The Socialist Temptation by Iain Murray

Author:Iain Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Editions
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21 Alienation Nation

One aspect of the socialist approach to liberty that doesn’t have to do with inflicting misery to guarantee rights relates to a concept essentially invented by Karl Marx: alienation. Alienation is critical to socialist thinking but is a hard concept to grasp.

Marxists.org, for instance, defines alienation as “the transformation of people’s own labour into a power which rules them as if by a kind of natural or supra-human law.”1 That’s as clear as mud, so I’m afraid we’ll have to look at Marx himself (feels like being back in college, eh?) for an explanation of his concept. “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.”2

What Marx is saying is that by working to produce something that they have no personal stake in, but which goes on to be sold by their capitalist bosses to people they never meet, workers grow alienated from their “species essence,” and therefore from the other human beings around them. As the analogy often puts it, they are just cogs in the machine of capitalism. They are not free men and women.

The alienation theory of labor is therefore very much linked to the labor theory of value we discussed earlier. The thing we produce, the theory goes, is valuable because of the work we put into it—and also, because of that, it has a special value to us. When we come together to create something, we increase that value, and our sense of shared endeavor makes us more valuable to each other. Putting us in a factory not only makes us servants, it is literally soul-destroying.

Interestingly, Marx’s description of alienation echoes something said by someone most people would regard as his opposite—Adam Smith. In describing the drudgery of factory work, Smith laments its effects: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become…. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

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