Marx elaborates on the objective alienation or estrangement of the worker (see excerpt 1b Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) and shows how this alienation inheres in the capitalist production process. Importantly, too, alienation results in private property being appropriated by the capitalists as rightfully theirs (though it is the product of alienated labor) and used by them as an object (such as money) in furthering their own ends. Therefore, while humans have, as Marx notes, a higher consciousness than animals and a great capacity for much creativity (see excerpt 1c The German Ideology), the capitalist production process diminishes them of their creativity and reduces them (as commodities) to cogs in the profit–production process.
Marx’s insights about the labor process – what’s entailed in the actual production and commodification of work – extend beyond work/labor to the whole lifeworld of the worker (and of the capitalist). A critical and enduring insight of Marx is that people’s being, their everyday material existence, determines what they think about and how they think about or evaluate the things they think about (see excerpt 1c The German Ideology). For Marx, ideas do not come from nowhere or from a mind abstracted from material existence. Ideas, rather, emerge from individuals’ lived everyday experiences. The economic or material activity of individuals and the actual circumstances (of structured inequality and objective alienation) in which they do these activities determine and circumscribe their whole consciousness and, by extension, their personal relationships, social lives, and political ideas. Marx notes that people have a certain freedom to make or to remake their lives but they must necessarily do so in circumstances which are not of their own choosing. As he states: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances…transmitted from the past”; Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 103; excerpt not included). As Marx conveys, individuals and social and political protest movements must always operate within the actual material circumstances they have inherited, and in a capitalist society, these circumstances are always inherently unequal and determined by the ruling capitalist class. Hence, for Marx, ideology, i.e. the dominating or ruling ideas in society – everyday ideas about the nature of capitalism, hard work, money, consumerism, the law, politics, relationships, etc. – is derived from and controlled by the dominance of the standpoint of the capitalist class, a standpoint which marginalizes the objective human and social interests of the workers (who are invariably exploited by capitalism) even as the ruling class (capitalists) insists that capitalism advances not only the interest of capital (e.g. profit) but simultaneously the interests of workers.
REFERENCES
1 Engels, Friedrich. 1878/1978. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” pp. 683–717 in Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx–Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.
2 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1848/1967. The Communist Manifesto. Introduction by A.J.P. Taylor. London: Penguin.
3 Marx, Karl. 1852/ 1978. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” pp. 594–617 in Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx–Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.
1A Karl Marx from Wage Labour and Capital
Original publication details: Karl Marx, from Wage Labour and Capital (1891/1978). Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, pp. 17–18, 19–21, 27–29, 29–30, 41. Reproduced with permission of Lawrence & Wishart via PLS Clear.
What are wages? How are they determined?
If workers were asked: “What are your wages?” one would reply: “I get a franc1 a day from my bourgeois”; another, “I get two francs,” and so on. According to the different trades to which they belong, they would mention different sums of money which they receive from their respective bourgeios for a particular labour time2 or for the performance of a particular piece of work, for example, weaving a yard of linen or type‐setting a printed sheet. In spite of the variety of their statements, they would all agree on one point: wages are the sum of money paid by the bourgeois3 for a particular labour time or for a particular output of labour.
The bourgeois,4 therefore, buys their labour with money. They sell him their labour for money.5 For the same sum with which the bourgeois has bought their labour,6 for example, two francs, he could have bought two pounds of sugar or a definite amount of any other commodity. The two francs, with which he bought two pounds of sugar, are the price of the two pounds of sugar. The two francs, with which he bought twelve hours’ labour,7 are the price of twelve hours’ labour. Labour,8 therefore, is a commodity, neither more nor less than sugar. The former is measured by the clock, the latter by the scales.
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Wages are, therefore, not the worker’s share in the commodity produced by him. Wages are the part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a definite amount of productive labour as such.9
Labour10 is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage‐worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live.
But,11 labour is the worker’s own life‐activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life‐activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life‐activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another. Hence, also, the product of his activity is not the object of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace resolve themselves for him into a definite quantity of the means of subsistence, perhaps into a cotton jacket, some copper coins and a lodging in a cellar. And the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. – does he consider this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone‐breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours’ labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc., but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed. If the silkworm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage‐worker.
Labour12 was not always a commodity. Labour was not always wage labour, that is, free labour. The slave did not sell his labour13 to the slave owner, any more than the ox sells its services to the peasant. The slave, together with his labour,14 is sold once and for all to his owner. He is a commodity which can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He is himself