coercion and alienation.
- This means that some people are dominating others.
- "In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men." (Marx, 574)
Estranged Labor
Political Economy
That is what Marx refers to as estranged labor.
- 1) labor no longer belongs to the worker.
- 2) it is coerced, rather than voluntary.
- "Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague." (Marx, 572)
- Thus labor is alien in two ways:
- The products created by labor.
- The act of laboring.
Species Being
- Marx wants to develop a critique of political economy which attempts to explain to us the origin of economic relationships.
- He thinks it fails because:
- it assumes what it attempts to explain
- like private property
- competition
- and the worker and what the worker produces
- "it assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. We proceed from an economic fact of the present." (Marx, 570)
"In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself his own active life functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species...Life itself appears only as a means to life." (Marx, 573)
- Estranged labor thus has more alienating effects:
- It alienates us from our 'humanness.'
- It alienates us from other people, by virtue of alienating us from the species.
Labor
- Labor is, when discussing Marx, referring to wage-labor.
- "the object which labor produces--labor's product--confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer." (Marx, 570)
- Why is this so bad?
- Because the worker puts something of himself into the object he creates, then the object no longer belongs to him and neither does the part of himself that he creates.
Choose a template
Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi