5.4 Alienation

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Do curso por University of Amsterdam

Teoria Sociológica Clássica

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University of Amsterdam

Teoria Sociológica Clássica

911 ratings

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) will offer the participants an introduction into the most important classical sociological readings between the 18th and 20th century. Highly influential social science scholars, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, will be discussed during 8 sessions. Combined with small tests, based on the video’s and recommended readings, the participants will be encouraged to dive deeply into the complex texts and get familiar with classical sociological concepts that are still very relevant today.

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Session 5: Karl Marx (1818-1883)

The German philosopher, radical economist, and revolutionary leader Karl Marx founded modern "scientific" socialism. His basic ideas, known as Marxism, form the foundation of socialist and communist movements throughout the world. Several topics like alienation, class struggle, and capitalism will be covered in this week's session.

5.1 The Unexpected Force of Social Thought5:57

5.2 Economic Chains of Interdependency6:29

5.3 Homo Faber6:40

5.4 Alienation6:31

5.5 Class Struggle6:52

5.6 Caught in the Capitalist System6:30

5.7 Class Consciousness5:32

5.8 Marx’s Predictions5:49

Conheça os instrutores

Bart van Heerikhuizen
Dr.
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Sometimes, the German terms [FOREIGN] or

[FOREIGN] are translated as estrangement.

That's not wrong, but here I will stick to the word Alienation.

Marx must have picked it up when he studied the philosophy of Hegel,

but he adapted it to serve his own aims.

You could say that he alienated the concept from philosophy and

turned it into a critical sociological term.

Let's say, for example, a clocksmith, a specialist in constructing beautiful and

precise clocks, who is very, very proud of his elegant products.

Let's compare that man with a boy who performs all day long a monotonous,

boring, repetitive action in our famous pin factory described by Adam Smith.

Now you begin to have an idea of what Marx means with alienation.

The man working in the pin factory may not realize in what way his

simple task contributes to the final product.

The little pins that leave the factory.

And if he did, he couldn't care less.

The clockmaker loves his clocks,

the pin maker doesn't feel any kind of pride for his pins.

In a way, he has been cut loose from his products.

He doesn't recognize his own work in the material outcome of all his labor.

In short, his product has been alienated from him.

He experience it as something alien.

A thing that he doesn't recognize as his own creation.

And in a broader sense,

the whole productive process has been robbed from him.

He has been robbed of his dignity as a factory worker.

He has become a kind of robot.

A cog in the machine.

Being coerced to make the same bodily movements over and

over and over again, all day long, and also the next day, and the day after that.

Not only has the product of the work been alienated from him, in fact,

the whole labor process has been alienated from him.

He does the job in a mechanical way.

He's not interested in the meaning of his actions.

His contribution to the goods that may serve the needs of

the people who buy them, he isn't interested in that.

The only thing he cares about is the paycheck, nothing else.

So this new way of working in a modern factory in a capitalist system,

has also severed the ties between the workers.

In the past, they were proud craftsman exchanging amongst each other the tricks

of the trade, sharing maybe the secrets of their profession.

Relishing in the pride of their accomplishments.

But now that capitalism has forced everybody to define their labor and

work in this very repetitive fashion, alienated from their products.

Alienated from the labor process,

the workers are gradually alienated from their fellow workers.

They lose the sense that they are as a collective responsible for

the stream of products that leaves the factory.

They do not know one another.

They have become strangers for each other.

They do not feel and they need not to feel any kind of sympathy or loyalty to

the factory or to it's products, no sense of solidarity with one another.

They are now completely individualized, itemized.

In the modern factory, with its fragmentation of labor,

with jobs that most people can learn in just a few hours, where craftsmanship

is not valued anymore, the workers are not interested in what your guy is doing.

There is no common interest.

There is no sense of sharing a common fate.

And of course, Marx hopes that kind of overarching class

consciousness uniting the workers in many different factories,

uniting the workers all over the country, maybe even uniting factory workers all

over the world, would create a new kind of solidarity.

A sense of belonging to an important collectivity, but for

the time being they are separated form each other.

They have been effectively alienated from one another.

Now, this according to Marx is all very bad,

but the worst part has not even been mentioned yet.

In the course of this process, human beings are more and

more, alienated from themselves.

And this follows from Marx's conception of men, when it is in his work,

and only in his work, that men realizes his deepest potential,

and only in labor he can realize his innermost talents.

A potential that before he may not even have been aware of.

Then alienating his work from him means that he has been alienated from his self.

Marx dressed this argument in very philosophical language, and

sometimes he says that under capitalist conditions man is alienated from

what defines him as a member of the human species.

He says it alienates him from his [FOREIGN] ways, and

that's a German word that can be translated as species being.

But what he wants to convey to the reader with those old fashioned words,

is that all those types of alienation boil down to this,

the members of the human race are robbed

of everything that differentiates them from brute animals.

They are stripped of their humanity.

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