Marx: Exploitation and Alienation

Karl Marx, 1818-1883 (Wikimedia Commons)

Marx and Marxism in General

There are useful materials on Marx's life here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

And on major Marxists and fellow-travellers, both thinkers and doers, see materials here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm

To get a handle on Marx's system, it is helpful to see it in the context of the main currents of ideas in the 19th century. For a helpful overview of these, listen to this recording of Bertrand Russell's "Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century," in his great History of Western Philosophy (1945).

Here is a recording of a good brief overview of the main features of Marx's intellectual system: a chapter from Russell's History.

Many people today puzzle over how revolutionary Marxism could have attracted so many for so long. How, they ask, could so many people still believe in it after the disastrous effects of Stalinism and then Maoism had become so evident? Part of the answer lies in revolutionary Marxism's ideological appeal: its religious creed, which discusses the harms done by capitalism. Here is that creed, as formulated by C. Wright Mills:

"[T]he Ideological Message of Marxism [is]:

"You do not have to be poor any longer. Everywhere men have always lived as exploiters and exploited. As long as the means of producing goods were not sufficient to provide for all, perhaps this evil condition was inevitable.

"It is no longer inevitable.

"You do not have to be poor.

"You are poor not because of anything you have done or anything you have failed to do, not because of original Sin, or the Will of God or because of bad luck. You are poor because of economic and political conditions. These conditions are called capitalism. At first, capitalism was a great progressive force in man's history; under it men built enormous facilities for the production of all the things they need.

"You are poor and you are exploited and you are going to be exploited as long as capitalism prevails. For capitalism has ceased to be a progressive force; it has become an obstacle to Progress, to your progress. It enters into every feature of human life, private and public, and all of them it corrupts. Capitalism is the system that exploits you.

"You do not have to be poor. The conditions that make you poor can be changed. They are going to be changed. Inside capitalism itself are the seeds of its own destruction. What will happen, whether you are yet aware of it or not, is that you are going to make a revolution. Those who rule over you and keep you poor are going to be overthrown. That is the next step forward in human progress. You are going to take that step. By the revolution you can abolish capitalism, root, stock and branch. By the revolution you can eliminate once and for all the exploitation of man by man; you can enter into a socialist society in which mankind conquers nature. And no man any longer will know poverty and exploitation."

--C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell, 1962), pp. 32-3

Marx on Exploitation and the Reserve Army of the Unemployed

http://digitalcollections.library.yale.edu/GroupsView.aspx?qid=5090

Many argue, against Marx's theory of exploitation, that it predicts that the working class will be increasingly immiserated and driven to starvation. Yet in the world's rich countries, since the Industrial Revolution, the working class's standard of living has improved enormously. So doesn't this falsify the theory? Here it helps to read the report of a non-Marxist socialist, the British political theorist G. D. H. Cole:

"Marxists sometimes argue that...the advanced countries, operating policies of economic and political imperialism, have thriven by exploiting the peoples of the less developed countries: so that the workers in the advanced countries have become in effects exploiters of colonial and quasi-colonial labor, and have in consequence taken on bourgeois characteristics. Today, it is argued, the real exploited proletariat consists of the workers and peasants of the less developed countries, out of whose product the workers, as well as the capitalists, of the advanced countries live relatively well by extracting the surplus value."

--G. D. H. Cole, "The New Revisionism," in C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell, 1962): 439-453, p. 444

Here is a poem by Robert Pinsky that deals with exploitation and capitalism:

"Shirt"

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,

The nearly invisible stitches along the collar

Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break

Or talking money or politics while one fitted

This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,

The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,

The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames

Of the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

The witness in a building across the street

Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step

Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up

To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms

Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held

Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared

And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,

Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."

Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly

Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme

Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,

Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,

To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed

By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers

To wear among the dusty clattering looms.

Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter

Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton

As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black

Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma

And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied

Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality

Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters

Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,

The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

--Robert Pinsky, The Figured Wheel (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), pp. 84-5

A famous essay on exploitation is George Orwell's opinions on the life of a restaurant dishwasher, given in Chapter XXII of his Down and Out in Paris and London (1933): Click here to read. Orwell argues that the job of a dishwasher as it then was--fifteen hours a day of washing dishes and other dirty and unrewarding work--was useless because unneeded. Dishwashers worked those hours because they were required to so as to make a restaurant look de luxe. But the luxury, Orwell argues, is false or enormously overpriced. One can get a much better meal at home for the same amount of money. What one pays for at a luxury restaurant are needless shams, shams that require a fifteen-hours-a-day dishwasher, among other things. The only person who really profits from the shams, says Orwell, is the owner.

If the dishwasher's job is useless, since it could be done efficiently in eight hours, then why, Orwell asks, does it persist? Why is the job not changed to an eight hours a day job? Orwell argues that the deep cause of this is fear of the mob. Orwell claims that the rich think that if the mob had leisure, they would be dangerous, because they would have time to think. Thus it is better not to give them leisure, so that they have no time to think, and hence will not be dangerous.

Marx on Alienation

One of the many schools of Marxism that flourished in the 20th century was the Frankfurt School of critical theory. It was more interested in Marx's critique of how capitalism alienates people from themselves and society than in how capitalism exploits workers. Here is a conversation with Herbert Marcuse, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School; it gives an illuminating overview of the School's main doctrines.